How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  When the situation is reversed—when, against the natural pattern, mother chimpanzees lose their loved offspring to death—that loss too may be felt acutely felt. Just as wild monkey mothers do, chimpanzee mothers sometimes carry their babies after death. And occasionally, just as with monkey mothers, a chimpanzee mother may seem unable to stop the corpse-carrying, even though the body is rotting in her hands.

  In chimpanzees, emotional ties between mothers and their offspring may be intense. In the wild, great ape babies nurse from and ride on the mother for four years or more. When these babies die, they may continue to ride on their mother’s body, simply because the mother refuses to part with them. At Bossou, in the West African country of Guinea, a respiratory epidemic swept through the chimpanzee community in 2003. Two infants under the age of three, Jimato and Vene, were among the victims. Their mothers, Jire and Vuavua, carried the infants’ bodies for sixty-eight days and nineteen days respectively. I find Jire’s sixty-eight-day commitment to her infant’s dead body astonishing; just think of her burdened with that tiny corpse for an entire summer, the equivalent of July Fourth to Labor Day and a little bit beyond.

  Vuavua’s nineteen-day carry, as it turns out, overlapped with Jire’s longer one. Did one mother pass the other in the forest, look into her eyes, and acknowledge a shared loss? Did each mentally revisit times when her child was alive, nursing close against her body? Intruding into these sentimental thoughts is a grim reality. The mothers must have experienced terrible sights and smells, judging from a report by primatologist Dora Biro and her colleagues. The infants’ bodies became mummified, just as the monkey infants’ corpses that we discussed in the previous chapter had: the hair was lost, and the limbs and other body parts turned leathery. “Because of wearing effects of prolonged carrying,” Biro’s team wrote, “by the time Jire abandoned Jimato’s body, much of the body cranial structure had been destroyed, making most facial features unrecognizable.”

  WILD CHIMPANZEES IN UGANDA: ALPHA MALE NICK, FEMALE KALEMA, AND KALEMA’S FIVE-YEAR-OLD SON. PHOTO BY LIRAN SAMUNI.

  The mothers shooed away flies from their babies’ bodies, and even groomed the corpses. Sometimes, infant and juvenile chimpanzees were allowed to borrow a body and carry it in playful ways. Do such actions mean that the mothers persisted in their carrying because they couldn’t discern that the infants had died? I doubt it. For one thing, the carrying techniques used by the moms varied greatly from those normally used with healthy infants. For another, chimpanzees are capable of complex reasoning, thinking strategically, step by step, about how to solve foraging problems with tools, or social challenges with deft manipulation of allies. While it’s impossible to prove that chimpanzees understand anything about death, it’s equally impossible for me to think that chimpanzee mothers could judge the dead babies—unbreathing, unfeeling, and rotting—to be alive.

  Of course, Jire and Vuavua are females. The brutality that I described earlier, visited on Grapelli in the Ngogo community, was orchestrated by males. Beyond the behavior of juveniles like Flint, is there a place for male sensitivity to death among chimpanzees living in the wild, a gentleness akin to Ham’s expressed in captivity?

  In the first-published scientific review of primate death, James R. Anderson describes an event that took place in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, in 1989:

  In the Tai Forest, a fatal leopard attack on an adolescent female chimpanzee caused an outburst of loud calling and aggressive displays by males, who initially dragged the body over short distances. . . . Contacts with the body were frequent, including grooming and some gentle shaking. Interestingly, infants were prevented from approaching the body. Again, after several hours the corpse was abandoned.

  In a bare-bones sense, Anderson’s summary is accurate. Yet it misses the nuance—indeed, the significance—of what happened that day at Tai. Anderson’s selective reporting echoes a situation that I noted in chapter 6. There I cited a paper by Anne Engh and colleagues that reported a hormonal spike in bereaved female baboons relative to other baboons. Devoted to statistical results, the paper included no observations of grief in the monkeys. Its genesis, however, was Engh’s witnessing of grief symptoms in a female whose daughter had been killed by a predator. The peer-reviewed scientific literature—including Engh’s and Anderson’s papers—favors statistical results and bare summaries over descriptive passages. Yet it is in descriptive details that a topography of animal grief will emerge.

  Precisely this needed detail can be found in The Chimpanzees of Tai Forest by primatologists Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann. There the anecdote summarized by Anderson is presented in full, and the narrative strongly suggests that even adult male chimpanzees may respond to a companion’s death with thought and compassion. In the forest, the chimpanzee Tina was found dead by Tai field assistant Gregoire Nohon. Viscera protruded through her stomach. An autopsy later showed that she had died when a leopard bit through her the second cervical (neck) vertebra. Four months previous, Tina’s mother had also died. Since that time, Tina, age ten, and her little brother Tarzan, age five, had been traveling with Brutus, the community’s alpha male. From what they could see of Tarzan’s actions, Boesch and Boesch-Achermann concluded that he longed to be adopted by Brutus. Sometimes, he even shared Brutus’s night nest. Only after the discovery of Tina’s body did these two scientists realize just how tight the ties were within the trio of Tina, Tarzan, and Brutus.

  The Boesches found a dozen chimpanzees, six females and six males, sitting in silence around the body. Over the next hours, some of the highly aroused males performed displays around the corpse. Some touched Tina. In a period of eighty minutes, males Ulysse, Macho, and Brutus groomed the body for nearly an hour. Ulysse and Macho hadn’t been seen to groom Tina at all when she was living; other males in the community had groomed her only for brief periods. Here, then, was a new and unexpected behavior. Further, some chimpanzees gently shook Tina’s body, as if trying to solve the puzzle of her stillness.

  Other chimpanzees played gently together near the body. To engage in play around a dead companion may seem a strange choice, but how many of us have joined in joking and laughing during the long hours of a wake or memorial service? The urge to play verbally may be a natural way to remember happy times spent with the one now deceased, or it may represent a discharge of nervous energy at an emotionally trying time. The Boesches think that perhaps the chimpanzees needed to expel the tension caused by Tina’s violent death, and that playing and even laughing near the corpse allowed them to do this.

  About two and a half hours after Tina’s body was first discovered, Tarzan walked up to his big sister. By this point, other young chimpanzees had been run off by Brutus, who acted as a sort of gatekeeper. “Tarzan came to smell gently over different parts of the body,” Boesch and Boesch-Achermann reported, “and he inspected her genitals. He was the only infant allowed to do this.” Tarzan groomed his sister, and pulled on her hand. While this scene was playing out, Brutus chased Xeres and Xindra, a mother-daughter pair, from the area.

  That Tarzan spent time with his sister, unlike other young chimpanzees and even some adults, was no random outcome. Brutus brought it about in a thoughtful way. An eminently smart chimpanzee, Brutus played a key role in the Tai community, particularly as a hunter. At Tai, the males hunt cooperatively for monkey. The “moves” needed for a successful capture in the thick forest take years to learn, especially because multiple males must work together strategically, taking specific, conscious steps to aid each other rather than charging in “every male for himself” and hoping for a good result. Mastering hunting skills among the Tai chimpanzees takes twenty years, with the most complex skills taking another ten years more.

  And Brutus was a star hunter. He was, during the observation period highlighted by the Boesches in their book, the best meat provider of the community. His cognitive feats were unmatched by any other male, especially his performance of what is called double-anticipation hunting. On a n
umber of occasions, Brutus mentally calculated not only the imminent moves of his monkey prey, but also those of his fellow chimpanzee hunters. In anticipating their actions, Brutus showed that he could reflect upon the mental state of others. In scientific lingo, Brutus has a theory of mind; he bases his own actions in part on an awareness that other intelligent creatures may act or feel in ways different from his own.

  These capabilities were, I believe, fully engaged on the day of Tina’s death. Brutus recognized that Tarzan, alone of all the young chimpanzees at Tai, needed time to inspect his sister’s body and to mourn over it. Unlike Flint, grieving alone over his mother Flo’s body, Tarzan mourned as part of a social community, because the alpha male of that community recognized his relationship with his sister. I would even venture to call the Tai chimpanzees’ response to Tina’s death a “wake” of sorts, because so many apes gathered around the body.

  All told, chimpanzees stayed constantly with Tina’s body for six hours and fifteen minutes. Brutus himself spent four hours and fifty minutes with her, only interrupting that vigil for seven minutes. Eventually, the chimpanzees left the area around Tina’s body. Two days later, a leopard consumed part of the carcass. In this way, becoming part of another animal, Tina vanished back into the natural world. Or to put it another way, she remained part of the natural world. We are left to wonder what Tarzan, Brutus, and her other social partners thought about or remembered of Tina in the weeks and months that followed.

  In Ape, a volume in the fabulous “Animal” series published by Reaktion Books, John Sorenson notes the strange blend of factors that makes up humans’ response to our closest living relatives: “Although much effort goes into denying our proximity to other apes,” Sorenson writes, “we are fascinated by their resemblance to us and by possibilities of transgressing the border separating us.” We stare at chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans in zoos and on film, seeing almost but not quite human selves looking back at us. Watching movies, TV shows, or commercials, we may chuckle at chimpanzees dressed in clothes, drinking out of teacups, or wearing suits and carrying out tasks in a modern office. Often in these scenarios, something goes slightly amiss, and the rules of everyday life are broken. “Watching the chaos,” Sorenson tells us, “we can see, in a safely managed way, what things would be like if we did not maintain control of the situation and of ourselves.”

  And that’s the point—we don’t always maintain control of the situation or ourselves. In one sense, times are changing: fewer of us laugh at chimpanzees out of control on the screen, while more of us protest the entertainment industry’s unethical treatment of the apes. But that laudable sea change does not alter the reasons for the enduring popularity of the chaotic ape skit. As Sorenson hints, it’s that sense of being on the edge of chaos, of giving in to our own wild impulses, that may explain our fascination. Primatologist Frans de Waal has described our species’ Janus-faced tendencies, our equal capacity for compassion and for cruelty. Our nature, he says, is split between two ancestral sides; we share a common ancestor with both excitable, violent chimpanzees and calmer bonobos, who are regarded as peacemakers. I could just as well, though, shift the frame and focus on individual variation from chimpanzee to chimpanzee. Like captive Ham in his empathetic response to Melanie Bond’s grief, we humans shine with goodness; like the wild chimpanzees filmed by David Watts, we explode with violence, causing pain and sorrow to others, sometimes on the scale of genocide.

  I do not believe that people act in these conflicting ways because the patterns are inherited, a fixed part of our nature. Anthropologists’ work with people around the world, and back through time, convincingly demonstrates that there is no single human nature. Our evolutionary legacy is to behave, think, and feel flexibly, according to what happens around us in combination with influence from our genes. We construct our natures in response to a web of experiences that spans from cradle to grave. In a similar though less elaborated way, apes’ variable behavior, and its responsiveness to life experience, tells us that there is no single chimpanzee nature (or bonobo nature, or gorilla or orangutan nature).

  Some chimpanzees kill fellow community members in brutal ways. Some chimpanzees mourn others in their group and express compassion for others who mourn. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the chimpanzee who participates in a violent male mob is capable also of mourning. Chimpanzee grief is real, just as chimpanzee violence is real.

  8

  BIRD LOVE

  Every March, a stork flies from South Africa to a small village in Croatia, a distance of eight thousand miles. This bird, who has been given the name Rodan, times his arrival with astonishing consistency, alighting each year in the village on the same day and at about the same hour. In 2010, his fifth year making the journey, he showed up two hours earlier than usual, surprising the small crowd of people gathering to await his return.

  But it’s not people that Rodan flies so far to see. It’s his mate Malena, a stork who, years earlier, had been shot by a hunter. Malena’s injuries prevent her from joining Rodan on his annual migration. A kind man in the village cares for her and reports that each year the two birds visibly delight in their reunion. Rodan and Malena make good on their affection, too; at least thirty-two chicks have been born to the couple. It’s Rodan, of course, who tutors the young ones in how to fly. And when the pull of the southern hemisphere takes over, the fledglings accompany him to South Africa.

  Video footage shows the two companions grooming and mating on a rooftop in the village. How must Malena feel, left behind year after year by her mate and her offspring? Does she remember, and miss, soaring sky-high across the globe? And what are the reasons for Rodan’s persistent loyalty, his preference for Malena over all other storks? Has he imprinted upon Malena in some adult equivalent to the attachment behavior famously shown by baby geese for Nobel Prize–winning animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz? Or do we have here an example of bird love, which will lead inevitably to grief for the survivor when one of the pair dies?

  Bird bonding can be a funny thing. Sometimes it goes awry. Petra, the sole black swan to live a lake in Munster, Germany, has bonded not to another swan but to a swan-shaped white plastic pedal boat. The boat is so integral to Petra’s emotional well-being that when she was sent to a zoo, the boat went with her. In telling Petra’s story in his book The Nesting Season, Bernd Heinrich shows there’s a lot of instinct involved in bird attachment. According to Heinrich, storks like Rodan and Malena tend to bond to the nest site more than to each other. Based on stork biology, then, if Rodan arrived in Croatia some year to find a strange female stork in the rooftop nest, he would probably groom her and mate with her, and faithfully return to her next year.

  Is one opposite-sex stork, then, as good as any other? Is the newspaper writer who called this male “Rodan the Romantic” going too far? We are willingly beguiled by such stories, and it’s not just storks. When the now-famed nature documentary March of the Penguins came out, people flocked to the theater in droves to revel in scenes of warm and fuzzy bird coparenting. Why are we collectively attracted to stories of loyalty on the wing, of bird love, and hope for them to be about genuine emotion more than mere instinct? Could this intense interest in bird bonding relate to our species’ fraught relationship with monogamy?

  Now, my best and first reader is my husband, so let me clarify that, twenty-three years into our marriage, I’m as happy to see Charlie after we spend a few days apart as Malena is to see Rodan after his overseas flight. That’s just the way it turned out for us. Mounting evidence suggests, though, that monogamy has never been a natural state for our species. There’s no evidence that nuclear families, centered on a male-female pair bond, were part of our evolutionary past, and even in modern societies they are a minority pattern. To stay with one partner exclusively over the long haul is relatively rare for Homo sapiens; why it remains a cultural and emotional ideal for so many of us is an intriguing question.

  Do we see in faithful bird pairs an
ideal, a hope for our own relationships? “In the movie Heartburn,” biologist David Barash writes, “a barely fictionalized account by Nora Ephron of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the lead character complains to her father, who responds ‘You want monogamy? Marry a swan!’” As it turns out, though, bird pair-bonding isn’t as idyllic as we wish it to be. With evident glee at the opportunity to smite a myth, Barash explains that, in fact, swans aren’t monogamous and neither are many other birds. In one study, female blackbirds paired with vasectomized males continued to lay fertile eggs. DNA studies show that a lot of supposed “monogamy” actually involves what many of us call cheating but scientists call EPCs, extra-pair copulations. These ornithological data are robust and apply across many species. Is it just so much foolishness, then, to get misty-eyed over Rodan and Malena?

  Questions arise, too, when we think ahead to what’s in store for the pair. Inevitably, one year, Rodan will not show up at Malena’s nest, because he has flown elsewhere, grown too old to make the journey, or died. Or maybe he will show up only to find Malena gone—or guarded by another male stork. Will the bird who is spurned, or left alone, mourn the loss, or just move on to another partner?

  When it comes to monogamy, here’s the thing: myth-busters like Barash merely sow the seeds of a different myth, the myth that it’s naïve and a little bit silly to imagine that birds might care deeply for their partners. But why couldn’t long-term bird mates feel something for each other? Malena’s caretaker sees emotion when the two birds reunite, and even if some EPCs occur along the way, surely cheating doesn’t preclude affection for the original partner. Indeed, scientists make a distinction between social monogamy and sexual monogamy. Animals who don’t show sexual fidelity but still stay together as pairs are labeled socially monogamous. This technical distinction makes some sense, but it strips the birds of an emotional life. Compare this scheme to how we think about the adulterous affair, the human equivalent of EPCs in birds.