CHAPTER TWO
The Mismeasure of Animals
IT WAS A HOT, mid-August day at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. As they do each day, visitors by the thousands, young and old, passed through the turnstiles for a close-up look at wild animals, many of them rare and most from faraway corners of the earth. For many visitors, this was the closest they’d come to seeing these creatures, outside of Animal Planet. And on this summer day in 1996, many visitors would leave with a story to tell.
Like even the best-managed zoos, Brookfield cannot possibly re-create the fullness of an animal’s life in the wild. Today’s curators may pay more attention to the behavioral and psychological needs of the animals than in other times, but the settings are still nothing like their native habitats, where the lives of countless creatures are all bound up together. In captivity, the animals are normally housed separately by species—the hippos here, the polar bears there, and the jaguars somewhere else. Even if the zoo architects plant some familiar vegetation, each animal’s quarters bear little resemblance to plains, forests, or wetlands that the creature would know in the wild.
With the zookeepers providing food and water, the animals have little need of their foraging, hunting, or evasive abilities. There’s not a lot of problem solving going on for the animals—just eating, a lot of lying around, and occasionally some playing. On rare occasions, we’ll see something different and exciting—a lion or tiger makes a ten-foot leap within the enclosure; baboons chase, play, and climb; or the hippos spar. Usually, though, patrons get just a hint of the full range of behaviors these creatures normally display in the wild. What the visitor does take away, even in this manufactured setting, is an appreciation of the physical majesty and beauty of the animals, and that’s what keeps the crowds coming back.
On this day, too, it all began with a flash of action. A woman and her three-year-old son had come to the zoo for all of the obvious reasons. But the mother’s plan went awry when her son suddenly scampered ahead and out of view. She made a mad dash to find him, but it was too late. Somehow the boy had climbed over the railing of the gorilla exhibit and tumbled to the bottom of the pit—a fall of eighteen feet. According to visitors who saw it, he landed with a thud, striking his head.
Witnesses gasped, not only at the boy’s fall but at where he had landed. A crowd soon gathered, with those nearest the railing peering down to see the motionless child, facedown and splayed out. Some of the spectators must have felt an urge to climb over the fence and save the little boy. But for anyone who tried, getting into the pit would be the least of the dangers. Once down there, they would be confronting seven adult lowland gorillas, who had the run of the exhibit. They are the biggest and strongest of the world’s great apes and many times more powerful than a grown man. (The largest males of the species exceed four hundred pounds.) If the long fall hadn’t killed the boy, then surely the gorillas would do it themselves.
It didn’t take long for the gorillas to notice. They moved in on the boy, a little startled themselves and clearly curious. As onlookers screamed, zoo staff ran to the scene and emergency personnel were on the way.
A mother gorilla, Binti Jua, with a baby on her back, was the first to reach the boy. She seemed to have a purpose in mind. As the males came close, she stopped them with a straight-arm gesture that clearly translated to “Back off!” Then, to the astonishment of everyone watching, she gently picked up the child and cradled him.
With her own baby still clinging to her, Binti Jua carried the boy over to the sliding door that zookeepers use to access the exhibit. She set him down right beside it and stepped away, so that keepers could get to him. They snatched him out and rescuers immediately began working on him before the boy was rushed to the nearest emergency room.
The boy would survive and recover, and images of the drama would be broadcast all over the world. What the footage showed was an understanding, caring animal coming to the aid of a vulnerable child. At that moment, we glimpsed a side of our fellow creatures that we often overlook and are sometimes told is not there at all.
Thinking and Feeling: Shared Capacities
IN DECEMBER 2005, IN the waters off the Farallon Islands, near San Francisco, boaters spotted a female humpback whale so entangled in the ropes of crab traps that she was unable to free herself. They radioed authorities, and a team of divers quickly answered the call. She was at the surface and thus able to breathe, but she wouldn’t last long without assistance.
A century ago, when men in boats set their sights on a whale, they typically had harpoons in hand. These divers also carried sharp weapons, but for a different purpose. Their large, heavy knives were meant to cut through rope, not flesh. To do so, however, they’d have to bump right up against a frightened and frustrated fifty-ton animal, and there was no telling how she would react. With the rope also caught in the whale’s mouth, the rescuers had to get eye to eye with her to accomplish their mission. As they cut the rope piece by piece, she remained calm and quiet, not thrashing her tail or using her mass to harm the divers or even to signal that she feared them. She seemed to know they were there to help, the divers said, and she put her trust in them.
“When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me,” said one of the divers. Once she had been set free, she did not swim away, but went up to the divers, one by one, and nuzzled them.
In West Africa, there was an animal rescue of a different and less dramatic kind. German field researchers studying forest chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast have discovered that unrelated adult chimpanzees, both males and females, adopt and provide care for orphaned chimps. One male chimp they observed shared his nest with the baby every night, carried him on his back for long travels, and shared Coula nuts he expertly opened. In all, the researchers witnessed eighteen adoptions of orphaned chimps. With no benefit to themselves or their group, and indeed despite the sacrifice required to help the needy juveniles, these adoptions have every appearance of charity.
Had such observations of chimp adoptions been recorded fifty years earlier, they would very likely have stirred controversy and perhaps not even been published. The authors would have been accused of attaching human attributes to chimps. Adoptions of the orphans might have been explained away as an evolutionary strategy of some kind, rather than an act of kindness or sympathy. The scientists would have been accused of straying from their lane and ascribing consciousness to animals—and the whole study dismissed as another case of “anthropomorphism.”
Indeed, just such charges were made in 1960, when Jane Good all first began sharing her findings about chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Her fellow scientists quickly brushed off her findings about the lives and emotions of chimps as a woman’s sentimentality. Goodall wasn’t even formally trained, they noted. What could she possibly know about primates?
In her dispatches from the field, which would later gain an enormous popular following in National Geographic magazine and on television, Jane Goodall named the chimpanzees and treated them as individuals. There was David Greybeard, a striking adult male who first accepted Goodall into the group, and his friend Goliath, the daring alpha male. She produced rich accounts of the chimps’ activities and displays of intelligence and emotion, describing their individual personalities. Over time, Goodall was even accepted as if a member of the troop, living among them for twenty-two months. To the strict mid-twentieth-century behaviorists, observations of this kind were heresy. Humans, as dogma held, were the only animals capable of deliberate action, conscious thought, and emotion. No animal other than man was to be considered a who, with personality and awareness, but merely an it to be studied much as one might observe a food-gathering, reproductive machine.
Louis Leakey, the legendary Kenyan paleontologist, had seen too much of animals in the wild to accept such orthodox thinking. It was Leakey who urged Goodall to go into the field and document chimpanzee society, just as he did in later years with Dian Fossey and Biru
te Galdikas in their study of the other great apes. Equipped only with a pen and paper, the twenty-six-year-old Goodall began recording the hidden lives of chimps: their games, family squabbles, power struggles, interpersonal violence, and affection.
One day she watched as David Greybeard used a stick to catch food from a termite mound, and soon after she noticed Goliath stripping leaves off a stalk to fashion it into tool for catching termites. The implication was tremendous: toolmaking, long considered a defining attribute of humans, was shared by other animals. When Goodall shared her observation with Leakey, he replied, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as human.”
Today Goodall’s discovery seems less startling, and Leakey’s conclusions overstated. We now have learned that all sorts of animals—from New Caledonian crows to bottlenose dolphins—can make and use rudimentary tools. And we also know that animals can do much more—that dogs can feel empathy, elephants can suffer emotional trauma, and birds can reason and solve problems.
But at the time, Goodall’s methods, vocabulary, and findings were unheard of. Decades of academic papers, layered over centuries of philosophical dogma, had sealed our species off from all others, somehow completely separate from them. We occupied our own special citadel, claiming tool use, cognition, any capacity for language, and all the elements of reason as ours alone.
It would take a long time, starting with Goodall’s reports, for the reality that animals think and feel to sink in. So many people didn’t see it, or simply denied what they saw. All along though, it was right there—playing out in the behavior of our own dogs and cats, in elephant and chimpanzee societies, and in the lives of so many other creatures. In their humble ways, animals do think and feel—and this should awaken our empathy and command our respect.
Denying Animal Intelligence
DENYING OR DIMINISHING THE intelligence of others has always been a strategy to justify oppression, cruelty, or indifference, or at the very least to divert moral responsibility. We’ve seen it used for centuries to downgrade the moral worth of animals, but it’s also been invoked to justify plenty of human wrongs—whether perpetuating slavery, denying rights to women or minorities, or locking away the mentally ill.
In The Mismeasure of Man, the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould looked back at the so-called science of “biological determinists,” who argued, perhaps in part unconsciously, that certain races, notably blacks, had a lower intelligence quotient than whites. Through craniometry, or the measuring of the size of the brain, and certain psychological testing methods, proponents argued that there was a biological basis for the supposed inferiority of blacks. With cool reason, step by step, Gould stripped away the pretense of objective science and demonstrated that their data were cooked and their conclusions preordained. His work stands as a reminder that scientists sometimes labor under prejudices of their own. They may simply shore up the reigning falsehoods of the day, instead of knocking them down as we expect good science to do.
Of course, Gould had exposed a form of pseudoscience that was employed to invent racial differences. It’s not quite so easy to argue that similar methods have been used to deny the intelligence of nonhuman animals, since there are so many actual differences of brain size and intelligence between humans and other species. That humans possess special cognitive abilities, powers of thought and creativity that long ago set us apart, is among the most obvious facts in nature.
The question is not whether animals possess a level of intelligence equal to ours, but instead whether they possess some meaningful level of intelligence and awareness. Do they think and feel and suffer in ways that command our moral attention? Uniquely in the world, human beings are the creature of conscience, and that very capacity allows us to perceive the worth of other beings and to care about how they’re treated. Perhaps alone among animals, we know what is right and fair, and it falls to us to give animals their due. The nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s-rights advocate Sojourner Truth, in speaking up for dispossessed people of her time, said it well: “If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?”
René Descartes, a stern man in his measuring of cups and pints, had confidently declared that animals were “mere automatons”—objects incapable of feeling conscious sensations, and hence incapable of suffering. Language, Descartes argued, is essential to thought, and since animals couldn’t speak, therefore they couldn’t think. Emboldened by this belief, vivisectionists in the succeeding decades cut open live dogs without anesthetic to provide anatomical lessons, and they dismissed the dogs’ cries as mere stimulus response. The absence of reason, or even sentience, meant that the dogs’ tormentors had no moral obligations to other creatures and could do with them as they wished—which they did, to the point of staging vivisections in public for the enjoyment of crowds.
Whatever the theories used to justify such practices, there have always been those who knew better. Voltaire, writing in the eighteenth century, went to the heart of the matter by challenging the assumption that animals don’t feel: “Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel?” He reasoned that since animals share anatomies strikingly similar to our own, it was highly likely that they feel pain like we do too. In time, these biological similarities would only become more evident, and they seemed undeniable to the man who would become the most famous scientist of the age.
In 1859, in On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin called into question much more than man’s unique place in Creation. He argued that the differences between humans and animals were differences of degree, and that animals had complex emotional lives. Summarizing his studies of animals in the wild, he wrote that mammals “experience (to greater or lesser degrees) anxiety, grief, dejection, despair, joy, love, ‘tender feelings,’ devotion, ill-temper, sulkiness, determination, hatred, anger, disdain, contempt, disgust, guilt, pride, helplessness, patience, surprise, astonishment, fear, horror, shame, shyness, and modesty.”
In 1872, Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which documented how people and animals share similar facial expressions and body language to express the same state of mind. He observed how monkeys laugh and dance when happy and dogs stand taller when angry, much as people do. He pointed out that animal emotions make evolutionary sense too; without fear, a gazelle wouldn’t know when to run, and without aggression, a dog wouldn’t feel the same urgency in defending his territory. It was equally obvious that animals took pleasure in the basics of life such as eating and mating.
Still, the denials of intelligence and rationality by Descartes (and earlier but similar denials going back to Aristotle) shaped ages of thinking on the subject. Although the human-animal bond predates all known philosophy, the dominant view among scientists in the fields of psychology and animal behavior was that animals operate by instinct, somehow mimicking consciousness or intelligence without truly possessing them.
By the middle of the twentieth century, most scientists rejected the Cartesian notion that animals could not feel pain, but they still dismissed the idea of animal cognition. They embraced Darwin’s theory of evolution, but rejected or ignored altogether his findings on animal intelligence and emotions. The leading voices of the new school of behaviorism, including American psychologist John B. Watson, decreed that scientists should reserve comment for the external behavior of animals and avoid assumptions as to internal states such as thought and feeling—if animals had any feelings at all. This was consistent with what animal behaviorist Lloyd Morgan called his law of parsimony: if a behavior can be attributed to a lower cause (that is, a direct stimulatory response), it should not be attributed to a higher one, and least of all to intelligence. In 1913, Watson wrote,
Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction an
d control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.
The most prominent behaviorist of the era, B. F. Skinner, did not discount the possibility that animals can reason, but theorized that it would be too difficult to know. We should just observe behavior, he argued, and describe it in a scientific manner free of “anthropomorphism.”
In our own day, the author Jeffrey Masson sees the imprint of the Skinnerian model of behaviorism in the work of scientists throughout the twentieth century. Masson wrote:
From the belief that anthropomorphism is a desperate error, a sin or a disease, flow further research taboos, including rules that dictate use of language. A monkey cannot be angry; it exhibits aggression. A crane does not feel affection; it displays courtship or parental behavior. A cheetah is not frightened by a lion; it shows flight behavior.
These are subtle descriptive distinctions, but loaded with implications for the way we view animals. The animals did not think, but simply demonstrated certain programmed behaviors. They operated by instinct, devoid of emotion or consciousness.
The Bond Page 7
