As is routine in the scientific literature, the published descriptions are dry, clinical, and stripped of emotion. But it may be significant for a profile of dolphin grief that adults other than the mother involved themselves with the infant’s body. Working from their database of individual photographs, scientists identified nineteen dolphins who participated in some way in the unfolding events. Of these, fifteen were, on the basis of previous observation, thought to be members of a single, tight social unit. Further, the dolphins’ travel speed was slower during this period than had ever before been observed. Over the six days, the dolphins moved very little from their original location. Ritter concludes that the group adjusted its behavior to the exceptional circumstances surrounding the calf’s death.
A tightly coordinated response among animals who communicated closely with each other, this event shows clearly that a dolphin social group may be affected by an infant’s death. It would be risky for me to assert that it shows as well the existence of collective dolphin grief. Yet the chain of logic isn’t weak: Given that mother dolphins exhibit grief and that dolphin pods are tight-knit social groups, it is entirely possible that dolphins other than the mother exhibit grief when a youngster dies.
Gregarious creatures, dolphins play exuberantly with partners in their own groups and sometimes also with whales. A wonderful series of photographs taken in Hawaiian waters shows play between a bottlenose dolphin and a humpback whale, once near Maui and another time near Kauai. In both cases, the dolphins draped themselves across the whales’ heads; the whales then reared up and the dolphins slid down their backs. At no time did the whales’ actions appear aggressive, and the dolphins’ cooperation over multiple “rides” was complete.
Would a dolphin mourn a whale play-partner who died, or vice versa? The play interactions, occurring outside of any long-term friendship, may be too fleeting for that. It may just be that these marine mammals are so primed to come together socially that their usual within-species play patterns spill over into cross-species play when an opportunity arises. The dolphins’ expansive behavioral repertoire, surely rooted in emotion, leads me to think that a hypothesis of shared dolphin grief is highly plausible.
Whale-for-whale mourning may occur in relation to a phenomenon that concerns (and sometimes mystifies) marine-mammal scientists: mass strandings. In February 1998, 115 sperm whales beached themselves in three strandings on the coast of Tasmania. The individuals came from three separate groups, were mostly female (97 of the 112 whales who could be reliably sexed), and represented a variety of ages, from under one year to sixty-four years. In a paper for Marine Mammal Science, Karen Evans and her research team report valuable physiological details gleaned from the whales’ carcasses. For instance, I was startled to learn that among the whales were pregnant females ranging in age from twenty-five to fifty-two years; I had not expected whales to be reproductively successful at such advanced ages.
At one of the three strandings, the whales’ behavior could be closely monitored. First, a tight cluster of thirty-five whales moved from open waters toward the surf zone. One whale began to swim away from the others in a “frantic” way, churning up water and moving parallel to the shore, then stranding on the beach. In pairs and trios, the other whales followed the first to the surf zone; from there, wave action pulled them in to the beach. (The last two whales to strand deviated from this pattern; they swam past the others and actively beached themselves in a separate area.)
Sperm whales organize themselves into temporary aggregations of ten to thirty adult females and their offspring, with smaller permanent subgroups breaking away from the larger groups and rejoining them at various times. In their paper, Evans and her team put forward no connection between this family organization and the “why” of the strandings. When talking with the media, though, Evans noted that the whales probably beached because of a kind of emotional contagion: the original whale or whales became stranded for reasons related to distress or injury, and family members followed because they refused to abandon their kin.
This explanation for the sperm-whale stranding is tantalizing, and matches up with events in other whale species. When pilot whales strand, says Ingrid Visser of the Orca Research Trust in New Zealand, other pilot whales arrive to inspect what is going on; if rescuers try to herd them away, they become quite stubborn. “If we tried to get them to move past without stopping, they would fight to go back to the dead animal,” Visser told the journal New Scientist. “I do not know if they understand death but they do certainly appear to grieve—based on their behaviors.”
Dolphins strand in big numbers, too, and scientists agree there is no single factor that explains why. Between January 1 and March 7, 2012, 189 dolphins stranded on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, far in excess of the annual average of 38. One factor could be Cape Cod’s hook shape, which may trap the dolphins in shallow waters—but a permanent feature of the landscape cannot account for a single year’s spike in strandings. Nor can Cape Cod’s topography explain the dolphin strandings that occur elsewhere. Causes of strandings, including the military’s use of sonar, which may disorient the dolphins’ navigational abilities, are hotly debated. In short, mass marine-mammal strandings are not well understood. Social ties, even social mourning, may help explain some of the whale and dolphin strandings, but these factors offer only a partial answer to a disturbing mystery.
So far, I’ve considered only cetaceans, but questions about mourning apply to nonmammals as well. Sea turtles are reptiles, and gorgeous ones at that. In their swimming grace, they seem wholly unlike the awkward-gaited land turtles with which most of us are more familiar. On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, a spot nicknamed Turtle Beach attracts numerous endangered sea turtles. Residents and visitors a few years back came to know and love a turtle they dubbed Honey Girl. Great sadness ensued when Honey Girl was found slaughtered (cruelly, by human hands) on the beach. Grieving residents set up a memorial to Honey Girl that featured a large photograph of her. Turtlelovers flooded the memorial, but an unexpected visitor showed up too. A large male sea turtle hauled himself out of the water and made his way up the beach straight toward the photograph. There he parked himself, in the sand, head oriented toward the image of Honey Girl. Judging a turtle’s gaze as best humans can, observers concluded that he stared hard at the picture for hours.
Was the male grieving for his mate? All along, we have considered how we might come to discern a wild animal’s emotions; doesn’t this question only increase in complexity when dealing with a reptile? A turtle is, after all, many evolutionary eons away from us primates, and indeed from any mammal—it is a creature cold in the bone to our hot in the blood, as psychologist Anthony Rose puts it. When we posit that a turtle is grief-stricken (as televised news reports did in the case of Honey Girl’s presumed mate), aren’t we imposing romanticized notions upon a species that operates on instinct?
We will never know with certainty that Honey Girl’s mate mourned her on the beach, or even that he knew the photographic image depicted Honey Girl. Clues do suggest that something was going on in the male’s mind, something more than a mere attraction to novelty on the beach. His straight-arrow path to the memorial, and the quality of his stillness during his hours in front of it, are notable. Would he have behaved the same way had he encountered a sand sculpture of Honey Girl roughly the same size as the photo, or some other large novel object unrelated to Honey Girl? Short of jetting to Oahu to run a controlled experiment, I cannot say for sure. Whatever that turtle was up to at Honey Girl’s memorial, though, it’s clear to me that he was acting out of choice, behaving in a realm that stretches beyond mere survival activity.
My own experience with tortoises, and turtles, emerges from less exotic locales. I regularly encounter them on roadways as they amble across lanes of traffic, unaware of the imminent risk of becoming brightly colored bits of roadkill. Turtle rescue gives me a thrill, I admit: a quick carry from midroad to the safer verge for the smaller, amiable ones, a behind-the-s
hell foot-shuffle to guide the bigger, hissy ones (while avoiding their snap-rapid jaws). One summer day, after a quickly executed pullover onto a highway’s shoulder, I joined in epic battle with a magnificent snapper poised on the edge of trouble. Plucking the creature from the path of predatory vehicles, I set her (or him) down on grass, and reoriented her toward safer pastures. Back she wheeled, heading once more for the thick ribbon of cars. Perhaps seeking a watery oasis across the road, and thus set to “instinct,” she resisted all aid. Finally, carrying her aloft, I plunged through the smelly and brackish roadside ditch water (sacrificing clean sneakers and pride, as passing drivers gaped) and placed her out of harm’s way. Self-contained, methodical, stoic: that’s a turtle’s nature. “Eat, Move, Mate” would be the turtle world’s best-selling book and movie title. Wouldn’t it? So I once assumed. But, applying the questions raised by the Honey Girl anecdote, I now think it lacks rigor to assume a single “turtle nature.” Tortoises and turtles, I’m learning, not only come in diverse species and sizes, on land and on sea, but behave in ways that go beyond the instinctual.
Consider the tortoise who aimed to help a companion in distress. Here again we benefit from the craze for videotaping the actions of any animal that is cute, comic, or doing something unexpected. In this clip, a tortoise lies canted on its side, legs angled uselessly to the sky and unable to right himself (or herself). A second tortoise approaches. Tortoise B pushes his face right up near A’s body, perhaps to assess the situation, then begins gently to push on A. Nothing much happens at first, but B continues to labor with purpose and precision. Once A begins to tilt back toward the ground, he wheels his legs, thus adding his own force to B’s. When A regains his quadruped stance, the pair moves off together, slowly. With a video of unknown origin like this one, it’s possible that viewers, including me, have been suckered. Could Tortoise A have been placed on his side by a person eager to offer a dramatic scene to a YouTube-addicted world? And what about ethics? Shouldn’t the videographer have helped Tortoise A early on, even before Tortoise B stepped in? Even though the circumstances surrounding this video aren’t clear, the inventive—and successful—problem-solving behaviors shown by Tortoise B are striking.
As I remarked in writing about goats and chickens in the prologue, what we notice in the animals around us is set, to some significant degree, by our expectations. We may not even think to look for mourning when a turtle lose a partner. We may not think to look at turtle behavior very closely at all. Yet to be ruled by our assumptions leads to missed opportunities, a lesson brought home by Verlyn Klinkenborg’s fictional tortoise in his novel Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile. Timothy was born among the tangy salt smells of Turkey and transported to England on a ship. What Klinkenborg reveals, through Timothy, is that we humans don’t understand other animals nearly as well as we like to think.
Timothy offers an ethnography of sorts, a view of the Homo sapiens who weathered the eighteenth-century English winter in ways that are peculiar to Timothy’s sensibility: “Humans of Selborne wake all winter. Above ground, eating and eating. . . . Huddled close to their fires. Fanning the ashes. Guarding the spark. Never a lasting silence for them. Never more than a one-night rest.” Reflecting further on the human condition, Timothy finds little to envy: “Barely able to witness what is not human. Always conjuring with the separateness of their species. Separate creation. Special dominion. Embarrassed by signs of their animal nature.” More than anything, Timothy is flummoxed by humans’ drive to measure, categorize, and rigidly label the natural world, all the while puffed up with the resolute certainty of their understanding. All through his notes and descriptions, the human Gilbert White (a real-life English naturalist of the eighteenth century who wrote about tortoises) refers to Timothy as “he.” White has never seen any evidence to suggest that Timothy is anything other than male, so he leaps to a conclusion. “No eggs buried under the monk’s rhubarb,” Timothy reflects, “or hidden at the foot of the muscadine vine. None laid on the grass-plot. No preening, no dalliance. . . . And so Mr. White has always supposed that I am male.”
As Klinkenborg’s narrative reveals, Timothy isn’t male. She is full of surprises, both about her sex and about her ways of living in the world. I am drawn to this novel because it mirrors perfectly what we are coming to grasp more acutely in animal-behavior science more clearly than ever before: We must look at animals’ actions with fresh eyes and thoughts unconstrained by expectations.
When in 1994 animal behaviorist Gordon Burghardt visited the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, he stopped at the enclosure of a Nile soft-shelled turtle named Pigface. Enclosed alone, Pigface had by that time lived at the zoo for fifty years. (Reading that statistic, I had to stop for a moment and let it sink in: five decades captive.) Burghardt had looked at Pigface before, but this time he did a double take: Pigface was playing with a basketball. The turtle swam through the water, batting the ball with his (or her) nose and chasing it with great energy. This snapshot of turtle play invited Burghardt to think in a new way about the behavioral repertoire of reptiles.
In the twenty-first century, we tend to veer between two poles in thinking about creatures of Pigface’s ilk. We may conclude that the male Hawaiian sea turtle was mourning his mate, Honey Girl, or we may look at turtles and tortoises much like the fictional Gilbert White does, boxed in by assumptions that their lives are circumscribed by the “eat, move, mate” circuit. I don’t think that the Honey Girl anecdote proves the existence of turtle grief, but like Pigface and his play behavior did for Gordon Burghardt, it should shake us into a realization: We won’t have a hope of finding turtle grief until we look for it.
10
NO BOUNDARIES
CROSS-SPECIES GRIEF
The bulky gray body, with its huge ears and dangling trunk, walked in a big open field beside a smaller, white romping one. Tarra and Bella were out for a walk. Side by side, day after day, they roamed the open acres of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. They even took swims together. The trust that Bella the dog felt for her friend was evident when she allowed Tarra to caress her stomach with one massive foot.
Tarra bonded with the stray dog Bella all on her own, without any urging from her human caretakers. For eight years, the two were fast friends. And thanks to television and the Internet, they became a global video sensation. That two creatures of such disparate size, indeed of such different natures, shared an enduring friendship was uplifting news for many people. Tarra and Bella remind us that when individuals will it so, bonds of friendship may transcend even extreme dissimilarities.
Then one day in 2011, Bella was attacked by a wild animal, or possibly more than one. The attackers were almost certainly coyotes, and they killed her. Though circumstantial, the evidence that could be gathered points to two conclusions: Tarra was the first to discover Bella’s body, and she carried her dead friend back near the barn where the two had spent happy times. No person at the sanctuary witnessed Tarra’s discovery or carrying of Bella’s body, so I cannot affirm the truth of these conclusions, but here are the known facts: Tarra and Bella were seen together on October 24, 2011. The next morning, and indeed through the day, Bella was nowhere to be found. Sanctuary workers began a search for her that yielded no results, and continued it the next day. Bella’s prolonged absence was so unusual that people at the sanctuary began to fear the worst.
TARRA AND BELLA AT THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY. © THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY IN TENNESSEE.
And then those fears were realized: Bella’s body was found near the barn. There was no sign of coyotes or any other wild animals, or of any altercation, visible near the body. How she got there is a puzzle. Bella might have wanted to make her way from the site of the attack back toward the barn, a place of comfort for her, yet her injuries were probably too severe for her to have traveled that distance on her own. When the sanctuary staff discovered blood on the underside of Tarra’s trunk, they concluded that Tarra had carried Bella back to the barn. Or perhaps Ta
rra discovered Bella making her way to the barn, or found her there, at the spot where she would die, and offered her help or comfort with her trunk.
In any case, Tarra showed no interest in lingering with Bella’s body once caretakers brought her to it. Later that day, when the little dog was buried, Tarra did not approach the ceremony. On its website, the sanctuary later reported the events of that and the following day:
Tarra chose not to participate in her burial. She was close, less than 100 yards away, on the other side of some trees but she would not come over. She had already said goodbye. This was for the humans. . . . The following day, caregivers made the heartbreaking discovery that Tarra had gone to visit Bella’s grave sometime during the night or early morning. They found fresh dung nearby and an elephant footprint directly on Bella’s grave.
At first, my response to this last claim was a skeptical one. How could the identity of the elephant visitor to Bella’s resting place be known? From sanctuary caretakers, I learned some key details. While Tarra had not been observed directly at the grave, she had been seen in its vicinity—and no other elephants had. Further, skilled observers can discern an elephant’s identity from footprints and dung alone. It was these factors taken together that led sanctuary staff to conclude that it was Tarra who had visited Bella’s grave.
What is beyond question is how much joy Tarra and Bella had each taken in their long-term friendship. Here is a situation in which a response of grief would be highly predictable for the surviving partner. Yet one final detail of the sanctuary’s report deserves attention. After Bella went missing and before her body was found, Tarra’s caretakers already judged her to be depressed and grieving. The elephant ate less and behaved in atypical ways. Because of the timing, Tarra was at that point upset about an absence, not a known death. We have grappled with this distinction before: How to distinguish an animal’s emotional response when she cannot locate a friend from a state of outright mourning?
How Animals Grieve Page 12
