But it’s not just the foolhardy who are at risk in Yellowstone. During my visit to the Park in the late summer of 2011, all the talk was of grizzly bears. In a twelve-month period, three hikers had been mauled to death by bears who make their home in Yellowstone and who responded to a human’s presence, in what is essentially their living room, as a bear might be expected to respond.
The joy of Yellowstone, though, is that it invites a shift in perspective, away from ourselves and toward other creatures. Do any Yellowstone animals grieve when one of their numbers dies? Reading a travel article in the New York Times, I learned that bison sometimes fall into the boiling hot springs. Shimmering up from the hot depths, their bones tell a story of sudden, accidental death. Do other bison ever witness these scalding deaths and turn away in sorrow? We don’t know. But the bison, I think, hold a key to asking good questions about mourning patterns in Yellowstone.
On my first visit to Yellowstone in 2007, I fell hard for the bison, an animal of keen importance to humans for many millennia. Cave painters rendered bison in true-to-life images throughout Ice Age Europe, showing the acute perceptual powers of our ancestors in regard to the natural world. But bison weren’t represented only in realistic ways. A startling image in France’s Chauvet Cave, created by an artist living thirty thousand years ago, depicts a creature that is half buffalo and half human woman. Our hunting-and-gathering ancestors thought symbolically with animals in ways that remain beyond our ken but continue to stir our imaginations.
Observing the Yellowstone bison brought me back to my Kenya days. Following the Amboseli baboons on foot to collect data on their feeding patterns, I often encountered elephant, lion, leopard, hyena, warthog, rhino, and even the occasional Cape buffalo. Back then, I did everything I could to avoid proximity to the African buffalo (not to mention the big cats). I was a vulnerable biped on the savannah, in awe of massive horned beasts who could gore me or worse. But in Yellowstone, where I could ride in a vehicle—and deploy common sense when stepping out of it—I couldn’t take my eyes off the American version, the bison of the Great Plains.
Our usual procedure when bison-watching is to drive out on Yellowstone roads to Hayden or Lamar Valley, sight a bison herd, and pull over to the side of the road. The bulls are shaggy, snorting, and solidly built. The females and babies, lighter of foot, move together in the timeless mammalian dance of suckle-and-wean: long after the mothers are ready to nudge them toward independence, the babies want to keep nursing. Bound by an invisible cord, these moms and youngsters remind me of baboons: a baby cavorts away from her mom, twists and jumps in play, then seems to suddenly realize she is out of her comfort zone, and zooms back to home base.
It is a thrill to observe the large Yellowstone herds. After the terrible toll inflicted by the slaughter of the late nineteenth century, only twenty-five bison survived—the sum total in the entire United States, and all located in Yellowstone. The Yellowstone Buffalo Preservation Act, introduced to Congress in 2005 but never passed into law, noted that those survivors’ offspring today “comprise the Yellowstone buffalo herd and are the only wild, free-roaming American buffalo to continuously occupy their native habitat in the United States.” Compared to ranched buffalo, whose genes have long been intermixed with those of domestic cattle, the Yellowstone buffalo are genetically unique: pure and wild.
Do these buffalo, killed in terrible numbers and in terrible ways by humans, respond with emotion to the natural deaths of their own kind—death by disease, by predator, by old age, by a stumble into a hot pool? Biologist John Marzluff, whose work on corvids I discussed in chapter 8, brings a glimmer of light to this subject. With a group of his students, Marzluff surveyed a recent wolf kill site at Yellowstone. Over the previous two weeks, terrestrial and avian predators had reduced to bone the carcass of an old female bison. Near the skeletal remains was a boulder, “split in half,” Marzluff writes, “by eons of freezing and thawing.”
As teacher and students stood at the site, in thundered a bison herd, heading right for the carcass. Not lacking common sense, the biology group retreated and watched from a distance. The bison stayed for nearly an hour. “Each of the three dozen animals walked up to their former companion’s bones and smelled them,” Marzluff reports. “They sniffed the remains and the soiled snow and dirt.” Departing, they made their way right through the split boulder and walked out of view. “These animals,” Marzluff concludes, “are still sensitive to a past event.” Marzluff’s account may remind us of the African elephants who caress the bones of loved ones. Given the emotional power entailed in such events we can grasp why Marzluff describes what he and his students saw as “sacrosanct.”
It’s our old refrain by now, but true still—there’s been little science done so far on bison grief. One segment of Radioactive Wolves, a television documentary about the thriving of wildlife in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, focuses on a pack of wolves approaching the remains of a bison calf. The wolves didn’t kill the calf—it was already dead on the ground. Scavengers as well as hunters, the wolves begin to tear into the small carcass. The bison regroup then, and chase the wolves off. I snapped to attention when the narrator stated that the adults were “mourning” the calf, as is “typical” for bison.
But where is the science to support this notion? One classic text on this animal is American Bison by Dale F. Lott. Nowhere in its thorough index do the terms “death,” “grief,” or “mourning” appear. The whole arena of animal emotion is tough enough to study in the wild, and the old bugaboo of anthropomorphism still prevents some scientists from even trying to collect the needed data. Look at what Lott calls the first section of his book, though: “Relationships, Relationships.” Bison are herd animals, living in social conditions ripe for the formation of strong social bonds and for mourning. Writing about the high drama of the breeding season, Lott has this to say: “Attraction, rejection, acceptance, competition, and cooperation within and between the sexes create vital, compelling, generally short-lived, and shifting relationships.” Short-lived: we aren’t talking about long-term monogamous bonds here. But male-female bonds do exist, and of course mother-infant bonds do too.
An interviewer once asked me what I’d do if I had unlimited funds to study animal grief. The short answer? I’d make my way to Yellowstone with those funds and a massive cache of patience. Death doesn’t happen in bison or other animal groups in front of a casual observer’s eyes; to be present at the right moment, or soon after, would take good fortune as well as persistence. But as we have seen, clues to bison mourning are already available. Moose behavior tantalizes too. Biologist Joel Berger has labored in some of the world’s most unforgiving (and cold) landscapes, from Yellowstone to the Russian Far East and Mongolia, in order to learn about animal behavior. In Yellowstone, he focused in part on moose. “Just as parents know the behavior of their children,” he writes in his book The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World, “my intent was to understand each moose.”
One frightened moose orphan ran for more than half a mile when Berger wanted to put a radio collar on her, then halted at the precise spot where her mother had died. Another moose, this one a mother, returned repeatedly to the spot where her calf had been struck by a car, “apparently searching for her missing calf.” What would happen if Berger, or other scientists like him, staked out the carcass of a moose who had died of natural causes, then watched over days and weeks what other moose did as the body gradually turned to bone? Would the moose detour to view the bones of a lost herd member, as Marzloff’s bison did and (see chapter 5) as elephants do? When bison, or moose or other animals, encounter bones of their own kind, do they inspect the bones in a detached manner, or do they feel something as they look? Could we humans tell the difference? Would an experienced observer of bison note clues to an emotional response in bison after a death in the group?
Do animals read bones on the ground like we read obituaries? Is that too fanciful a thought? I’m not so sure
that it is. Well-written obituaries elegantly compress a life into a few descriptive passages. In a parallel but nonlinguistic way, the bones an animal leaves behind may do the same. The compression of obituaries may bring sadness or even a hint of futility to readers. Can eighty long years of a life really be reduced to eight short paragraphs? Vital force can be unleashed from these life haikus, though, as I have discovered by reading regularly the New York Times obituaries section. This habit might be thought elitist in that the Times skews its death reporting toward the famous, yet for me it affords a chance to learn about fascinating lives I otherwise wouldn’t encounter.
When a woman named Martha Mason died at age seventy-one, she had dwelled for six decades in an iron lung. Paralysis had struck Mason as a child, a result of polio; from that point on, her habitat was, as the Times described it, a “horizontal world, a 7-foot-long, 800-pound cylinder.” In the obituary photograph, Mason’s white-haired, bespectacled head juts from one end of the machine, which is lined with porthole windows and resembles some sort of deep-sea research craft. And from it, Mason did explore the world. While encased in the iron lung, Mason attended Wake Forest College, hosted dinner parties, and employed, in later years, a voice-activated computer to write Breath, her memoir.
When my impatience meter ratchets up in the face of some trivial annoyance, I sometimes think of Mason. Faced with anything but trivial challenges, she did more than just endure; she lived with courage and verve. In this way, reading obituaries can inspire me. It’s no surprise that I’m moved especially by the lives of people who loved animals. In Vermont, the artist Stephen Huneck built the Dog Chapel, where people and their dogs may seek moments of interspecies serenity. The church’s windows feature stained glass and dog images; blanketing the walls are handwritten notes of grief, describing pets sorely missed. Atop the steeple sits a winged Labrador. I only wish Huneck had found serenity of his own within the chapel. In despair at having been forced to lay off most of his art-business employees, Huneck committed suicide at age sixty-one.
At that same age, in 2012, Lawrence Anthony died of a heart attack. In 2003, shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, Anthony had saved the lives of thirty-five starving animals in the Baghdad Zoo. Of 650 animals who resided there at the start of the war, these were the sole survivors. Anthony also restored the zoo itself to decent condition. I had known a little about Anthony’s work before, but his obituary colored in the broad outlines of a famous life. Working for animal conservation in Africa, Anthony rocked out to Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple as he crisscrossed the countryside in his Land Rover. He forged a deeper connection with elephants than with any other animal, and his obituary concludes on a mystical note: “The elephants also survive him. Since his death, his son Dylan told reporters, the herd has come to his house on the edge of their reserve every night.”
Like a hall of mirrors, an obituary illuminates in our imagination not only the person now lost, but also a life that echoes (and echoes again) across time and space. In it we read the names of those who died before and of the survivors, the past and future in unbroken continuity. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece portrait of one boy’s summer in 1928 small-town Illinois, captures this life-within-death theme. One hot night, twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding comes to grasp death’s inevitability when he releases a jarful of fireflies to evanescent freedom. “Douglas watched them go,” Bradbury writes. “They departed like the pale fragments of a final twilight in the history of a dying world. They went like the few remaining shreds of warm hope from his hand.”
Douglas’s dying grandmother imparts a lesson to him that resonates with us today. Douglas sits on her bed in the family home. He cries, knowing that soon she will leave him forever. She tells him:
Important thing is not the me that’s lying here, but the me that’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that’s downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.
There’s a phrase to arrest the heart: No person ever died that had a family. It is as apt for an animal who dies without an obituary as for a person who dies with one. People often commemorate an animal’s loss by coming together in some type of symbolic ritual, as we saw in chapter 10 with the German polar bear Knut, on a national scale, and the cat Tinky, on a family-and-friends scale. We fix memories of these special creatures in our minds, and pass them along to others in our generation and the next.
And sometimes, animal are memorialized in obituaries. The only obituary I have yet written was for an ape. When the chimpanzee Washoe died in 2007 at age forty-two, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) asked me to compose a notice for its monthly newsletter. Based on her groundbreaking accomplishments learning signs and phrases in American Sign Language, Washoe was judged by the AAA to be a figure of importance to its members. Impressed by the slightly transgressive nature of this request, and agreeing with the AAA’s assessment of Washoe’s stature, I wrote the obituary.
Wild-caught in West Africa, Washoe as a youngster was brought to the United States. She eventually came to live with psychologists, first Beatrix and Allen Gardner and then Roger Fouts, at a number of academic institutions including the University of Oklahoma, where, as a graduate student, I met her. Washoe overturned species-bound assumptions about who can deploy language to communicate and who can’t. Growing up immersed in human culture, Washoe learned a modified American Sign Language. She signed creatively, as when she coined the phrase “open food drink” for “refrigerator,” and she molded the hands of her adopted son Loulis so that he too would learn signs. Going well beyond the expression of simple desire for favorite foods, Washoe conversed with those around her, as when she expressed empathy for Fouts, her closest human friend, when he had broken his arm.
The page layout for the January 2008 issue of Anthropology News that contains Washoe’s obituary is a study in boundary maintenance. Across two facing pages in the “Rites of Passage” section are death notices for five accomplished anthropologists, aged fifty-seven to ninety-four. Turn the page and there, all on its own above the “Kudos” section that congratulates AAA members for honors received, sits my little article. “Also Noted,” the headline reads: “Washoe, age 42.” In this way, a nonhuman animal is included with anthropological luminaries, but by physical placement and subtle use of language she is, at the same time, kept apart. This editorial decision I can understand. Were you the spouse, or child, of an anthropologist who had recently died, would you welcome the sight of his life story and photograph pushed right up against Washoe’s, who appears with her simian face and robust brow ridge? (Well yes, I would, but that’s likely a minority view.)
Constrained by space, I failed to include in the obituary any mention of Washoe’s survivors, notably her son Loulis. Yet I did address her legacy, the past-to-future continuity of which the fictional Douglas Spaulding’s grandmother spoke, albeit in another way:
As with a human, it is impossible to sum up Washoe’s life by reference to academic debates and publications. Her personality (and her well-known interest in shoes and shoe catalogs!) made her a unique individual. Messages from Australia, Belgium, Italy, Mexico and elsewhere, posted on a memorial page for Washoe, reveal her impact on persons around the globe. Reading these tributes, one gets the sense that Washoe’s enduring legacy comes not from the number of signs she could be said to acquire, or whether those signs amounted to language. Rather, it relates to how she caused people to think hard about the dividing line between apes and people, indeed, about the very notion of ape personhood.
Animals like Washoe who live in the public eye may catalyze shifts in our thinking about what makes a human being, but not an ape or dolphin, deserving of the term “person.” Flo, arguably the most famous wild chim
panzee in history, had the same effect. Through Jane Goodall’s early dispatches from Tanzania, Flo’s maternal skill and inexhaustible patience with her babies and her juvenile son Flint captured the public’s imagination. When Flo died in 1972, her obituary appeared in the Times of London.
When animal celebrities die, few people seem to object to a newspaper’s stretching its “obituary” category to include them. When it comes to obituaries for our pets or other companion animals, the response may be quite different. Anthropologist Jane Desmond has written about the power of such obituaries to subvert the animal-human boundary and thus to unnerve a healthy segment of the human population. Some years ago in the Iowa City Press-Citizen, Desmond’s local newspaper at the time, an obituary was printed for a black Labrador named Bear—the first animal obituary published by the paper. Bear, who frequently walked along, and napped on, the town streets, had been known to many people. Even so, that brief obituary, writes Desmond, “became the cause of bitter debate” in the community. Especially offended was a woman named Sue Dayton, whose sister-in-law’s obituary had appeared on the same page as Bear’s. Discord erupted in the town as words like “distasteful” and “disrespectful” were hurled around to describe Bear’s printed memorial.
How Animals Grieve Page 16
