The Animal Manifesto (11 page)

“[The woman] didn’t have to do either to protect herself and her child — a dog mysteriously ran to the scene and charged the man, who quickly fled.

“ ‘I don’t think the dog physically attacked the man, but he went at him and was showing signs of aggression, just baring his teeth and growling and barking. It was clear he was trying to defend this woman,’[an animal control officer said].

“The exceptional part of the story. . . is that the dog had never met or even seen the people it quickly jumped to defend. ‘You hear about family dogs protecting their owners, but this dog had nothing to do with this woman or her kid,’[the officers] said.”

“A dog is recovering after a Florida Keys carpenter dove in to save his pet from a shark.[The man] said he took his 14-pound rat terrier Jake for a daily swim at a marina last Friday. The five-foot shark suddenly surfaced and grabbed nearly the entire dog in its mouth.

“[The owner] said he yelled, then balled up his fists and dove headfirst into the water off a pier. . . . ‘I couldn’t see the shark when I dived in. . . so I just put my fist together. . . but my hands landed solidly against the back of the shark.’

“Man and dog made it safely back to shore. The dog suffered bite wounds but was not critically injured.”

“A local security guard recently discovered a peculiar scene where black swans can be seen feeding goldfish near the shore
of a lake located in Hangzhou, China. According to the guard, nine black swans will climb onto a raft and start feeding the goldfish with their beaks at 10
AM
every morning. The goldfish can always be seen following the swans closely after that. Locals were astonished to find such an affectionate tie existing between the two creatures.”

“A dolphin has come to the rescue of two whales which had become stranded on a beach in New Zealand. Conservation officer Malcolm Smith told the BBC that he and a group of other people had tried in vain for an hour and a half to get the whales to sea. The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said. But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety. . . .

“ ‘I don’t speak whale and I don’t speak dolphin,’ Mr Smith told the BBC, ‘but there was obviously something that went on because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea.’

“He added: ‘The dolphin did what we had failed to do. It was all over in a matter of minutes.’”

[Cetacean expert Philippa Brakes told me later it is certainly within the capacity of these intelligent animals to be able to communicate their distress to the dolphin and for the dolphin to empathize with that distress and lead them to safety.]

“An eight-year-old dog has touched the hearts of Argentines by saving the life of an abandoned baby, placing him safely alongside her own new puppies. . . .

“[The baby] was born prematurely to a 14-year-old girl in a shanty town outside the capital, Buenos Aires. She is said to have panicked and abandoned the boy in a field, surrounded by wooden boxes and rubbish.

“Then along came La China, reports say, the dog which somehow picked up the baby and carried him 50m to place him alongside her own puppies. The dog’s owner reported hearing the child crying and finding him covered with a rag.

“The baby, weighing[8lb 130Z], had some slight injuries, but no bite marks.”

“Trapped in a dark sewer, the six little mallard ducklings found themselves cut off and facing an uncertain future. Their only hope of seeing daylight again lay with their mother — who they had last seen more than a mile away as they were sucked into a drain.

“Rescue seemed impossible. Yet somehow the mother duck had managed to follow her offspring for more than a mile, apparently listening to their cheeps of distress at manhole covers as they were swept along below ground. Her incredible journey took her across a busy roundabout, countless
roads, a metro rail line, a housing estate, two school playing fields and hospital grounds.

“The trail finally ended when she waddled on to Barrasford Close in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, where her chicks suddenly stopped. And it was there, standing over another man-hole cover, that the mother remained for the next four hours until local residents heard chirping coming from down below.

“They in turn launched a rescue operation, removing the manhole cover and using a child’s fishing net to scoop all six from the sewer one by one and reuniting them with their mother in a paddling pool.”

“A 250-pound bear stranded under a bridge near Lake Tahoe was saved by an army of rescuers, a tranquilizer dart and a nylon net bought at an Army surplus store. . . .

“[The bear] was walking across the span on Highway 40 near Donner Summit in the Sierra Nevada when at least two oncoming cars spooked it, causing it to jump over the railing. At one point it was dangling over the edge of the 80-foot-high bridge, but it caught a ledge and pulled itself onto a concrete girder beneath the bridge.

“Officials initially decided nothing could be done, but when they returned the next morning and found it sleeping on the ledge, they decided to take action. . . .

“ ‘I’ve been on a lot of bear rescues,’[one rescuer] said, ‘and this is the most intense bear call that I’ve been on.’”

Put simply, animals display moral behavior, or what Jessica Pierce and I call wild justice. They know right from wrong. When beings are in need, animals will go out of their way to help them, to keep them from harm, or to teach them how to successfully solve a problem. They can act unselfishly in ways that demonstrate empathy and compassion.

Consider these scenarios. A teenage female elephant was once nursing an injured leg and was knocked over by a rambunctious hormone-laden teenage male. An older female elephant saw this happen, chased the male away, and went back to the younger female and touched her sore leg with her trunk. Eleven elephants once rescued a group of captive antelope in KwaZula-Natal: the matriarch undid all of the latches on the gates of their enclosure with her trunk and let the gate swing open so the antelopes could escape. After Christina Germeni, who lives in Athens, Greece, read an article about my research in a Greek newspaper, she emailed me about seeing a male buffalo in the Okavango Delta in Botswana attack a lioness who was attacking his friend, forcing the lioness to give up the fight and saving his buddy.

During a science experiment, a rat in a cage refused to push a lever for food when he saw that another rat received an electric shock as a result. In a separate experiment, a male Diana monkey who learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helped a female who couldn’t get the hang of the trick; the male inserted the token for her and allowed her to eat the food reward.

In other incidents, a female fruit-eating bat helped an unrelated female give birth by showing her how to hang in the
proper way. A cat named Libby led her elderly deaf and blind dog friend, Cashew, away from obstacles and to food. In a group of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, individuals punish other chimpanzees who are late for dinner because no one eats until they’re all present.

Do these examples show that animals display moral behavior, that they can be compassionate, empathic, altruistic, and fair? Do animals display a kind of moral intelligence? Yes, they do.

Here’s a story sent to me by Linda Alvarez. Linda wrote about her two dogs, a male named Volt and his sidekick, Lola.

Lola is four-and-a-half-months-old, and she was recently spayed. I brought her home with her e-collar on. She was obviously frustrated with this space-like sphere around her neck. The times when the e-collar seemed to bother her most were, I guess, when the stitches were causing an itching sensation. Periodically, she would start bucking around like a wild stallion and bark at me as if attempting to say, “Hey, my stomach itches. Can you help me out here?” I sympathized, but I left the e-collar on for fear that she might rip off the stitches.

Seeing that I didn’t really do anything to alleviate her problem, she tried the next best thing: Volt. Whenever Lola started acting this way, Volt would watch her; he seemed to be observing and trying to figure out what her issue was. Then, on one occasion Lola came over to Volt, who was laying on the grass, stood right over him, so that her surgical incision was right over his face, and then started to make grunting sounds. Volt propped up his ears, sniffed her stomach, and then started licking her wound. I thought this was awesome!

I’m sure dogs and other animals do this all the time, but I just thought it was fascinating that Lola figured out a way to work around the e-collar problem.

I think it’s also fascinating that Volt showed the simple caring we would expect of any family member. Is this not the right thing to do? Is this not moral intelligence?

The popular and scientific media constantly remind us of the amazing things animals can do, know, and feel, and these often surprise us — we didn’t know animals could do
that!
However, correctly understanding animal behavior is also tricky; sometimes, there are several plausible, alternate explanations, and it’s important to examine them all. When it comes to animals displaying a sense of justice and compassion, the answer typically hinges on a basic question: is the animal displaying what appears to be self-aware intelligence and other-directed empathy, or is the animal’s response unthinking, self-centered, and automatic? Is the animal blindly following instinct, or is the animal making a choice guided by a combination of an inborn predisposition and of learning, which shows that the animal is being flexible and adapting to a specific situation?

Consider the story of a female Western Lowland gorilla named Binti Jua — Swahili for “daughter of sunshine” — who lived in the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois. One summer day in 1996, a three-year-old boy climbed the wall of the gorilla enclosure at Brookfield and fell twenty feet onto the concrete floor below. As spectators gaped and the boy’s mother
screamed in terror, Binti Jua approached the unconscious boy. She reached down and gently lifted him, cradling him in her arms while her own infant, Koola, clung to her back. Growling warnings at the other gorillas who tried to get close, Binti Jua carried the boy safely to an access gate and the waiting zoo staff. Her face and posture showed deep concern.

This story made headlines worldwide, and Binti Jua was widely hailed as an animal hero. She was even awarded a medal from the American Legion. However, behind the splashy news, the gorilla’s story added fuel to an already smoldering debate about what goes on inside the mind and heart of an animal like Binti Jua. That is, was Binti Jua’s behavior really a deliberate act of kindness — did she know what she was doing — or did it simply reflect her previous training by zoo staff?

In the mid-1990s, there remained considerable skepticism among scientists that an animal, even an intelligent animal like a gorilla, could have the cognitive and emotional resources to respond to a novel situation with what appeared to be intelligence and compassion. Skeptics argued that the most likely explanation for Binti Jua’s “heroism” was her particular experience as a captive animal. Because Binti Jua had been hand-raised by zoo staff, she had not learned, as she would have in the wild, the skills of gorilla mothering. She had to be taught these skills by humans, who used a stuffed toy as a pretend baby to show her how to care for her own daughter. She had even been trained to bring her “baby” to zoo staff. Thus, some scientists argued that she was probably simply replaying this training exercise, having mistaken the young boy for another stuffed toy.

At the time, several scientists disagreed with their skeptical colleagues and argued that at least some animals, particularly primates, probably do have the capacity for empathy,
altruism, and compassion and were intelligent enough to assess the situation and understand that the boy needed help. Binti Jua’s manner showed evident care and concern, and combined with her warnings to the other gorillas, displayed an awareness that she held an injured living being and not an inanimate doll. Her prior training perhaps helped her know what to do, but she applied that knowledge to an entirely new and different situation. To support this understanding, the scientists pointed to a small but growing body of research hinting that animals have cognitive and emotional lives rich beyond our understanding.

We ‘ll never know exactly why Binti Jua did what she did. But now, years later, the staggering amount of information that we have about animal intelligence and animal emotions brings us much closer to answering the larger question raised by her behavior: Can animals really act with compassion, altruism, and empathy? Among scientists who study animal behavior, the answer has become an unequivocal “Yes.” This doesn’t mean that animals always act in these ways; humans certainly don’t. But considering Binti Jua today, we have every reason to believe that she made a deliberate, empathetic choice to rescue the young boy — as well as unintentionally liberating some of my colleagues from the grip of timeworn and outdated views of our fellow animals and opening the door for much-needed discussion about their cognitive and emotional lives.