She was bitten eight or nine times, and had to have rabies shots.
JUST SHOWING UP
Animals can also cause plenty of trouble by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Imagine combining the vulnerable feeling of having one’s pants down with a very common phobia. A man in the Bronx was lucky to notice his visitor, a three-foot-long corn snake, before he sat down on his toilet, as did a woman in Poland—of course, it’s hard to miss a six-foot anaconda. But not everyone is so attentive. A man in rural Taiwan made the TV news when he was bitten on his penis, and a woman in Florida was in the hospital for three days after being bitten by the venomous water moccasin in her toilet.
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MULTITALENTED MARAUDERS
In Germany, wild boars commit every offense we’ve seen so far, and then some: blocking roads; rampaging through villages and breaking into shops and homes; and chasing joggers, cyclists, and pedestrians. They cause so many car crashes that a European auto club conducted a crash test with model boars—with spectacular results—to publicize the danger. Nor is public transit immune: In Berlin, some buses avoid stops where boars congregate.
Wild pigs dig up everything from graveyards to gardens to soccer fields. One mob attacked a man in a wheelchair, and a lone boar crashed through the glass door of a church in Frankfurt, right into a meeting of mothers with young children.
They also have no fear of people. Two policemen who responded to a report of a boar in a liquor store gave chase down a nearby street. The police report described what happened next:Initially the attempts of the officers to drive the animal towards the forest appeared to be successful, but suddenly the boar appeared to change its mind, became increasingly aggressive and finally attacked. . . . The two officers were only able to get to safety with a bold leap onto the balcony of an apartment block.
It’s not just the rampaging that makes these pigs a threat: They have smarts as well. Sportsmen say that boars eat only the interior parts of cornfields, leaving the outer edges of the field intact to conceal their activity, and that they’ve learned how to avoid hunters by hiding when they hear car doors slamming.
Boars also have the advantage of a well-developed social structure, allowing them to benefit from the knowledge of an experienced lead sow, but their society may be following ours down a troubling path, according to one boar biologist:A sow can produce a litter of up to eight piglets per year. . . . And because their reproduction depends on weight rather than age, we’re seeing boars of just nine months—mere teenagers—producing young.
In some cases the boars are an agent of our own technological troubles turned against us. Climate change has increased their numbers, because warmer winters are easier to survive and increase the availability of their favorite foods. And in 2009, almost €425,000 ($555,000) was paid out to German hunters in compensation for wild boar meat that could not be eaten: It was too contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster that lingers in their diet of mushrooms and truffles.
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However dramatic, though, a snake in the bathroom can affect only a limited number of people. The best way to bring whole swathes of society to a standstill at once is to disrupt traffic, especially at rush hour, and here’s where animals really show their stuff. In India, elephants sometimes seem to block the road for the pure pleasure of it, like one that brought traffic to a standstill for an hour on a highway in West Bengal in 2010:A fully-grown wild elephant, probably from Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary, had strayed onto the highway and almost lorded over the road not letting any vehicle move an inch ahead.
The vehicles on the highway had no other option—they were forced to wait until the pachyderm moved away leisurely at its own will.
Some animal roadblocks do more than simply interfere with progress: In Germany, when a woman tried to shoo away five cows that were in her way, one of them climbed onto the car’s roof and down the other side, wrecking it. And in the spring of 2010 a Greek highway had to be closed down after a carpet of millions of frogs caused drivers to skid off the road.
RUNNING WILD
Native wildlife is a traffic problem in many places—in Maine, for instance, there are about six hundred collisions with moose per year. But perhaps the most effective road disruptions come from animals that unexpectedly show up outside of their natural habitats. For those drivers in West Bengal, an elephant is no doubt an inconvenience but not a huge surprise. Not so for the Oklahoma couple who were driving home from church and nearly slammed into an escaped circus elephant. “Didn’t have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road,” the driver was quoted as saying. “At the very last second I said ‘elephant!’ ” Fortunately, he had time to swerve, and the couple was unhurt, although their vehicle was punctured by a tusk.
An escaped circus elephant in Zurich, Switzerland, caused a more widespread reaction. The pachyderm spent two hours apparently simply sightseeing, walking calmly around the city and stopping to bathe in a lake, but police closed roads and pedestrians fled.
Smaller exotics can cause just as big a kerfuffle: A wallaby on a motorway in Britain caused a four-hour drama, taking at least nine officers and a police helicopter away from other duties, and causing the speed limit to be lowered to thirty miles per hour.
Similar situations have been caused by llamas in Germany (three police cars with six officers, road closed), circus animals in Dublin (did they head for the Red Cow Roundabout on purpose?), and zebras all over the place: Augsburg, Germany; Atlanta, Georgia; and a suburb of Sacramento, California. A victim of the California incident, whose car was damaged, gives some indication of the determination of these animals on the run:I don’t know if he went straight into the car or he tried to stop himself and broadsided it. I heard from witnesses he flew up and over my car, got up and kept running.
TRANSPORTATION ALTERNATIVES
Animals interfere with other forms of transportation as well. An elephant in India blocked a train for half an hour and damaged the engine with its trunk before allowing it to continue. Rats have caused dozens of train cancellations and hundreds of delays in England by gnawing on power cables, and to make the rails safe from their rodent dental prowess will cost millions of pounds.
And as if flying weren’t unpleasant enough nowadays, animals can make it worse. A stowaway squirrel caused a flight from Tokyo to Dallas to make an unscheduled landing in 2007, and in 2009, a flight in Korea was grounded by the last animal that ought to need to catch a plane: a bird that got into the cabin. Passengers were transferred to another aircraft as the crew tried to catch the lazy freeloading sparrow, resulting in a three-hour delay .
Animals in planes can also cause more than delays. One man in West Virginia flying a private four-seater discovered that he had an unexpected passenger and had to figure out how to make a landing with a four-foot black rat snake wrapped around his arm. And a flight from Houston to Columbus was delayed for an hour when otters got loose from the cargo hold, and weren’t just walking around in there:A man who had coffee in his suitcase found his bag open and covered in what appeared to be hay. “Some otters got into them,” he said. “They must have smelled the coffee.”
FOCUS ON THE BASICS
The roads aren’t the only place where animals disrupt our society’s infrastructure. Dogs have traditionally interfered with the mail getting through, and cats do their share as well, as we’ll see in Chapter 8. But messing with the postman is less effective than it once was, now that so much of our communication is electronic. Unluckily for us, animals have branched out. In 2006, hundreds in Tokyo found themselves without Internet access when crows took a fancy to pecking fiber-optic cable into strips and building nests out of it. Electrical outages have been blamed on cats, squirrels, snakes, and other animals that can climb power lines, including a raccoon described as “very acrobatic and mean-spirited” who caused a short-circuit that knocked out power to a children’s hospital and delayed production of the newspaper in Mem
phis.
The more abstract foundations of our civilization are vulnerable to animals as well: They can even interfere with the democratic process. In India in 2009, rampaging elephants affected voter turnout and overshadowed other political issues in some locales. Said one citizen, “Many villagers did not go out to vote. Those that did had to stand at polling booths fearing that elephants might come by,” and another, “This year, our vote will go only to those candidates who will help in getting rid of elephants.”
India’s animal-political problems have sometimes gone even further than that: In 2007, Delhi’s deputy mayor died of head injuries sustained when monkeys attacked him as he was reading the newspaper on his terrace. When he tried to defend himself, he lost his balance and fell.
TREADING ON TRADITION
Animals attempting to undermine our way of life may also target the simple pleasures that we hold most precious.
In Hawaii, young Newell’s Shearwater birds inconveniently choose the middle of football season to fly from their nests to the ocean. Every year about thirty of the endangered birds are disoriented by the bright lights of the Kauai stadium and fall to their deaths. The league has been forced to move its high school football games to Saturday afternoons or risk a fine of $30,000 per dead bird.
You might think it’s the same game no matter what day it’s played, but according to Hawaii News Now, this Friday-night tradition is “practically sacred.” One parent said, “It’s about bringing the community together, it’s more than just a football game, it’s a way of life.” And State Representative Jimmy Tokioka was quoted as saying, “To just go without having football games at night is really going to hurt the social fabric of our community.”
Animals may also express criticism of our cultural activities quite directly. In St. Louis, the band Kings of Leon was forced off the stage by pigeons, using the weapon that comes most naturally to them: pigeon poop. Perched in the rafters above the stage, they were apparently most displeased with the bass player, who was hit several times during the first three songs and finally threw in the towel when he was hit in the face. He said, “We had 20 songs on the set list. By the end of the show, I would have been covered from head to toe.”
Sometimes, though, it’s the little things that really get to you. In a quiet Nottinghamshire village in England, the harassment of a jackdaw has become unbearable, according to one villager:He unpegs the washing, turns the pages of the newspaper before you are ready and pick-pockets things from your pocket.
Turns the pages of the newspaper before you are ready. Truly, is nothing sacred?
THREE
Kinky Creatures
HUMANS TEND TO BELIEVE THAT WE’RE THE ONLY ONES WHO do it purely for fun—that in the rest of the animal kingdom, sex is just about perpetuating the species. In reality, all kinds of creatures indulge in sexual behavior that doesn’t have the remotest chance of making little baby animals. There are some limits, of course, for purely practical reasons—it’s hard to have a foot fetish, for instance, when your species doesn’t have feet. But take the obvious example of sex between partners of the same gender: This is so common and thoroughly documented in animals that it’s actually boring. One published survey of the topic is 750 repetitive pages long, and that covers only mammals and birds.
Doing it with someone of the same sex is one way to have fun without the risk of offspring, but as we all know, there’s an even simpler way. And animals know it too. After all, who needs a partner when you’ve got perfectly good flippers of your own?
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PROSTITUTION AND PORN
Animals commit other sordid, if less violent, offenses related to sex. Humans may have invented pornography, but animals seem to enjoy it when it’s offered. In the lab, monkeys will pay with fruit juice to see pictures of a female monkey’s bottom. And in China, keepers have used films of pandas mating to boost the libido of male pandas, who are otherwise notoriously bad at continuing their species; apparently they are particularly aroused by a sexy soundtrack.
Animals came up with prostitution all on their own, though. They’ll trade sex for various benefits.• Fiddler crab females put out for a neighboring male so he’ll protect them with his enormous claw.
• Female birds may offer sex to get food, in the form of permission to forage on a male’s property. One species of tropical hummingbird vigorously defends its territory of nectar-producing flowers from males and females alike—unless the female performs the courtship ritual and lets him have sex, in which case, she’s allowed to feed. This happens outside the breeding season, so again, it’s not about producing offspring.
• Male macaques exchange grooming for sex with females, and the price varies depending on the market—and who you are. The lower ranking a male is and the more competition there is, the longer he has to groom a female if he expects to get some action.
If some of those examples seem like less payment than politeness—perhaps it’s only civilized to share a nice meal after enjoying each other’s company—consider the Adélie penguin. The males may have sex to get their rocks off, but the females have sex to get rocks from them. A female will copulate with a male and then take a stone from his nest as payment, bringing it home to use as material for her own rocky abode.
Reasonable people might disagree about the morality of an honest business of penguin prostitution, but that’s not what we have here: They’re sneaks and adulterers too. These are married ladies, going off to find single males behind their innocent mates’ back. Says the researcher who observed the behavior, “There was no suspicion on the part of the males. Females quite often go off on their own to collect stones, so as far as the males are concerned there is no reason to suspect.”
And remember, guys, if her husband can’t trust her, she might be lying to you too. Sometimes the female will go through the courtship ritual, then, just when the male thinks he’s going to get lucky, she’ll grab a stone and run.
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Yes, everyone masturbates, and at least animals don’t lie about it. It’s been documented in many of our fellow primates—at least seventeen species—in the wild and in captivity, and in animals as young as fifteen weeks old. But our close relatives are hardly the only ones: so do kangaroos, walruses, and marine iguanas. And if your parents told you masturbating would make you go blind and it took you years to get rid of the resulting sexual hang-ups, you’re not alone. Scientists have shown that punishing stallions for masturbating not only makes them do it more, it interferes with their normal mating behavior. So if you’re hoping to breed that next Triple Crown winner, it’s best to look the other way.
THE JOY OF FLEX
Aside from doing it with paws or flippers, many animals masturbate using parts of the body—and positions—that you can’t.
Did you ever wonder what it would be like to have a tail? Bet you never thought of this use for it, but olive baboons have, as have spider monkeys (their tails are prehensile, which is almost as good as an extra hand). And for male elk, the antlers are erogenous zones—they can rub them against vegetation until they ejaculate.
Some male animals—including squirrel monkeys, marmosets, dwarf cavies, and kangaroos—can reach their own penis with their mouth, with predictable results. And, just to make you even more jealous, fruit bats can copulate and have oral sex at the same time—and scientists say that the simultaneous pleasure helps them do it longer.
Not to be outdone, some female primates can suck their own nipples. Chimps not only get sexual pleasure from this activity—it actually prevents pregnancy by mimicking nursing, which inhibits breeding cycles.
SEX OBJECTS
You might think that with all those body parts and configurations that are unavailable to humans, animals wouldn’t bother with sex toys. You’d be wrong.
Our fellow apes commonly use sticks, rocks, and leaves as sexual novelties. And if nothing suitable is available, primates, including orangutans, chimps, and macaques have been seen creating their ow
n. Female orangs, for example, will cut up vines, and males may use a piece of fruit peel or in one imaginative case, a hole poked in a leaf.
Less sophisticated creatures make use of objects for sexual pleasure as well. Both male and female porcupines do it by straddling a stick, and male hummingbirds use small items, like leaves, that they find suspended in spiderwebs. Black-winged stilts, which use objects like bits of driftwood, are particularly enthusiastic—one bird was recorded stimulating himself in bouts of over twenty times in a row twice per minute (a statistic no doubt recorded by a scientist wondering whether his mother was right when she said he should have gone into medicine instead).
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Even when animals have sex in pairs, it’s still not always about making babies. Many have sex outside the season when they can breed, and some like it best then—for golden lion tamarins and proboscis monkeys, their peak of sexual activity is actually during pregnancy. And in some animals, like Japanese macaques, the ladies still get plenty of activity after menopause.
Animals Behaving Badly Page 3
