The Human Zoo

by Desmond Morris

  There are drawbacks, nevertheless. Just as dangerous sports are likely to eliminate selectively the more adventurous spirits in society, and suicides the more highly strung and imaginative, so contraception may favour a bias against the more intelligent. At their present stage of development, contraceptive devices require a certain level of intelligence, thoughtfulness and self-control if they are to be utilized efficiently. Anyone below that level will be more liable to conceive. If their low level of intelligence is in any way governed by genetic factors, these factors will be passed on to their offspring. Slowly but surely these genetic qualities will spread and increase in the population as a whole.

  For modern contraception to work effectively and without bias, therefore, it is essential for urgent progress to be made in the direction of finding less and less demanding techniques; techniques which require the absolute minimum of care and attention. Coupled with this must be a major assault on social attitudes towards contraceptive practices.

  Only when there are 150,000 fewer fertilizations per day than there are at present, will we be holding the human population steady at its already overgrown level.

  Furthermore, although this is difficult enough in itself to achieve, we must add to it the problem of ensuring that the increase in control is suitably spread around the world, rather than concentrated in one or two enlightened regions. If contraceptive advances are unevenly distributed geographically they will inevitably lead to the destabilizing of already strained inter-regional relationships.

  It is difficult to be optimistic when contemplating these problems, but supposing for the moment they are magically solved and the world population of human animals is holding steady at around its present level of roughly 3,000 million. This means that if we take the whole land surface of the earth and imagine it evenly populated, we are already at a level of more than five hundred times the population density of primitive man. Should we manage to stop the increase and somehow contrive to spread people out more thinly over the globe, we must therefore not delude ourselves that we shall be achieving anything remotely resembling the social condition in which our early ancestors evolved. We shall still require tremendous efforts of self-discipline if we are to prevent violent social explosions and conflicts. But at least we might stand a chance. If, on the other hand, we wantonly allow the population level to go on rising, we shall soon have forfeited that chance.

  As if this were not enough, we must also remember that being five hundred times over our natural primitive level is only one of the ten conditions contributing to our present war-like state. It is a frightening prospect, and the danger that we shall completely destroy civilization as we now know it is becoming daily more real.

  It is intriguing to contemplate what will happen if we do go. We are making such great strides in the development of ever more efficient techniques of chemical and biological warfare that nuclear weapons may soon become quaintly old-fashioned. Once this has happened, these nuclear devices will gain the respectability of being dubbed conventional weapons and will be tossed recklessly back and forth between the major super-tribes. (With more and more groups joining the nuclear club, the ‘hot line’ will, of course, by then have become a hopelessly tangled ‘hot network’.) The resultant radioactive cloud that will then circle the earth will dispense death to all forms of life in areas that experience rainfall or snowfall. Only the African bushmen and a few other remote groups living in the centres of the most arid desert regions will stand a chance of surviving. Ironically, the bushmen have, to date, been the most dramatically unsuccessful of all human groups and are living still in the primitive hunting condition typical of early man. It looks like being a case of back-to-the-drawing-board, or a supreme example, as someone once predicted, of the meek inheriting the earth.

  CHAPTER FIVE: Imprinting and Mal-imprinting

  Living in a human zoo we have a lot to learn and a lot to remember: but as biological learning machines go, our brain is easily the best in existence. With 14,000 million intricately connected cells churning away, we are capable of assimilating and storing an enormous number of impressions.

  In everyday use the machinery runs very smoothly, but when something exceptional occurs in the outside world we switch on to a special emergency system. It is then that, in our super-tribal condition, things can go astray. There are two reasons for this. On the one hand, the human zoo in which we live shields us from certain experiences. We do not regularly kill prey—we buy meat. We do not see dead bodies— they are covered by a blanket or hidden in a box. This means that when violence does break through the protective barriers, its impact on our brains is greater than usual. On the other hand, the kinds of super-tribal violence that do break through are frequently of such unnatural magnitude that they are painfully impressive, and our brains are not always equipped to deal with them. It is this type of emergency learning that deserves more than a passing glance here.

  Anyone who has ever been involved in a serious road accident will understand what I mean. Every tiny, nasty detail is, in a flash, burned into the memory and stays there for life. We all have personal experiences of this sort. At the age of seven, for example, I was nearly drowned, and to this day I can recall the incident as vividly as if it were yesterday. As a result of this childhood experience, it was thirty years before I was able to force myself to conquer my irrational fears of swimming. Like all children I had many other unpleasant experiences during the course of growing up, but the vast majority of them left no lasting scars.

  It seems, then, that as we go through our lives we encounter two different kinds of experience. In one type, brief exposure to a situation makes an indelible and unforgettable impact; in the other, it produces only a mild and easily forgotten impression. Using the terms rather loosely, we can! refer to the first as involving traumatic learning, the second as involving normal learning. In traumatic learning the effect produced is out of all proportion to the experience that caused it. In normal learning, the original experience has to be repeated over and over again to keep its influence going. Lack of reinforcement of ordinary learning leads to a fading of the response. In traumatic learning it does not.

  Attempts to modify traumatic learning meet with enormous difficulties and can easily make matters worse. In normal learning this is not so. My drowning incident illustrates the point. The more I was shown the pleasures of swimming, the more intense my hatred of it became. If the early incident had not had such a traumatic effect I would have responded more and more positively instead of more and more negatively.

  Traumas are not the main subject of this chapter, but they make a useful introduction to it. They show clearly that the human animal is capable of a rather special kind of learning, a kind that is incredibly rapid, difficult to modify, extremely long-lasting and requires no practice to keep it perfect. It is tempting to wish that we could read books in this way, remembering their entire contents for ever after only a single, brief scanning. However, if all our learning worked like this, we would lose all sense of values. Everything would have equal importance and we would suffer from a serious lack of selectivity. Rapid, indelible learning is reserved for the more vital moments of our lives. Traumatic experiences are only one side of this coin. I want to turn it over and examine the other side, the side that has been labelled ‘imprinting’.

  Whereas traumas are concerned with painful, negative experiences, imprinting is a positive process. When an animal experiences imprinting it develops a positive attachment to something. As with traumatic experiences, the process is quickly over, almost irreversible and needs no later reinforcement. In human beings it happens between a mother and her child. It can happen again when the child grows up and falls in love. Becoming attached to a mother, a child, or a mate are three of the most vital bits of learning that we can undergo in our entire lives and it is these that have been singled out for the special assistance that the phenomenon of imprinting gives. The word ‘love’ is, in fact, the way we commonly describe the emot
ional feelings that accompany the imprinting process. But before we go deeper into the human situation, a brief look at some other species will be helpful.

  Many young birds, when they hatch from the egg, must immediately form an attachment to their mother and learn to recognize her. They can then follow her around and keep close to her for safety. If newly hatched chicks or ducklings did not do this, they might easily become lost and perish. They are too active and mobile for the mother to be able to keep them together and protect them without the assistance of imprinting. The process can take place in literally a matter of minutes. The first large moving object that the chicks or ducklings see, automatically becomes ‘mother’. Under normal conditions, of course, it really is their mother, but in experimental situations it can be almost anything. If the first large moving obj ect that incubator chicks see happens to be an orange balloon, pulled along on a piece of string, then they will follow that. The balloon quickly becomes ‘mother’. So powerful is this imprinting process, that if, after some days, the chicks are then given a choice between their adopted orange balloon and their real mother (who has previously been kept out of sight), they will prefer the balloon. No more striking proof of the imprinting phenomenon can be provided than the sight of a batch of experimental chicks eagerly pattering along in the wake of an orange balloon and completely ignoring their genuine mother near by.

  Without experiments of this kind, it could be argued that the young birds become attached to their natural mother because they are rewarded by being with her. Staying close to her means keeping warm, finding food, water and so on. But orange balloons lead to no such rewards and yet they easily become powerful mother-figures. Imprinting, then, is not a matter of responding to rewards, as in ordinary learning. It is simply a matter of exposure. We could call it ‘exposure learning’. Also, unlike most normal learning, it has a critical period. Young chicks and ducklings are sensitive to imprinting for only a very brief period of days after hatching. As time passes they become frightened of large moving objects and, if not already imprinted, find it difficult to become so.

  As they grow up, the young birds become independent and cease to follow the mother. But the impact of the early imprinting has not been lost. It has not only told them who their mother was, it has also told them what species they belong to. As adults, it helps them to select a sexual partner from their own species rather than from some alien species.

  Again, this has to be proved by experiments. If young animals of one species are reared by foster parents of another species, then, when they mature, they may try to mate with members of the foster species instead of with their own kind. This does not always occur, but there are many examples of it. (We still do not know why it occurs in some cases but not in others.)

  Amongst captive animals this susceptibility to becoming fixated on the wrong species can lead to some bizarre situations. When doves reared by pigeons become sexually mature, they ignore other doves and try to mate with pigeons. Pigeons reared by doves try to mate with doves. A zoo peacock, reared on its own in a giant tortoise enclosure, displayed persistently to the bewildered reptiles, refusing to have anything to do with newly arrived peahens.

  I have called this phenomenon ‘mal-imprinting’. It occurs widely in the world of man/animal relationships. When certain animals, isolated from their own kind from birth, are hand-reared by human beings, they may later respond, not by biting the hand that fed them, but by copulating with it. Doves have often been found to react like this. It is not a new discovery. It has been known from ancient times, when Roman ladies kept small birds to amuse themselves in this way. (Leda, it seems, was more ambitious.) Pet mammals sometimes clasp and attempt to copulate with human legs, as certain dog-owners are painfully aware. Zoo keepers also have to keep a wary eye open during the breeding season. They must be ready to resist the advances of everything from an amorous emu to a rutting deer, when members of these species have been isolated and hand-reared. I myself was once the embarrassed recipient of sexual advances by a female giant panda. It occurred in Moscow, where I had arranged for her to be taken to be mated with the only male giant panda outside China. She ignored his persistent sexual attentions, but when I put my hand through the bars and patted her on the back, she responded by raising her tail and directing a full sexual invitation posture at me, while the male panda was only a few feet away. The difference between the two animals was that she had been isolated from other pandas at a much earlier age than the male. He had matured as a panda’s panda, but she was now a people’s panda.

  Sometimes a ‘humanized’ animal may appear to be able to tell the difference between a human male and a human female, when making sexual advances to them, but this can be deceptive. A mal-imprinted male turkey, for instance, tried to mate with men, but attacked women. The reason was an intriguing one. Women wear skirts and carry handbags. Aggressive male turkeys display with drooping wings and with wattles. In the eyes of the mal-imprinted male turkey, the skirts became drooping wings and the handbags became wattles. It therefore saw women as rival males and attacked them, reserving its sexual advances for men.

  Zoos are full of animals that, with misguided human kindness, have been painstakingly nurtured and hand-reared and then returned to the company of their own kind. But as far as tame isolates are concerned, their own kind are now aliens, members of some frightening, strange, ‘other’ species. There is an adult male chimpanzee at one zoo that has been caged with a female for over ten years. Medical tests show that he is sexually healthy and she is known to have bred before she was put with him. But because he was a hand-reared isolate, he ignores her completely. He never sits with her, grooms her, or attempts to mount her. As far as he is concerned, she belongs to another species. Years of exposure to her have not changed him.

  Such animals may become extremely aggressive towards their own species, not because they are treating them as rivals, but because they see them as foreign enemies. The usual rituals, that under normal circumstances make for bloodless settlements, break down. A female mongoose, hand-reared and tame, was given a wild-caught male in the hope that they would breed, but she attacked him from the moment he entered the cage. Eventually they appeared to reach a state of fairly stable mutual disagreement, but the male must have been under considerable stress because he soon developed ulcers and died. The female immediately became her old friendly self again.

  A hand-reared tigress was placed in a cage next to a wild-caught male for the first time in her life. She could see him and smell him, but they could not yet meet. This was just as well. She was so ‘humanized’ that as soon as she detected his presence, she fled to the far side of her cage and refused to move. This was an abnormal reaction for a tigress, but a much more normal one for a member of her adopted (human) species on encountering a tiger. She went further: she stopped eating, and continued to refuse food for several days, until the male was taken away. It took several weeks in her case to bring her back to her normally friendly, active self again, rubbing up against the bars to be patted and fondled by her keepers.

  Sometimes the rearing conditions are such that the animal develops a dual sexual personality. If it is reared by humans in the presence of other members of its own species it may, as an adult, try to mate both with humans and with its own kind. The mal-imprinting is only partial, there being some degree of normal imprinting as well. This would be unlikely with a very rapid imprinter such as a duckling or a chick, but mammals tend to become socialized more slowly. There is time for a dual imprint to occur. Careful American studies with dogs have shown this very clearly. The socialization phase for domestic dogs lasts from the age of twenty days to sixty days. If domestic puppies are completely isolated from man (being fed by remote control) throughout this period, they emerge at the other end as virtually wild animals. If, however, they are reared in the presence of both dogs and men, then they are friendly towards both.

  Monkeys reared in total isolation, both from other monkeys and other species incl
uding man, find it almost impossible to adapt in later life to any kind of social contact. Placed with sexually active members of their own species, they do not know how to respond. Most of the time they are terrified of making any social contact and sit nervously in a corner. They are so un-imprinted that they are virtually non-social animals, even though they belong to a highly sociable species. If they are reared with other young animals of their own kind, but without mothers, they do not suffer in this way, so that there also appears to be a kind of companion-imprinting as well as a parental one. Both processes can play a part in attaching an animal to its species.

  The world of the mal-imprinted animal is a strange and frightening place. Mal-imprinting creates a psychological hybrid, performing patterns of behaviour belonging to its own species, but directing them to its adopted foster species. Only with enormous difficulty, and sometimes not even then, can it re-adapt. For some species the sexual signals of its own kind are strong enough, the responses to them instinctive enough, to enable it to survive its abnormal upbringing, but for many the power of imprinting is such that it overrides everything.

  Animal lovers would do well to remember this when indulging in the ‘taming’ of young wild animals. Zoo officials have long been perplexed by the great difficulties they have encountered in breeding many of their animals. Sometimes this has been due to inadequate housing or feeding, but all too frequently the cause has been mal-imprinting before the animals concerned arrived at the zoo.