If ever a man needed a miracle, it was Todd Endris. And it came in the form of a group of strangers who happened to be passing through, acting on motives that, if they were human, we would instantly recognize as altruism and incredible courage. Humans who do things like that get the keys to the city, but all the dolphins receive in return, as in all such cases of animal heroics, is more labored theorizing from the skeptics, more attempts to explain it all away as so much preprogrammed behavior.
Anyone watching a service dog on the job, guiding a blind person through the perils of streets and sidewalks, is left with the distinct impression of an awareness, attentiveness, and commitment going beyond anything that training can instill. The animals really care, and they know that a lot depends on their jobs. The singular devotion of service dogs—their special bond with the people who depend on them—is much more than the right mix of positive and negative reinforcement. And it’s not just the professionally trained ones who show such qualities. Dogs rise to the occasion all the time, perhaps especially shelter pets. Most anyone who has rescued a homeless dog will tell you that it’s a favor they don’t forget.
In recent years, the HSUS has run a “Dogs of Valor” contest, recognizing canines whose alertness, loyalty, and bravery saved lives. The 2010 winner was Kenai, a fourteen-year-old Bernese mountain dog mix, from Erie, Colorado. Kenai’s owners, Todd Smarr and his wife, Michelle Sewald, were staying in the basement of a vacation house during a weekend getaway with family and friends, when Kenai awakened them at 4:00 A.M. by whining and barking. When Todd got up to comfort Kenai, another friend sleeping in the basement, Karen Hull, woke up and said she wasn’t feeling well. Minutes later, Michelle collapsed into Todd’s arms, unconscious. Todd rushed upstairs, roused their friends, and soon realized there was a carbon monoxide leak in the house. Saved by Kenai’s warning, the seven adults, two children, and four dogs in the house escaped into the fresh air to breathe another day.
The runner-up in the HSUS contest, Calamity Jane, was still recovering from having her leg amputated from an old gunshot wound and from giving birth to seven puppies when her foster mother, Shar Pauley, took her for a walk on a cold January night in Aledo, Texas. As Shar walked past the neighbors’ house, Calamity Jane suddenly bolted into the neighbors’ front yard, barking furiously, in spite of her somewhat feeble condition. A few moments later, Shar heard a car door slam and then saw a car speed out of the driveway. She quickly returned home, and minutes later the neighbor arrived, telling her to call 911. He said that his family and guests, including two children, had been held at gunpoint for close to an hour during a violent home invasion. But when the intruders heard Calamity Jane, they yelled to one another that there were people outside and fled.
Then there’s Jack, a terrier mix rescued from a trash bin. His best friend was little Maya Pieters, who as a three-year-old had been diagnosed with congenital bilateral perisylvian syndrome (CBPS), an extremely rare neurological condition that mainly affects the oral motor functions. One morning, as Jack slept downstairs in his open crate, he suddenly darted upstairs to Maya’s room where he began clawing and barking at the door. Maya’s parents heard the commotion and realized something was wrong. It turns out Maya was having her first grand mal seizure in her sleep. Her parents scooped her up and rushed to the emergency room. After Maya recovered and the family returned home, Jack dutifully stayed by the little girl’s side, knowing that he had a special ability to help her. Now, each time Maya has an epileptic event at home, Jack seems to sense it in advance. Once, as she suffered a seizure, he stepped in to cushion her with his body.
Like Jack, many dogs have an uncanny ability to detect oncoming seizures—whether it’s by smell or observing behavioral changes is unclear. Hungarian researchers trained a dog to warn a blind and epileptic man with barks and licks minutes before a seizure, allowing the man to call for help. Other dogs have been trained to turn on the lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, to remind their sick owners to take medication, and to aid severely depressed patients under suicide watch.
SUCH SKILLS AMONG DOGS take both smarts and empathy, and it’s seen in their wild cousins as well. When Marc Bekoff first began studying coyotes, he noticed a code of moral behavior among members of the pack. At the time, any capacity for a moral sensibility was considered a strictly human virtue, one of the scientific barriers that conveniently separated us from them. But Bekoff, leaving behind the constraints of a laboratory setting that can warp natural social behaviors, gathered his evidence in Grand Teton National Park near Jackson, Wyoming. There he observed coyote dogs in the wild, discovering complex societies with surprising rules of their own.
Video camera in hand, he found that coyotes and other canids begin their play fights with a “bow,” in which the animal crouches on her forelimbs and often barks or wags her tail vigorously. Seeing this gesture again and again, he established that this was a signal understood by one and all in the pack—saying, in effect, Let’s spar but keep it playful. Coyotes will often repeat the bow during play fights, especially before biting their opponents or doing anything else that could be confused with real fighting. And when they overstep the bounds, for instance by biting an opponent too hard, the coyote will bow to apologize. Coyotes who break the rules of play are duly punished: those who bow and then attack are less likely to be chosen as play partners, and more likely to be shunned.
Bekoff tells other stories of what he calls “wild justice.” In one, a hormone-crazed male elephant had knocked over a female elephant suffering from a leg injury. A third elephant rushed to her aid, touching her trunk to the sore leg as if to soothe the pain. In another case, an elephant matriarch set free a group of captive antelopes, using her trunk to undo the latches on the gate of their enclosure. Scientist Jonathan Balcombe notes that vampire bats even appear to exhibit reciprocal altruism—individuals will share food with ill and nursing bats, helping them out when they really need it.
Does all of this prove that animals possess morality, at least in the very basic sense of being able to care for one another and for us? There is certainly evidence of empathy among some animals, and empathy is often the starting point of moral action. Primatologist Frans de Waal has tested the extent of empathy in capuchin monkeys. He put the monkeys in pairs and gave each one an option: the monkey could choose a token that dispensed treats only to himself, or one that produced treats for both. He found that the monkeys consistently chose to share as long as their partner was familiar, visible, and receiving equal rewards. De Waal concluded that “they seem to care for the welfare of those they know.”
If acts of kindness are one expression of empathy, then grief is another. Researcher Cynthia Moss has documented elephant burials in which elephant families cover their dead relatives in branches and then stand vigil over the body for the night. Bekoff notes that such grief is common in the wild. Animals who lose a mate, family member, or friend may withdraw from their group and seek seclusion. They might try to retrieve the dead animal or stay with the remains for days. Some distraught animals even give up eating and mating—a response utterly at odds with evolutionary self-interest.
In 2009, chimpanzees at a West African sanctuary amazed volunteers by forming a kind of funeral procession to mourn the loss of an elder named Dorothy. As caregivers at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in eastern Cameroon bore Dorothy’s body by wheelbarrow, the normally boisterous chimps rushed to the edge of their wire enclosure and fell silent. They stood there—wrapping arms around each other, some leaning on the shoulders of troupe mates—as Dorothy was prepared for burial and lowered into the ground.
Along with sorrow, animals also can fall into depression just like us. It’s especially common among captive zoo animals, who are given medications to mitigate their condition—usually the very same antidepressants given to people. Rats separated from social contact will often choose morphine-laced foods over regular foods—a preference that ceases when the rats are returned to a more enriching en
vironment, and not in the solitary confinement of a laboratory cage. When they’re together, in fact, and have a chance to play, rats show increased levels of dopamine—biochemical evidence of happiness.
That animals experience emotional trauma when they’re isolated, mistreated, or bereaved should not surprise us. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp notes that most fellow mammals show neural reactions in the brain similar to ours, and that human pain-relief drugs typically have the same effects on them. Mammals are attracted, likewise, to the same environmental rewards as people—food, social contact, and so on. In 2008, researchers at the University of Sussex even found that gorillas’ facial expressions are controlled by the same processes in the left side of the brain as they are in us—suggesting that when a gorilla winks, grimaces, or smirks, he really means it.
The hurts and losses that animals experience are more than skin deep, as in the especially poignant case of elephant calves who have seen their parents killed by poachers. Well into their lives, if not forever, they show signs of posttraumatic stress disorder. Scientists in Uganda were the first to document this after investigating a series of violent attacks by elephants on villagers over the last decade. Traditional wisdom held that elephant attacks were motivated by competition for scarce food, but at the time of the attacks, food supplies had never been so abundant and elephant numbers had never been lower. That led scientists to consider a different explanation: rampant poaching over three decades had wiped out some 90 percent of Uganda’s elephants, leaving just four hundred elephants, many of them orphans.
Scientists wondered whether these orphans, as they grew to adult size, were still acting out the effects of their childhood traumas. And they couldn’t figure out why the elephants were knocking down and stabbing rhinos with their tusks—a bizarre kind of violence almost never seen among these herbivorous animals who often share the same habitat. In South Africa, delinquent elephants were responsible for killing as many as thirty-nine rhinos—10 percent of the population—in Pilanesberg Park. It turns out that the parents and grandparents of these elephants had been culled by sharpshooters in Kruger National Park. The babies were spared, but apparently never forgot what they saw and had grown up without adults to teach them how to behave.
Sure enough, researchers found neurological signs of posttraumatic stress. In particular, orphaned elephants had nightmares and also had trouble forming emotional ties with other elephants—all clearly linked to having seen their mothers and families slain. Some researchers even suggested the possibility that these elephants might now be avenging the terrible things they witnessed. As Joyce Poole, research director at the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, says, “They are certainly intelligent enough and have good enough memories to take revenge.”
Considering all that has befallen elephants, it would be understandable if they held it against us. Yet such cases are so very rare, and the remarkable thing is that so many animals, when they come to know humans a bit, still see the best in us. They seem to feel the bond even when we have fallen short.
The Emotional Lives of Animals
WITH OUR NEW KNOWLEDGE of how animals think and feel come new obligations in how we care for them. Many challenges in animal welfare today are an attempt to apply our understanding in consistent ways, and a good example of the difficulties involves the care of captive wild animals in zoos.
I think of my friend Ron Kagan, who for thirty-five years has worked in the world of zoos. He’s still going strong despite years of resistance from the leadership of his profession. He’s challenged many of the set ways and myths within the field—lobbying for animal-welfare legislation, using the zoo as a sanctuary for many abandoned and confiscated exotics, and starting an animal-welfare teaching center at the zoo.
What really got Ron into trouble, however, was his decision to send the elephants living at the Detroit Zoo to an elephant sanctuary—essentially conceding that even the best-intentioned zoo, with financial resources to hire the best staff and to improve and expand the elephant enclosure, could not match the conditions of a dedicated elephant sanctuary in a warm climate with room to roam.
It was not an impulsive decision for Ron. In fact, it came about through a series of experiences that moved him gradually to the conviction that elephants are awfully difficult to maintain properly in a zoo.
In 1974, he was a new keeper, caring for elephants and rhinos at the Boston Zoo. On his first encounter with an elephant, the animal pinned him against the wall with his head—a message of just who was in charge and of the dangers to zoo staff dealing with enormous and highly intelligent animals. Several years later, that same elephant killed a worker at the facility, and the elephant himself was destroyed.
When Ron was the general curator of the Dallas Zoo a decade later, he helped to rescue a showbiz orangutan, a gorilla from a shopping mall in Washington State, and a rhino from a Florida circus. These experiences only heightened his concerns about the quality of life for certain captive mammals, such as great apes and elephants.
In 1990, while still working at the Dallas facility, Ron went to Kenya and met elephant researcher Joyce Poole at Amboseli National Park. Poole and her colleague Cynthia Moss have studied elephants in the wild for years. Their work has revealed that the animals live in matriarchal family groups, with elders living up to seventy years, and traveling as far as forty miles in a day. Kagan noticed that almost all of the captive elephants he knew about suffered from chronic and extremely painful foot and skin problems. He asked Poole whether the wild elephants at Amboseli had these same problems. “In the most polite way, she told me what a foolish question this was,” Kagan told me. She explained to him that they simply do not get this condition in the wild—it is an affliction that besets only captive elephants.
Just two years later, Kagan was selected for the top zoo job in Detroit, which, with its cold winters, can hardly be considered an ideal environment for a species built for savannahs and tropical forests. Kagan had two elephants in Detroit—Winkie came from a zoo in Sacramento, and Wanda from San Antonio. As the truck carrying Wanda approached the city, Kagan was excited at the thought that he’d have a new showcase animal for his exhibit, despite his growing doubts about keeping elephants in captivity. But his excitement turned to anguish when he heard her screaming and wailing when she arrived. “She didn’t know what was ahead of her,” he told me. “It was heartbreaking.” With everything else he had learned about elephants, he knew too much. “That experience was unnerving, and it contributed to the discussion of whether certain animals should be in captivity at all.”
So in 2003, Kagan and his colleagues decided to give up elephants at Detroit and send these two animals to the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary in central California, where they would have dozens of acres, a mild climate, the company of other elephants, and the daily attention of people who understood them. It took a year and a half to complete the public discussion process, with some members of the city council and the community initially objecting. Eventually, Kagan won over the locals, but he couldn’t persuade the leaders of the other major zoos in America to rethink their own policies. They didn’t like the outcome in Detroit, and they sure didn’t care for the drift of the discussion over this whole matter. To the zoo establishment, this was more evidence that Kagan was trouble, and now he was opening up a larger debate that few were willing to have.
It didn’t help ease their discomfort that the elephants seemed to adapt quite nicely to the sun and wide open spaces of their new digs in California. After years on display, shipped around from one small place to the next, this was a kind of deliverance. They would never again be in the wild, but this was surely the next best thing.
Who takes in a homeless elephant, or any other captive wild creature in need of space and care? To his great credit, Kagan is among the rare zoo administrators who keeps an eye out for captive animals in need—the discards of roadside menageries and exotic pet fanciers who get in over their heads. For that gorilla whom
Ron helped rescue in 1995—a thirty-year-old creature born in Africa, purchased by a shopping mall, and forced to live in a concrete-and-steel cage as a curiosity for shoppers—moving to an accredited zoo was a big upgrade. But giving sanctuary to the many thousands of animal castoffs and refugees is largely the work of a rather remarkable network of private charities and volunteer rescuers—smaller versions of Black Beauty Ranch. Name just about any animal or any kind of abuse, and somewhere there are people devoted to bringing shelter and relief. And different though they are, in their focus and their means, they are each called to the same kind and noble work, which in practice usually involves cleaning up after careless, selfish, or malicious people.
It’s not just good work, it’s hard work. And it takes a special kind of person to do it—guys like Matt Smith of the Central Virginia Parrot Sanctuary. It was a beautiful spring day when I stopped by to see Matt in May 2009. When I climbed the steps of a white-fronted colonial house, I knew I had the right place because I could hear the ear-piercing screeches of parrots inside. Before long, Matt, a clean-cut thirty-two-year-old with a winning manner, greeted me. Matt runs one of a handful of sanctuaries devoted to rescuing, rehabilitating, and if possible adopting out, these strikingly intelligent, demanding, and long-lived birds.
Matt’s youth is an asset in his chosen field. It’s a young man’s job to race around to care for dozens of parrots, build the enclosures they need, and give them the attention they deserve. If Matt lives into his eighties, many of his birds will still be with him. And the younger birds in his care will likely outlive him.
Matt told me people rarely know what they are getting into when they acquire a parrot. The data support that claim. Most birds have five to ten homes before they die, meaning that most of them experience a never-ending cycle of loss and separation from their owners.
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