by Hal Herzog
Our attraction to some animals does seem to be instinctive. When I give talks about human-animal relationships, I usually include a couple of slides that inevitably evoke a chorus of oohs and ahhhhs from the audience. The pictures are of kittens and puppies. The audiences’ responses to the photographs reflect a component of human nature that makes most behavioral scientists squirm: instinct. The notion that humans are innately drawn to anything that looks like a baby—infants, puppies, ducklings, you name it—is called the “cute response.” The idea was first proposed by the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz. Young animals share features with human infants; large foreheads and craniums, big eyes, bulging checks, and soft contours. Lorenz referred to these characteristics as “baby releasers” because they automatically bring out our parental urges.
Bambi is the classic example of how easily we are manipulated by baby releasers. Walt Disney originally urged the animators working on the film to draw the fawn as accurately as possible. He had a pair of fawns shipped in from Maine and made his artists watch an anatomist dissect the rotting carcass of a newborn deer. The problem was that the Bambi sketches that the animators produced, while realistic, were not cute enough to grab the hearts of the movie-going public. The solution was babyfication; Disney told the artists to reduce the length of Bambi’s muzzle and make Bambi’s head bigger. Then they gave Bambi huge eyes with lots of white in them. Bambi was morphed into a surrogate human baby.
Mickey Mouse is a similar testament to Disney’s ability to design characters that elicit our parental urges. Mickey started life in 1928 as a not-so-nice trickster named Steamboat Willie. Over the next fifty years, Disney systematically changed his image. To accomplish this shift to a kinder and gentler Mickey, his features became more baby-like. Mickey’s head grew to nearly half the size of his body, and the size of his eyes and brain case nearly doubled. Does our innate tendency to be taken in by a pair of oversized eyes affect our attitudes toward the treatment of other species? Of course. Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard biologist who traced Mickey’s evolution said it best: “We are, in short, fooled by an evolved response to our own babies and we transfer our reaction to the same set of features in other animals.”
The role of cuteness in our attitudes toward animals is illustrated by public outrage over the annual “harvest” of baby harp seals on the ice floes off the Atlantic coast of Canada. The seals are irresistible right after they are born; for the first two weeks of their lives, their fur is pure white and their eyes dark and as deep as pools. In the 1970s and 1980s, gory photographs showing the oozing blood of newborns being clubbed to death were staples of the brochures and placards of anti-hunt protesters. In 1987, the Canadian government caved in to public pressure—sort of. They prohibited killing seal pups under fourteen days old, which happens to be when their fur becomes darker and the animals begin to look less infantile. Then it is open season. The Canadians did not stop the baby seal hunt; they stopped the cute baby seal hunt.
Our fetish for animals that look like infants comes at a cost. Humans’ love for the cute has produced canine breeds in which full-grown dogs resemble perpetual puppies. The babyish snouts of breeds like Chinese pugs and French bulldogs make for respiratory problems, and their bulging puppy eyes barely fit into their shallow sockets. By breeding dogs for neoteny (the biological term for the retention of juvenile features in adults), we have also created pets that are emotionally immature and prone to canine versions of our own neuroses. This phenomenon has been a boon to Big Pharma, which has developed repackaged versions of Valium and Prozac for our depressed, anxious, and obsessive-compulsive pets.
WHY DO PEOPLE HATE SNAKES?
But if people are biophilic toward creatures like puppies and baby seals, they are biophobic toward others—snakes, for instance. In a 2001 Gallup poll, Americans were asked about the things that make them sweat. Four of their top ten fears were of animals, with snakes at the top of the list. (The other common animal fears were of spiders, mice, and dogs.) Even the revered medical missionary Albert Schweitzer, whose philosophy emphasized reverence for all life, kept a gun around to shoot snakes.
As a young researcher, I observed first hand the conflict between the fascination for snakes and the fear of them. I was spending the summer at a reptile theme park in Florida, recording the mating calls of alligators. At the beginning of the tourist season, the park would hire college students who had experience handling reptiles to lead tours of the facility. At the end of each tour, the guide would don a pair of snake-proof boots and wade into a pit containing dozens of big rattlesnakes and water moccasins, snakes that can kill you.
The balloon trick was the climax of the show. The tour guide would blow up a balloon and pick out a big diamondback, which he would harass with a snake hook until the animal was coiled and ready to strike. To pull off the trick, you have to hold one end of the balloon in your hand and slowly push the other end toward the hot snake. Then, when the balloon is a foot from the snake’s nose, you make a quick thrust, pushing the balloon directly into its face. If you do it right, the snake hits the balloon full-force with its fangs. Bang. The balloon bursts. The startled tourists jump and clap and maybe even give you a tip.
But one of the college boys did not have the guts to make the quick final thrust toward the inch-and-a-half fangs of a rattlesnake. The old-timers on the staff did not think much of the summer college kids, especially this one. In the mornings, before the place officially opened, I would join them around the pit to watch the new kid try to learn the balloon trick. Looking confident and cocky in his starched khaki jungle shirt, he would enter the pit, pin a snake, grab its head, and milk it by hooking the snake’s fangs over a glass vial and massaging its venom glands. No problem. But then it was time for the finale, the balloon trick. You could see his hands start to tremble when he started to blow up the balloon, and the tremors would get worse as he picked out his target, an Eastern diamondback.
That’s when the old guys would start on him, some of them clucking like chicken, a few whispering encouraging words: “Come on, kid…you can do this.” Then the college boy would line up the balloon and start to push it slowly toward the snake. But slow doesn’t do it for a rattlesnake. You’ve got to be quick to make them strike. You’ve got to startle them.
The college kid would cautiously edge the balloon closer and closer to the snake’s face until it touched the animal’s nose, pushing the snake backward out of its strike coil, making a rattlesnake packing enough venom to kill five men look about as tough as a pussycat. Not a good way to impress bloodthirsty tourists.
The kid, humiliated, would leave the pit, eyes down, the old timers clucking, showing no mercy. On day seven of snake tour-guide training, the kid did not show up for work, and I never saw him again. The incident reminded me of the biblical warning that the spirit might be willing, but the flesh is weak. On those morning sessions at the reptile park, primordial fears of the flesh prevailed.
Objectively, the fear of snakes among Americans does not make sense. There are only about a dozen snakebite deaths a year in the United States, and most victims are testosterone-fueled males with more balls than brains. A case in point was described in an article in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. A forty-one-year-old man showed up at a hospital emergency room with a rattlesnake bite on the end of his tongue. The report speaks for itself: “A friend held the snake close to the patient’s face while the patient mimicked the tongue protrusions of the reptile. Seizing the opportunity, the rattlesnake quickly bit him on the dorsal surface of the tongue. While the fangs were still in place, the friend yanked the snake out of the patient’s mouth.” Ouch. The man’s tongue swelled to the size of an orange, making it nearly impossible for him to breathe, and he almost died.
Why are so many Americans afraid of snakes? After all, you are more likely to be killed by a dog than by a snake bite. Is ophidophobia a relic of Bronze Age myths featuring serpents, naked women, and apples? Or are people weirded out by the snake’s
alien leglessness or its phallic form? Or did snake phobias evolve because they steered our ancestors away from animals that could kill them?
Scientists have been arguing for two hundred years about the relative importance of nature and nurture in development of snake fears. Susan Mineka, a psychologist at Northwestern University, argues that in monkeys, fear of snakes is learned. She found that Rhesus monkeys captured in the wild were terrified of snakes but that monkeys born in captivity showed no fear of them. However, if lab-reared monkeys that have never seen a snake observe how its wild-caught brethren react to them, they immediately become snake-phobic.
Other researchers, however, do not think that primates are blank slates when it comes to snakes. The University of Tennessee ethologist Gordon Burghardt and his colleagues at the Kyoto Primate Institute tested adult captive Japanese monkeys in a situation in which they had to reach in front of a snake cage to get food. Many of the animals were absolutely terrified of the snakes even though they had never seen one before. In her book, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well, Lynne Isbell of the University of California at Davis makes a convincing case that the primate brain was shaped by evolution to specialize in visually detecting snakes. University of Virginia psychologists Vanessay LoBue and Judy DeLoache (the latter of whom has a snake phobia herself) tested the idea that humans have a built-in snake detector. They asked, young children who had never seen a snake to pick out photographs of serpents embedded in a series of pictures of other natural objects. Sure enough, their subjects were quicker at spotting a picture of a snake amid pictures of other animals than they were to pick out a picture of a flower or a centipede.
So nature plays a role in snake fears. But that can’t be the whole story. About half of Americans say they are not afraid of snakes, and 400,000 people in the United States keep them as pets. Further, cultures differ in how they treat snakes. My friend Bill spent five years in Tanzania as a game warden. In the village where he lived, people did not distinguish between poisonous and harmless snakes. When anyone saw a snake, they would shout “Nyoka!” and everyone would come running and help club it to death. But this is not true in New Guinea. According to the biologist Jared Diamond, New Guineans are not afraid of snakes despite the fact that a third of snake species on the island are highly venomous. Unlike Tanzanians, New Guinea tribesmen are adept at telling poisonous from nonpoisonous species, and they eat the harmless ones.
The idea that both genes and environment influence our attitudes toward animals fits nicely with E. O. Wilson’s updated view of biophilia. He originally conceived of biophilia as a hard-wired human instinctive urge to affiliate with all things bright and beautiful. A few years later, however, he revised the concept to include the profound effects that learning has on our relationships with nature. “Biophilia,” he wrote, “is not a single instinct but a complex of learning rules that can be teased out and analyzed individually.” And the job of teasing out the learning rules that govern our relationship with nature will fall within the province of anthrozoology.
WHAT’S IN A NAME? LANGUAGE
AND MORAL DISTANCING
How we think about animals is also affected by the names we give them and the words we use to describe them. Animal words permeate human language. Some of them elevate (“busy as a bee,” “foxy lady!”), others demean (“you bitch”), and some reflect sexual power (cock, pussy). Calling someone “an animal” reflects our ambivalence about our place in nature. In some contexts, it is a compliment; in others, an insult. Psycholinguists argue about whether language reflects our perceptions of reality or helps create them. I am in the latter camp. Take the names we give the animals we eat. The Patagonian toothfish is a prehistoric-looking creature with teeth like needles and bulging yellowish eyes that lives in deep waters off the coast of South America. It did not catch on with sophisticated foodies until an enterprising Los Angeles importer renamed it the considerably more palatable “Chilean sea bass.”
The words we use for meat help us avoid thinking about the ethical implications of our diet. It is easier to order a pound of beef from the butcher than a pound of cow. Semantic moral distancing is apparently less necessary as we descend the phylogenetic scale; we don’t bother with linguistic cover-ups for chicken, duck, or fish. In other parts of the world, however, people dispense with meat euphemisms altogether. The German words for pork, beef, and veal are, respectively, Schweinefleisch (pig flesh), Rindfleisch (cow flesh), and Kalbfleisch (calf flesh). In Mandarin, beef is niurou, which translates into cow (niu) meat (rou); pork is zhurou (pig meat), and mutton is yangrou (sheep meat).
Partisans on both sides of the animal rights debate realize the power of words. In describing the Canadian seal hunt, the government agency that oversees the hunt uses neutral words: “harvest,” “cull,” “management plan.” The language of seal hunt opponents is peppered with hot words: “slaughter,” “massacre,” “atrocity.” What the wildlife managers call the “swimming reflex of dead animals,” the activists refer to as “being skinned alive.”
The animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made millions of Americans aware of the suffering associated with factory farming, hunting, animal research, and zoos and circuses. But they have had almost no success in riling up the public over the suffering caused by our insatiable desire for sushi-grade bluefin tuna or the pain experienced by a sixteen-inch brown trout who mistakes a #14 dry fly for a real insect. My friend Cathy says she never eats anything with a face, but she doesn’t count fish. PETA’s new strategy to change the way we think about creatures with fins rather than fur is to rename them. The slogan for their new campaign against fishing: “Save the Sea Kittens!”
Joan Dunayer would approve. The author of Animal Equality: Language and Liberation, she believes that some words makes it easier for us to exploit other species. She proposes linguistic substitutions such as “aqua-prisons” for aquariums, “inmates” for zoo animals, and “cow abusers” for cowboys. She wants us to refer to our pets as “my dog friend” or “my cat friend.” I am happy to call Tilly “my cat friend,” but I suspect that my dentist, who has an aquarium in his waiting room, will be reluctant to say that it is time to change the water in his “fishy friends’ aqua-prison.”
PETS OR RESEARCH SUBJECTS? CATEGORIES COUNT
The language that we use to talk about animals is closely tied to another factor that affects how we think about animals—the categories we put them in. For example, animals in the category “pet” are named; animals in the category “research subject” are usually not. When I recently asked a biologist if any of the mice in his lab had names, he looked at me as if I were crazy. I wasn’t surprised. After all, the white mice he pokes, probes, and injects are essentially identical. Why should they merit names?
But sometimes our animal categories become blurred. When I was a graduate student we did give names to some of our animal research subjects—the lifers, who became more pets than objects to be used in experiments. Our favorite lab animal was a spectacular five-foot black rat snake named IM (pronounced em). We got him when he was just a baby. IM was unusual in that he had two heads and one penis (most snakes have one head and two penises). One head was named Instinct and the other one Mind. You can see why we gave him a nickname.
But the shift from lab experimental subject to pet can come at a cost. A laboratory animal veterinarian told me about the time she “instantly fell in love” with a beagle puppy that was scheduled to be part of an experiment that would end in the animal’s death. She quietly took one of the lab technicians aside and told him to swap animals, and another dog was euthanized in place of the beagle. She realized that the beagle had lived only because a person of authority (her) had taken a shine to it, and several years later she still felt guilty about arbitrarily sentencing the other dog to death.
The human propensity for categorizing animals starts very young. Researchers at Yale University showed pictures of unfamiliar animals like sa
igas and pangolins and objects such as luzaks (a gizmo that draws circles) and garfloms (a device to flatten towels) to preschool children and recorded the types of questions they asked about them. The children’s questions reflected a deep-seated category system that distinguished between living creatures and inanimate objects. When shown a pangolin, the kids ask questions like “What does it eat?” When presented with a garflom, they asked “How does it work?” or “What is it for?”—questions they never asked about the animals.
There is also evidence that the human mind is wired to think about animals differently than inanimate objects. In her book Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science, Carol Kaesuk Yoon describes a series of fascinating cases of people with brain damage whose mental capacities are intact except that they can no longer name animals. J.B.R., whose brain was damaged when he contracted encephalitis, could easily identify inanimate objects like flashlights, wallets, and canoes, but was completely stumped if you showed him a picture of a parrot or a dog. Researchers have also reported that some parts of your brain light up when you see pictures of animals but not pictures of human faces or inanimate objects. Further, these same brain areas are activated when people who are blind from birth hear the names of animals. These studies suggest that parts of the human brain evolved to specialize in processing information about animals.
WHEN BUGS ARE PETS AND DOGS ARE PESTS:
CULTURE AND THE SOCIOZOOLOGIC SCALE
Arnold Arluke points out that there are big differences between the way zoologists classify animals and the cultural and psychological categories the rest of us put them in. While the phylogenetic scale is based on an organism’s evolutionary history, in everyday life we look at animals in terms of what Arluke calls the sociozoologic scale. This is a sometimes arbitrary category system based on the roles animals play in our lives. While dogs and hyenas lie on the same large branch of the phylogenetic scale (order carnivora), they are worlds apart on the sociozoologic scale.
