How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  Unfortunately, details of the mother bear’s behavior are too sketchy to allow firm conclusions even about what exactly happened, and in any case, there’s no way from observation alone to figure out why the mother bear did what she did. But let us not allow her and her cub to be filed away only as an unsolved mystery. Instead, let us use their fate—and the mother’s behavior, whatever her underlying intentions—to add new questions to the others we have asked about animal grief. Do animals kill themselves? And if they do, is grief ever the probable motivation?

  In 1847—a dozen years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species with its theory of evolution by natural selection—that question was alluded to in the pages of Scientific American. The animal under consideration was a gazelle in Malta, but in some ways the story parallels what we know about the mother bear in China. Here is the brief item, published over 160 years ago under the headline “Suicide by a Gazelle”:

  A curious instance of affection in the animal, which ended fatally, took place last week, at the country residence of Baron Gauci, at Malta. A female gazelle having suddenly died from something it had eaten, the male stood over the dead body of his mate, butting every one who attempted to touch it, then, suddenly making a spring, struck his head against a wall, and fell dead at the side of his companion.

  The female gazelle’s death came from natural causes, which sets her story apart from the bears’. But then there’s that strange coincidence: the male gazelle, just like the female bear, slammed himself into a wall. Did these two creatures act in such dramatic and fatal ways because their emotions were overwhelmed by loss (for the gazelle) and suffering (for the bear)? Revisiting in 2011 the brief note about the gazelles, Scientific American blogger Mary Karmelek found grief-crazed suicide to be an improbable explanation for the gazelle’s actions. She speculates about other explanations for his fatal behavior. Perhaps the male ate the same food that caused the female’s death, but in his case it led to neurological damage that caused him to run amok. Or maybe it was stotting gone awry. Stotting occurs when, in fleeing a predator, a gazelle leaps into the air so that all four legs are off the ground at once. “What seemed a suicide,” Karmelek writes, “may have been the male gazelle’s unfortunately timed response to perceived human predators.”

  Bear suicide, gazelle suicide . . . there’s reasonable doubt in each case. Both times the animal acted quickly, on what has been interpreted as a spontaneous impulse to die. Rash behavior of this sort is a staple feature of the anecdotal accounts that pop up when one enters “animal suicide” as a search term into Google. The idea of animals killing themselves seems to be an attractive one, in a strange sense, perhaps because it’s one more way to recognize animal emotion and to feel a kinship with other creatures. Yet a good percentage of the time the “suicide” label is clearly inaccurate.

  The classic example of an animal suicide myth involves lemmings. We’ve all heard that cliché deployed to characterize someone’s behavior. Seeing a friend conform to some trend we find distasteful, we may admonish her to stop following the herd: “Don’t be such a lemming. Think for yourself!” Lemming conformity is rooted in the idea that these small rodents plunge en masse from cliffs, each following its predecessor over the edge to its death. There’s a two-part explanation for how all this fanciful notion got started, however, and it has nothing to do with suicide.

  Part one involves the species’ natural behavior. Lemming populations tend to fluctuate to a degree that may be significant. When the population density shoots up, some lemmings may migrate to avoid the intense competition for resources in their home area. It is true that large numbers of lemmings move around in herdlike ways—they just don’t jump off cliffs. That second, crucial ingredient of the myth was supplied by Hollywood, as Australia’s ABC Science explains. In 1958 the Walt Disney studio released a movie called Wild Wilderness. In the making of the film, lemmings had been needed, but because none resided on location in Alberta, Canada, the filmmakers purchased some from Inuit children in the area. ABC Science reports, “The migration sequence was filmed by placing the lemmings on a spinning turntable that was covered with snow, and then shooting it from many different angles. The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river.” Thankfully, no such calculated exploitation of animals could happen in the present US film industry. That segment of the Disney film became famous in its day, however, and through it the lemming legend was born.

  The lemming example is an interesting one for a discussion of animal intentionality, because the mass suicide (in the myth) is seen as mindless, collective behavior. The idea is not that each individual lemming wishes to die and acts accordingly—just the opposite. Most of the lemmings have no clue what the lead lemming is doing, and so all perish together. Inevitably, questions of definition arise, just as they have with animal love and grief. Should the term “animal suicide” be restricted to cases where an animal acted through conscious choice to end his or her life? In the cases of the mother bear and the male gazelle, this restriction wouldn’t help us much. In neither case do we know whether conscious choice was involved. But lemming “suicide” would be ruled out, and perhaps the definition might aid in excluding other candidate cases of animal suicide as well.

  Near Dumbarton in Scotland, one can visit a place that locals have dubbed “the dog suicide bridge.” During the last half century or so, over six hundred dogs have fallen from the Overton Bridge to their deaths. With mentions of “suicidal dogs” and “kamikaze canines,” the media sensationalizes the situation by inferring that the dogs are purposefully jumping to their deaths. It strains credulity, though, to think that hundreds of dogs (one by one, not in a group as with the mythic lemmings) might choose to kill themselves at this place (or any other). So what is going on?

  Probably the dogs’ perception is in some way involved. The dogs may smell a prey animal, which they begin to track while high atop the bridge. As photographs attest, the architecture is such that dogs walking across the bridge would be unaware of the large drop-off on either side; from a dog’s-eye perspective, only a low wall is visible. The leaping dogs are victims, it seems, of an unfortunate collision of architectural design and the biology of their own perception. No conscious intention for suicide need be invoked. The Scottish dogs are an open-and-shut case.

  Still, might some sentient animals feel such emotional pain that they would act on an intention for suicide? The mammal-behavior expert and trainer Richard O’Barry swears that he saw a dolphin choose to kill herself, right in front of his eyes. The dolphin was Kathy, one of the cetacean stars of the 1960s television show Flipper that I loved as a child. According to O’Barry, Kathy locked eyes with him, sank to the bottom of her tank, and stopped breathing. “The [animal entertainment] industry doesn’t want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide,” he told Time magazine in 2010, “but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don’t take the next breath. It’s suicide.”

  Time featured O’Barry’s recollection in a story about the film The Cove, named best documentary of 2009 at the Oscars. Directed by Louis Psihoyos, the movie tells the story of O’Barry’s activism against a heinous practice that occurs yearly in the small Japanese town of Taijii: the killing of thousands of dolphins, six months out of every twelve. (I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch The Cove, because in some scenes the camera is turned on dolphins who undergo slow, agonizing deaths.) This brutal practice, driven by the lucrative business of falsely marketing dolphin meat as whale meat, remained largely secret before The Cove hit it big. O’Barry stresses that the vast majority of Japanese people had been as unaware of it as everyone else. The cove’s location is secluded, and the dolphins’ killers were highly motivated to keep their activity quiet.

  It was O’Barry’s history with dolphins that led him to animal activism and to his goal of exposing the Japanese dolphin slaughter to a wide pu
blic. Back in the 1960s, O’Barry had captured five dolphins from the wild and trained them to perform in Flipper. Once the five were installed in the Miami Seaquarium, O’Barry spent countless hours in their company. Once the show began to air, he and the dolphins watched it together on a television set brought right to the water’s edge, every Friday night at 7:30. That’s when O’Barry first realized that dolphins are self-aware: the dolphins—Kathy included—recognized themselves on the small screen.

  In support of his claim that Kathy committed suicide in her tank, O’Barry points to the way dolphins breathe. For humans, breathing is an automatic process that requires no conscious thought. We breathe naturally, even while in deep sleep, and rarely think about our breathing during the day, except in special circumstances such as hard exercise or a moment of emotional upset. As I type at the computer right now, I am intently focused on choosing the right words to convey my ideas; I inhale and exhale without awareness of doing so. As “conscious breathers,” however, dolphins enjoy no such luxury; they must focus on the drawing of each breath. According to O’Barry, when a physically healthy dolphin chooses not to breathe, she intends to bring about her own death.

  When twenty-six dolphins died off the coast of Cornwall, England, in summer 2008, one expert suggested suicide as a possible explanation. The dolphins beached themselves in four separate spots on a river in south Cornwall. When word of the stranding first got out, rescuers rushed to the scene and managed to save perhaps ten to fourteen others (in the immediate frenzy, no good census seems to have been taken). For reasons no one understands, the dolphins who died had ingested large amounts of mud; their lungs and stomach were simply full of the stuff. Notably, no fish were found in the dolphins’ stomachs, so the idea that the creatures stranded while foraging for fish was ruled out.

  In reporting the mass death, England’s Guardian newspaper quoted a pathologist who examined the animals on behalf of the Zoological Society of London. Vic Simpson told the reporter, “On the face of it, it looks like some sort of mass suicide. We have seen strandings on beaches, sometimes with five to seven dolphins—but never on a scale like this.” O’Barry, then, isn’t a rogue voice in claiming the possibility of suicide by dolphins.

  But what could be the dolphins’ motivation to strand? Unlike Kathy, kept in captivity by people in the entertainment industry, here were healthy animals (a fact confirmed by autopsy) swimming free in the wild. As it turns out, the British Royal Navy had been conducting sonar exercises in the area at the time of the dolphins’ death. The Ministry of Defence was quick to say that these exercises were too far away to upset the dolphins, but perhaps this remains an open question. Could the sonar have caused the dolphins to become confused and panic? Either way, the suicide hypothesis seems to me not to be ruled out by the sonar hypothesis. If dolphin biology was disrupted by the sonar to the degree that these animals felt significantly disoriented, might they have consciously chosen to beach themselves? Terrible events may cause animals (including humans) to fall into such an acutely emotional state that they behave in ways that lead to their deaths. The time course involved may be brief or prolonged. Flint comes to mind here, the grieving young chimpanzee who died so soon after his mother. We have seen that any number of animals, from apes to rabbits, may respond to emotional trauma by shutting down emotionally.

  With examples like these—the dolphin Kathy, the Cornwall dolphins, the chimpanzee Flint—we veer into the tricky area of animal mental health. To start with, not every example of self-harm, even in humans, is rooted in the urge to die. Sometimes, depression leads to the inability to care for oneself or to eat or sleep properly, but this situation may exist separately from suicidal wishes. There may indeed be no link at all between outright self-injury and suicide: the American Psychiatric Association notes that the unfortunate trend of cutting among adolescent girls, though a form of self-injury, is not a suicidal behavior. In fact, most mental health professionals see people who cut into their flesh with blades or knives as striving to help themselves (though in a dysfunctional and dangerous way that signals a need for help), as the stab of physical hurt temporarily relieves their deeper emotional pain.

  Nor is self-harm limited to humans. We see it also in captive chimpanzees—and not only chimpanzees who are subjected to repeated biomedical procedures in labs. Scientists Lucy Birkett and Nicholas Newton-Fisher collected twelve hundred hours of data on forty socially housed chimpanzees in six zoos in the United States and the United Kingdom. While much of the apes’ behavior was deemed normal, the abnormalities were sufficiently prevalent to be termed “endemic.” Suicide was not reported, but chimpanzees rocked repetitively, bit themselves, plucked their own hair, and ate feces. Some of these behaviors occurred at low levels and for brief periods, but it’s worth noting that every one of the forty zoo chimpanzees showed some sort of abnormality, while in 1,023 hours of focal animal sampling of wild chimpanzees in Uganda, not one of the abnormal behaviors was seen.

  Given what we know of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in wild elephants, however, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of abnormal behaviors in wild chimpanzee populations in regions where apes come under threat from humans. When elephants’ early attachments within their families are disrupted because of poaching and war, the result is a breakdown of normal elephant behavior and culture. Gay Bradshaw and her coauthors (including long-term Amboseli elephant researchers) published a report to this effect in Nature. That elephants suffer from PTSD in elephant-killing zones emerges in part from their capacity to mourn their family members. With these elephants in mind, we can see that the zoo chimpanzees have turned their own wellspring of emotion back onto themselves: emotion felt in this case not for others’ lives lost and bonds disrupted but for a life drastically limited in physical, cognitive, and emotional ways.

  In this thicket of connections among animal depression, self-harm, and suicide, two entwined lessons stand out. First, our species is part of the problem and needs to be part of the solution. Compassionate response saved some of the stranded dolphins at Cornwall and under-girds activists’ fight against the poaching of elephants for their ivory. Compassionate awareness leads to the realization that many animals now held captive—elephants, great apes, and dolphins among them—should be living, if not in protected reserves in the wild, at least in sanctuaries. Even well-intentioned zoos simply cannot provide for the psychological health of these creatures. Bile farms that imprison bears go off the charts in the harm they do to animals; no such place should be allowed to exist at all.

  The second lesson involves animal grief: We humans don’t just study the phenomenon of animal grief. In a broad sense, we cause animal grief as well. We bring about conditions in the wild and captivity that lead animals to feel a sort of self-grief, and at times to feel empathy for others’ suffering. Whatever caused that mother bear on the Chinese bile farm to run into a wall, in the end, it was human behavior—human greed twinned with an insensitivity to animal suffering—that murdered her.

  12

  APE GRIEF

  It’s November 22, 1968. Earlier that month, Richard Nixon had bested Hubert Humphrey in the US presidential election. A massive operation in Vietnam had initiated a sweep of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, resulting over time in the dropping of three million tons of bombs on Laos. Yale University began to admit women. And on this very day, the Beatles released their “White Album.”

  In the forests of Tanzania, the echoes of these political and cultural events are faint. Here, the air rings with chimpanzee pant-hoots. In the Gombe Stream population, chimpanzees, some excitable, others calmer, are on their way to becoming household names for animal-behavior aficionados: Flo, Fifi, David Graybeard, Goliath. These chimpanzees, already in 1968, have been observed for eight years by Jane Goodall—who is no longer dismissed as a National Geographic cover girl now that her discoveries of tool use and hunting have rocked the scientific world.

  On this morning, Gombe researchers Geza Teleki and Ruth Davis f
ollow a group of chimpanzees who walk through dense undergrowth. Serious students of ape behavior, Teleki and Davis are engaged to be married. Neither is aware, of course, that before the end of the year, Davis will be dead. Goodall makes an emotional acknowledgment to Davis and the “long arduous hours” she spent at Gombe in her book In the Shadow of Man. “It may have been due to physical exhaustion,” Goodall writes, “that one day in 1968, Ruth fell from the edge of a precipice and was instantly killed. Her body was found only after a search of six days.” Davis was buried in Gombe. “Her grave is surrounded by the forest,” Goodall notes, “and reverberates, from time to time, with the calling of the chimpanzees as they pass by.”

  What a terrible irony, then, that on this November morning, Teleki and Davis observe the immediate aftermath of a chimpanzee’s death from a fall. They arrive at a clearing where chimpanzees, as Teleki would write in a journal article five years later, “explode into frenzied activity and raucous calling, including shrieks, cries, screams, waa barks and wraaah calls.” In a dry stream bed within a gully, the chimpanzee Rix lies still. A necropsy will later determine that Rix’s neck had snapped, causing instant death. Teleki and Davis seemingly just missed witnessing what must have been his dramatic plunge from a fig or palm tree, which probably occurred while he was eating or resting.

  Teleki’s article offers a blow-by-blow reconstruction of the events he and Davis observed between 8:38 a.m. and 12:16 p.m, which they recounted into a hand-held tape recorder for later transcription. Most striking in their account is the prolonged attention paid by sixteen chimpanzees to Rix’s body—and how that attention varies. The chimpanzees are highly aroused in the wake of Rix’s fall, but there’s no uniform expression of that arousal. Just as we saw in Cote d’Ivoire, where the chimpanzee Brutus served as gatekeeper, determining which apes were allowed to approach the dead female Tina, the Gombe apes’ personal ties and personality differences play a role in their responses to Rix’s body.