Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  As for the outraged American public, we weren’t told about one hundred lions, only about one. We were shown a video of a huge dying animal lying on his side with what looks like a long metal pipe in his chest, trying to move, trying to breathe, his eyes open and searching, surrounded by excited people happily taking photos, and we were outraged that anyone could take pleasure in this tragedy.

  And by the way, the dentist gets no credit for using a bow and arrow. The pipe in the dying lion’s chest was, of course, the “arrow.” To hunt a lion with a bow and arrow rather than with a high-powered rifle might make Palmer seem brave, but he wasn’t using an archer’s bow—his crossbow was a powerful, complicated machine that fires a huge steel projectile, perfectly capable of killing a lion slowly and extremely painfully.

  Shortly after the killing, comments on the lion’s murder circulated on Twitter and other social media. Some people criticized those who mourned for the lion “because children are starving.” Isn’t it possible to feel concern for all kinds of animals, young or old, human or otherwise, especially if you don’t consider animals as things? This murder of Cecil involved an intelligent, sentient being much like ourselves, one with a family and responsibilities. Those who mourned the lion understand this, and those who criticized the mourners don’t.

  So maybe the lion’s name was important. Most animals—the vertebrates anyway—don’t look like us or behave as we do or communicate in ways we understand, which is why we see them as unimportant. Perhaps a name makes them seem more important, or in other words, more like us. This gives a more accurate impression, because in every way that matters, such as having consciousness, memory, thoughts, and emotions, animals are almost exactly like us, which isn’t surprising because we are animals, too.

  An important book by Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, presents mind-blowing accounts of what he saw animals doing. Safina, who is highly respected for his intensive fieldwork, recorded animals displaying their consciousness, their reasoning, their knowledge, their memory, and their emotions. His accounts are exact and convincing, suggesting that all who still believe that animals lack these qualities know significantly less about other animals than other animals know about them.

  Once when I was in Etosha National Park, Namibia, taking part in an elephant study, I was sitting on the ground, fixing something inside a small fenced enclosure made to protect the park wardens who patrolled on horseback. On the other side of the fence a lioness was lying on her side with her head raised, dreamily watching me work.

  I yawned. She yawned, too. Amazed, I waited a moment and yawned again. She yawned again. She did this several times but stopped when she realized I was manipulating her. She had been watching me with empathy (very different from sympathy). She wanted to know what about me was like her. Since we were pretty much the same, we both found yawning catching, as I already suspected and as she discovered through casual observation. It’s how animals study other animals. If our species did the same, we’d find better ways of spending $50,000.

  Discarded Animals

  — Liz —

  On a cold night in September 2010, a horrible person drove along the country road that leads past our house in New Hampshire, stopped the car, and threw two kittens into the bushes. Our neighbor found them—she noticed their tiny faces looking through the bushes. She took them home but couldn’t keep them, so she called me and I took them. They were about three weeks old, thin, starved, and infested with fleas.

  But they were lucky. Bobcats, bears, coyotes, and fishers live in our area, as do hawks and owls, and they all eat kittens when they can. The kittens were frightened but understood they’d been helped.

  Of course, our neighbor fed them when she found them, but they ate again greedily when I brought them home because they had learned what starvation feels like. We feed our cats on the kitchen table so the dogs don’t eat their food, and when the kittens could eat no more they explored the table briefly, then got in a small box that happened to be there, curled up together, and slept for hours in peace. They’re grown-ups now, and we bless the day our neighbor found them because they so greatly enhance our lives.

  We live in a small town, population about six thousand, and many of us know each other, so we soon learned that our kittens had a sister. A friend who lives about three miles away found the sister on the same day our kittens were discovered, and she can only have been discarded by the same dreadful person. The kitten was the same age and in the same condition as ours, and we feel sure they’re related because all three are purebred Russian blues, suggesting that whoever threw them away is not only cruel but ignorant. Such kittens sell from $400 to $500, and anyone who pays that kind of money for a kitten won’t be throwing it out of a car. Obviously, the dreadful person hadn’t purchased them, but he or she could probably have sold them and bought drugs or whatever else made him or her so thoughtless. Our community is not only small but cohesive. We don’t think of ourselves as cruel or stupid. When I tell others our story, they say the criminal must have come from out of state.

  Perhaps, but not necessarily. One day I found a dead domestic rabbit, a Dutch rabbit, in our garage. Our dogs had killed him. I had no idea how a domestic rabbit came to be there until weeks later a woman told me that she once had a Dutch rabbit whom she didn’t want so she “let him go” in our field.

  This explained it. Never having spent even one day in the wild, at a loss to find himself alone and abandoned in an open field, the rabbit had come to our house in hopes of finding someone to help him. It breaks my heart to think of him trusting our species, being dumped out of a bag or a box and left alone in a strange field, not knowing where he was, seeing our house in the distance, then crossing a road and climbing a hill to reach it. It breaks my heart that I didn’t know he was there. I would have helped him.

  People like that woman give me the shudders. If she didn’t want the rabbit but chose to release him on my land, why didn’t she give him to me? She’s a nice enough person in other respects, but today if I notice her at some town event, I pretend I don’t see her.

  Why do we have animal shelters and humane societies? Because they save animals like that rabbit and those kittens. The people who manage the shelters don’t condemn you for not wanting an animal, or because you moved to an apartment that doesn’t allow animals, or because your new boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t like animals and you chose the person over the pet. I have a refrigerator magnet that shows two women talking, one saying, “He said I had to choose between him and the dog. We miss him sometimes.” We instantly sense that the dog is still with her and a disagreeable gentleman is not, but too many people make the opposite decision, and the shelter is there to help whatever animal someone doesn’t want. Over the past fifty years, most of my animal companions were rescues, some because they came to our house, some as strays I noticed lost and wandering and couldn’t locate the owners, and some from shelters. I never enter a shelter without realizing what splendid work these institutions are doing in an almost impossible climate of need. I try to support our local shelter, I urge others to do the same, and I urge anyone with any animal to understand that it can’t just walk off into unfamiliar woodlands and care for itself successfully any more than one of us could. It’s like dropping the animal down a well.

  A Memorial Day Tribute to War Animals

  — Sy —

  My father never spoke to me about the wars. He had spent years as a POW. All he ever told me about his experience was that there were wild monkeys in the Philippines, and he had loved watching them before he was captured. As a little girl, unable to imagine war’s other horrors, I hated the enemy for taking my father away from the monkeys he loved.

  He was career army, and I was still in elementary school, too young to have an opinion about the conflict, when he was sent to Vietnam. But when he returned I overheard him say that in the jungles, elephants used as transport vehicles were be
ing bombed. That made me feel sick. I think it made him feel sick, too—enough to prompt his choice to take early retirement as a brigadier instead of staying in to make lieutenant general.

  That civilians die in war is tragic; that we drag other species into our conflicts deepens the sorrow. Though it’s not true that animals don’t, themselves, wage war: Chimps have reportedly annihilated rival chimp bands; certain species of ants raid other ant colonies and even take prisoners, whom they enslave. These are the animals’ affairs. They don’t get us involved. But humans, it seems, have enlisted animals in our bloodiest human-to-human conflicts since ancient times.

  Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder tells us how in the first century AD, animals were used as unwitting war weapons. Live pigs were deployed almost literally as cannon fodder. They were set on fire and hurled at approaching armies in order to scatter the enemy’s war elephants. The pigs, screaming in pain (at high decibel levels that can cause hearing loss), terrified even the brave elephants, who then panicked and trampled any soldier standing in their path.

  Later advances in warfare exploited animals’ more-than-human powers to serve us in our conflicts. At a time when most armies marched in long columns, Genghis Khan conquered an area the size of the continent of Africa with horses. Thanks to their horses, Mongol soldiers were faster and far more fearsome than mere men on foot. The sound of the animals’ thundering hooves terrified the enemy, and the dust they kicked up cloaked them in frightful mystery.

  By World War I both sides were equipped with large cavalry forces, with camels, mules, and donkeys serving as well, sometimes outfitted with equine gas masks. Other species were pressed into service: Glowworms helped soldiers read maps and letters in the trenches. Slugs (who, like canaries in coal mines, are exquisitely sensitive to pollutants) warned the men of mustard gas in time to put on their masks. Dogs laid communication wires. Pigeons transported messages. To this day, our navy trains dolphins to use their sonar and sea lions to employ their keen underwater senses of sight and smell to detect submarines and gather undersea intelligence. There is even an effort to implant electrodes into the brains of dogfish to control their movement and turn these sharks into underwater spies.

  Animals, like human soldiers, have received honors for their bravery on the field of battle. For ferrying a message that saved hundreds of troops, a carrier pigeon named Cher Ami was awarded the Croix de Guerre, a French medal. For rescuing the wounded behind enemy lines, a bulldog named Stubby was awarded the rank of sergeant—causing the dog to outrank his owner. Elephants are credited for helping to win Allied victory in Burma in World War II. They alone were powerful and agile enough to drag huge logs from the forest and lift them into place to create instant “elephant bridges” across creeks and streams, allowing troops and tanks to cross. By war’s end, elephants had built 270 of them.

  Journalist and author Vicki Constantine Croke writes movingly about the wartime contributions of Burma’s elephants in her national best seller, Elephant Company. Its hero, “elephant whisperer” J. H. Williams, spent his career, she writes, “trying to make the lives of working elephants better. Now he saw creatures who had no understanding of war being sacrificed to it.” And this grieved him deeply, as he considered his elephants comrades in arms.

  One of them in particular, the brave tusker Bandoola, Williams considered a brother. Williams’s relationship with Bandoola illustrates a deeper reason that humans bring animals with us when we head to war. “I’ve always been haunted by the reports of young soldiers in Burma who called out for their mothers as they lay dying in the jungle,” Croke observed when we spoke of this together. “I think the need for deep emotional connection is almost beyond reckoning, and whatever comfort these animals brought was a blessing.”

  No wonder that troops around the world, across the ages, have kept animals as diverse as monkeys, cats, bears, dogs, and even lions as wartime mascots—animals whose mere presence cheered the soldiers, boosting morale. “We know that it can often be easier to express affection for an animal companion than a colleague or comrade,” Croke notes. “And, believe me, if you’ve ever been trunk-hugged by an elephant”—and she has!—“you feel the love.”

  By the time my father died in 1991, he had revealed no more about his wartime experience than he had during my childhood. But I hope that from his jungle prison camp, he could sometimes glimpse, if not a monkey, then a bird or squirrel—giving him some cheer, reminding him of hope and freedom.

  A Failure to Communicate

  — Sy —

  A few years back a friend who works with elephants told me about an animal communicator she met, who reported she had a telepathic conversation with an aggressive zoo elephant. The communicator claimed the elephant really liked her—so much so, in fact, that she said the elephant had wanted to put his massive head in her lap.

  Unbelievable! And in fact, it was.

  If indeed the animal communicator had received a message from the elephant, she had grossly misinterpreted it. A child might show trust and affection by laying her head in your lap, but an elephant who does this is trying to kill you. They use their heads to squash irritating individuals like a person grinds out a cigarette butt with his shoe.

  Misinterpreting an animal’s motives or behavior is easy to do. We want to understand animals—and we want them to like us—and this colors our perceptions. A zoo veterinarian about to do an exam on a Tasmanian devil, a carnivorous marsupial the size of a small dog, noted with pride and relief how calm the animal seemed in her presence. “Look,” she said, pointing to his wide-open jaws, “he’s so relaxed he’s yawning!”

  It was then that the Tazzie devil bit her. What looked like a yawn was really an attempt to warn the veterinarian to stay away. The “yawn” was what’s known as a gape threat, the animal’s effort to advertise the power of its strong jaws and sharp teeth.

  Such mistakes may lead people to conclude that an animal is mean or its behavior is senseless or even crazy. We like to congratulate ourselves when our own wise behavior saves us from an animal’s viciousness. An excellent example of this is when people “narrowly escape” being “eaten” by a white shark. Most humans survive white shark “attacks”—this despite the fact this animal can weigh more than a ton, has a sensory system that can detect the electrical current of a beating heart, and possesses three hundred razor-sharp, serrated teeth capable of severing the head from a two-ton bull elephant seal. Do you think a person can escape such a predator? Not likely. People survive because the shark never intended to eat them in the first place.

  A human on a surfboard may look like a seal—particularly when seen from below, where the shark is usually coming from. Most of the time, though, the shark instantly realizes the mistake and spits the person out.

  Another error people make is concluding an animal does something for “no reason.” Once, when I was in Borneo at Biruté Galdikas’s orangutan study and rehabilitation camp, a volunteer who was smitten with the orange apes rushed up to one particular female whom she had met just the day before. She wanted to hug her. The orangutan promptly slammed the woman to the ground—“for no reason!” the woman said in hurt dismay. But the orangutan had a perfectly fine reason for her behavior: She didn’t feel like being grabbed by a stranger.

  During this same visit, Biruté’s husband, Pak Bohap bin Jalan, told me through a translator that sun bears—small, shorthaired ursines that look like fat, short-legged rottweilers—were vicious and untrustworthy beasts. As proof, he explained that a sun bear had once, years earlier, attacked him “for no reason.” How terrible! What was he doing, I asked, when he became the victim of such an unprovoked attack? The answer: He had been stuffing her cub into his shirt.

  Even if it’s not evident to us, animals have reasons for what they do, usually excellent ones. They have the same basic motives we do. They want to eat when they’re hungry and sleep when they’re tired. They love and protect their
mates and their babies. They sometimes want company and other times want to be left alone.

  We can’t always assume that animals experience and react to the world exactly as we do. Otherwise, dogs would not eat horse manure. Fish would try to escape from the water. But in the ongoing practice of trying to understand what happens in an animal’s head, there’s a far worse mistake than assuming animals think like we do—and that’s the crazy notion that animals’ thoughts and motives are nothing like our own.

  What is more interesting than the mistakes we can make when misinterpreting an animal’s behavior is the fact that quite often—despite our very different bodies and different sensory systems—we understand each other very well indeed. Our views on many matters are often strikingly similar.

  Consider a Stockholm University study of the aesthetic values of different human faces. The researchers presented undergraduates with photos of the faces of thirty-five young men and women and asked them to choose the most attractive ones. Then they asked a group of chickens the same question. The scientists trained chickens to peck at “average” human male and female faces. They then created images of faces with increasingly exaggerated male or female characteristics, and measured how often the chicken pecked at each. Which faces looked most like what the chickens thought a human face should look like? The chickens’ preferences overlapped with those of the humans 98 percent of the time.

  Why should this be so? Possibly both humans and chickens favor symmetry. Interestingly, it’s well documented that chickens and people recognize each other by the same means: by looking at the face.