Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  Our neighbors’ dog was once home alone when thunder started, and when her owners came back they couldn’t find her. The storm was still raging while they searched the house, calling her, until they noticed a paw sticking out of a pile of laundry in a basket. The dog had climbed inside and buried herself under the clothes. In my experience, dogs hide in closets or other small spaces but don’t cover their bodies, so this surprised me, and shows, I think, the depth of that dog’s concern.

  My dogs were not afraid of bears or any animal, not even of skunks or porcupines despite some sad experiences. One of our dogs noticed that something burning on the untended stove had set the kitchen curtains on fire, and she knew we were in danger. But she didn’t run or hide. Instead she faced the flames and barked so loudly and insistently that at long last we came to see what was wrong. The fire alarms had not sounded—who knew how far the fire would have spread before they did? This brave dog saved our house and all who lived there. But even she was terrified of thunder.

  I find it hard to reassure a dog when thunder is rolling. They let you stroke them and pat them and tell them it’s okay, but they don’t believe you. Are you so dense, they wonder, that you don’t understand what’s happening? It seemed to me that all dogs feared thunder, that it must be hardwired in them for some reason, and the fact that the noise itself does no actual harm was incomprehensible to them.

  Or that’s what I thought until a Chihuahua joined our family. He was two years old, weighed nine pounds, and came from a shelter. Our cats are bigger than he is. When we’re outdoors he stays nearby, and when we go to bed at night he likes to be with me under the covers. All you can see is a little lump in the bed. It’s him, curled up and sleeping peacefully.

  One day, soon after he joined us, a thunderstorm started. It was right overhead, so I thought he’d be terrified and I’d have to console him until it was over. But instead he ran to the door and looked up at the sky, barking ferociously and showing his teeth.

  The thunder got scared and stopped immediately. A few minutes later we could hear it far away. The little dog barked and snarled again, but not as forcefully. He knew the thunder was retreating.

  This little dog can handle any problem, especially those from the sky. One day he took exception to a low-flying plane heading for a nearby airport. He ran outside barking and snarling and the plane flew away fast. We think it warned the other planes, because no planes now fly low. By the time they’re over us, they’re up very high. The little dog looks to make sure they’re staying up there, then goes on about his business.

  I think of his courage when we’re sleeping. I feel his warm little body at the back of my knees. I hear soft little puffs of his breath. He may be small, but that doesn’t worry us. We know he’ll keep everyone safe.

  Animal Minds

  — Liz —

  I write this in my office with my two small dogs nearby, curled up together on a chair where both dream. Sometimes one will cry softly, sometimes one will jerk his legs as if he were running. Observers are prone to say, “He’s chasing rabbits,” even if he’s never seen a rabbit, and assume the dream can be of no consequence because the dreamer is just a dog. We don’t really know what dreaming does for us, but whatever it is, it does the same thing for dreaming dogs and other dreaming animals, including birds and fish.

  Virtually any mental manifestation one can think of—emotion, reasoning, learning, fact-finding, decision making, sympathy, empathy, recognition of “other,” and many more—is present in all kinds of animals, certainly the vertebrates. Although some of us acknowledge a few of these mental features in our pets, too many of us still cling to outdated scientific theory and deny the existence of animal cognition in almost any form.

  This wasn’t always so. During our first 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers, we had to recognize the mental abilities of other species just as they needed to recognize ours, especially if they hunted us or we hunted them. But it seems that the more “formal education” we acquired, the less we understood the truth. PhD philosophers spent lifetimes trying to define the fundamental difference between the minds of animals and the minds of people when all along there is no fundamental difference and never was. And until very recently, given that no scientific proof existed either way, most of the scientific community chose to assume that animals did not have consciousness or emotions or thoughts.

  A tsunami of evidence now refutes this. Fascinating films, books, and papers are shedding new light on the conscious lives and mental abilities of animals. Even a paramecium proved that it could learn. What is a paramecium? It’s a tiny, oblong single cell that swims. You can’t see it without a microscope. Yet the paramecium in question learned to avoid a certain kind of light. True, there’s still some distance between that paramecium and Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein, but the paramecium was on the same track.

  A breakthrough in this area was recently published—a book by Nicholas Dodman called Pets on the Couch. Even the cover promises realism—it shows a little dog sitting on the seat of a couch, a macaw perched on the back of the couch, and the tail of a cat hiding under the couch. Dodman is a veterinarian who treats what we call “behavioral” problems but which in reality are psychological problems and, as Dodman has determined, are much the same or exactly the same as ours. Dodman has found that dogs and cats with such problems respond to pharmaceuticals prescribed for humans with similar problems. He has found this true of multiple psychological disorders, from obsessive-compulsive behavior and Tourette’s syndrome (a horse had Tourette’s syndrome) to Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and posttraumatic stress. This wide array of problems stems from different kinds of mental disorders, and in my opinion, the fact that the same pill fixes the same symptom, whether in a person or a horse, shows us the most important thing we need to know about animals: They are more like us than we thought. Their organs such as their hearts, lungs, and kidneys are pretty much the same as ours in function and appearance—we knew that. What we didn’t acknowledge, but what is not surprising, is that their brains are, too.

  Not everyone sees this yet. Dodman says: “Despite Darwin, despite Goodall, despite Temple Grandin, and so many others, we still find ourselves having to apologize in scientific circles for ascribing the power of thought to animals.” This should end. It’s time to file that ill-considered, antiquated “scientific” theory with the flat-earth theory and acknowledge what’s been under our noses for hundreds of thousands of years.

  As for me, I’m with Dodman. I know, for instance, that birds, mammals, fish, certain mollusks, and even insects think and feel in much the same way we do. Even so, we kill them and eat them, and although I used to eat whatever was served, and I cooked “regular” meals for my family and guests, I no longer do so. Like Sy, who has long been a vegetarian, the last thing I want to do is eat an animal. I look at that piece of meat lying on my plate and wonder who he or she was. Who were her parents? Her siblings? Where did she spend her childhood? Was it pleasant or stressful? What did she like to do or think about, and what things did she remember? What form of captivity did she suffer and what were her last hours like? And I’m supposed to cut off a piece of her corpse and put it in my mouth?

  Octopus Love

  — Sy —

  The lights were low. The roses were tied with satin ribbon. Barry White’s sexy bass throbbed on the sound system: “I can’t get enough of your love, babe.” It was Valentine’s Day, and I had big plans to celebrate: I had flown to Seattle to watch two giant Pacific octopuses mate.

  Every February 14 for more than a decade, the Seattle Aquarium has hosted the “Octopus Blind Date.” It’s surprisingly popular with children. The year I went, 150 sixth graders, 88 second graders, and kids as young as five from at least five other elementary schools lined up in front of the three-thousand-gallon, two-part tank, strung with heart-shaped red lights, waiting for the moment that Rain, the sixty-five-pound male, and Squirt, the fort
y-five-pound female, would meet. Everyone was eager to see what they would do.

  It’s a fraught moment. Despite the plastic roses floating in the tank and the romantic music over the PA, not every blind date works out. Most of their lives, giant Pacific octopuses are solitary. One year one octopus ate the other. (Happily this didn’t happen in front of the public, but after the visitors had gone home.) Another year the female was scared of the male; at his approach she inked and fled.

  The aquarium’s lead invertebrate biologist, Kathryn Kegel, estimated there was a fifty–fifty chance that Rain and Squirt would hit it off. If there was a problem, she and another diver, clad in dry suits, would try to separate them. But, she admitted, “There’s too many arms to do much about it, though.”

  With those sixteen arms, plus 32,000 suckers and six hearts (each octopus has three) beating as one, octopus sex would seem to offer possibilities that leave the Kama Sutra in the dust. Not so—at least compared with other seagoing invertebrates. Take the sea slug, Chromodoris reticulata, which lives in shallow reefs around Japan. All have both male and female sex organs—and can use them both at the same time. By contrast, most octopuses usually mate in one of two familiar ways: male on top or side by side.

  “Our divers are going to encourage Squirt to come out and meet Mr. Rain,” the aquarium emcee announced to the crowd. Kegel and the other diver then lifted up a Plexiglas barrier that had been separating the two halves of the tank. But Squirt didn’t need much encouragement. Purposefully she flowed from her side of the tank, crawling along the bottom toward Rain, who was sitting on a rock wall at the opposite end.

  With excellent eyesight as well as sensitive chemoreceptors all over his body, Rain knew very well that she was coming. As she approached, Rain changed color from gray to red—the color of excitement. Squirt stretched two arms toward him, and at her touch, Rain poured down the side of the rock wall. He raced into her arms. She flipped upside down. The two embraced, mouth-to-mouth, thousands of suckers mutually touching and tasting one another. Both flushed red with emotion. And then they were still.

  Shortly thereafter the children decamped for their buses. Many of the kids appeared baffled. If human sex was incomprehensible, octopus sex was unfathomable. Aristotle explained octopus mating this way: “The male has a sort of penis on one of his tentacles . . . which it admits into the nostril of the female.” That’s essentially correct: He uses a specialized arm to place a single, foot-long spermatophore into the large opening on the side of what looks like her head. But what most people think is the octopus’s head is really the mantle, containing most of the organs.

  After the kids left, the two octopuses stayed at the bottom of the tank, not moving. Rain’s body covered Squirt’s completely. Rain’s color turned paler and paler. Finally he turned completely white—the color of a relaxed octopus.

  The octopuses were not moving, so I watched and listened to the people. Two guys with arms around each other gazed into the tank, watching solemnly and in silence. An elderly couple walked by, the wife leading the husband, who used a walker. “They’re mating, Leo!” she told him. “It’s a very beautiful experience!” The murmurs from the humans quietly watching these marine invertebrates—creatures who last shared an ancestor with us half a billion years ago—were tinged with tenderness:

  “They’re so peaceful.”

  “He looks happy.”

  “They’re beautiful. Just gorgeous.”

  “So dear. The dear, sweet things.”

  It would be difficult to imagine a creature more different from a person than an octopus: We are creatures of the land, they of the sea. We are full of bones, and they haven’t any. They can taste with their skin and squeeze their baggy bodies through tiny openings. We mate early in life and may give birth year after year. Octopuses mate at the end of their lives, and the female lays eggs—up to 100,000 of them—all at once.

  And yet, on that Valentine’s Day, the octopuses and people seemed to share the sweetness of the occasion: a celebration of the pleasures of love.

  Bushmeat

  — Liz —

  As we all know, due to our damaging environmental practices hundreds of species are facing extinction. Among other factors, we blame climate change and habitat destruction, but sadly one major threat to wildlife is almost completely ignored. A few valiant scientists and science writers have tried to point this out, most recently author Dale Peterson in Where Have All the Animals Gone? My Travels with Karl Ammann.

  The answer to that question, writes Peterson, is that the animals have often gone to fancy hotels and restaurants, mostly in Africa and Asia, and from there to people’s dinner plates. Together with Karl Ammann, a Swiss wildlife photographer, Peterson traveled in these continents to observe and document the destruction. A book they prepared jointly, Eating Apes, describes their findings, but in both books the facts were so appalling that publishers rejected their work, believing their readers did not want to see a dismembered chimpanzee, or an elephant’s trunk cut into circular slices as prepared for the table, or a bowl of wild animal soup with the animal’s little paws floating in it. Ammann’s photos were not taken in the homes of the poor, where food would be scarce. They were taken where bushmeat is an expensive and fashionable delicacy.

  Of course, African and Asian cultures are not alone in serving eye-catching meals—witness our roasted pig cadaver with an apple in her mouth—but the issue doesn’t revolve around cuisine. Instead, like many other problems, the issue revolves around money.

  Large animals such as hippos and elephants are favored foods, and great apes are highly prized. People prefer to dine upon the hands and feet of great apes (boiled), but they also eat the other parts with relish and are willing to pay for it, so the corpse of one adult gorilla meant for the table can bring about $38,000, while the corpse of a cow might bring about $1,600 and the corpse of a pig about $700. This would be one reason why restaurants and hotels are promoting bushmeat, and surely the poachers are glad to provide them. Not only that, but other forms of meat aren’t as readily available in Africa and Asia as they are in other parts of the world. For instance, the cattle who provide beef require long-term care and a grazing area, and to Africa’s pastoral people are more valuable than money. These people don’t eat or sell their cattle: The cattle themselves are wealth. In contrast, wild animals take care of themselves, and to procure one for bushmeat requires no more than a bullet.

  Interestingly, in Europe and the United States, criticism of bushmeat is sometimes regarded as cultural disrespect, as if everyone who eats bushmeat lived off the land or traditionally hunted gorillas and elephants for the table. In much of Africa, most farmers or pastoralists don’t often hunt for meat, and those who once did were hunter-gathers who for the most part hunted large antelopes, none of which have gone extinct due to hunter-gatherer activity. Eating bushmeat on a grand scale has only recently become fashionable, so we’re speaking of a new development that is causing the mass extinction of elephants, hippos, bonobos, chimps, and gorillas, to name but a few of the victimized species.

  In their travels, Peterson and Ammann found dozens of species on the menu, from rats to pythons, elephants, and hippos, but perhaps most dangerously, bonobos, gorillas, and chimpanzees. Like us, their relatives, these great apes reproduce slowly, with long gestation periods, usually for just one offspring at a time. The bonobo population is now reduced so seriously that it will almost certainly vanish forever.

  Can anything be done? Opponents of bushmeat could point out that eating chimps, gorillas, and bonobos is a form of cannibalism, but probably that would deter only a few. Many nongovernmental organizations now actively discourage the use of bushmeat and are educating people not only about endangered species but also about diseases one can get from eating bushmeat. The United Nations recommends insects as a source of protein, and it seems that some insects are quite palatable. Years ago I ate an African ant whose spec
ies was named for honey (albeit in the Ju/’hoan language), so I know this is true. Insects reproduce prolifically, not expecting all their hatchlings to grow to adulthood, and their appearance on menus wouldn’t dent their populations. It’s said that sago grubs taste like bacon and that cockroaches are less fattening than beef. Eating them won’t save the world, but it could help.

  Cecil the Lion

  — Liz —

  Most of us saw the reports of the lion named Cecil who was illegally shot with a crossbow in Zimbabwe by an American dentist named Walter Palmer. This caused such international fury that the president of Zimbabwe called Palmer a poacher, and President Obama received more than 160,000 signatures petitioning that he be extradited to Zimbabwe for trial.

  In contrast, a television pundit told viewers that more than a hundred lions had been killed that same year in Zimbabwe and this was okay because big-game hunting produces a meaningful amount of the national income. According to the pundit, the reason Americans were so excited about this particular lion was because he had a name.

  I don’t think so. As for the national income, the pundit was wrong. Hunting contributes little to the national income—not nearly as much as tourists do when on safari to look at wild animals. Palmer allegedly paid $50,000 for the privilege of killing a lion, a normal price for big-game hunters. Such money goes first to the hunting-safari companies, most of which are owned by white expatriates who organize the hunts and serve as guides. The hunting-safari companies then reward the appropriate government officials for ignoring illegal practices, as was disclosed by the ecologist Craig Packer, who studied not only lions but also the corruption of government officials in Zimbabwe and learned what happened to important amounts of the white hunter’s money. The corrupt officials don’t share their profits, and the national income doesn’t rise.