A deep look at animal emotions

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animal behavior, human behavior, behavioral science

Dr. Franz de Waal has coined a powerful word: Anthropodenial. It aptly describes the quasi-religious conviction of behavioral "scientists" who dominated the study of animal and human behavior for at least a half century. We have them to thank for the still-common view of animals as strictly instinct-driven automatons, and even of young humans as nearly the same. So babies didn't smile, we were told, they were just reacting to "gas". Fish didn't feel pain when on the hook, they were struggling against the force of the fishing line pulling them in an unexpected direction. Every reaction that "the rest of us" might interpret as an emotional response, or even, "gasp!", as a feeling, was explained in some neutral way.

Even today, Dr. de Waal reports, it is rare to find a catalog of human emotions that includes love and attachment. Strict behaviorists claim that there is no "love face", as there is a face for anger, disgust, and so forth; in fact, they are generally lacking in their regard for positive emotions other than a generalized "happy face" and "play face". They might find it useful to learn from popular music, particularly the older stuff: A 200-year-old French "love" song (it's more about betrayal) that was written to a tune later used for "Twinkle Star" contains the lines, "Depuis que j'ai vu Silvandre / Me regarder d'un air tendre", which I translate, "Ever since I saw Silvandre / View me with a tender air" (I have a translation that rhymes, but loses some of the sense). What is this "tender air?" I'd claim it is the "love face", and we are so used to seeing it—I think of a bride glowing at her groom, for example—that we don't grasp its importance. A similar look is seen in a photo of my father holding our day-old son, and I see a loving look on my wife's face when she pulls our cat onto her lap. Perhaps dogmatic behaviorism has blinded its practitioners to our more positive affects.

The book is Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves, a sequel or companion volume to Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, published in 2016. The prior paragraphs refer to items on pages 50 and 168 of the book.

"Mama" in the title was an elderly female chimpanzee. The opening chapter describes the last meeting between Mama and her human friend Jan van Hooff. To enter the cage of an adult chimp alone is tantamount to suicide. But Dr. van Hooff did so in this case, and Mama, in painful sleep, slowly awoke and was then thrilled to see him. She pulled him into a big hug, and patted him as if to say, "It's OK, I am really happy to see you!". Less than a month later she died. Can anyone doubt her love and joy? She was wearing a love face, even through her pain.

For the rest of the chapter the author introduces his learnings about animal emotions and feelings (emotions are visible to others, feelings are subjective and within), and he also stresses his viewpoint, that emotions are universal among animals, so far as he can determine. Can we deny that they have feelings to go along with them? Every animal that has been studied, from spiders almost to small to see to whales, responds to stimuli, whether painful or pleasurable, with similar actions, and similar biochemical shifts. All display either approach or avoidance behavior related to any anticipation of the same stimulus, depending on whether they liked it, or not. All have memories and all can plan.

The book's chapters take us through several aspects of our emotional lives, and the way that primates, mostly (the author's own field of study), have similar emotional lives. A proud primate, from human to ape to a tiny tamarin, stands taller with chest out and chin up. A sad one can hardly look you in the eye and tends to sit partly curled up. It may be that a mammalian brain, with its neocortex, is needed to laugh, although a differently-shaped structure in the brains of birds and lizards is probably their version of the neocortex. Maybe they can laugh also; when a parrot laughs maniacally, is it mimicking something or is it truly amused?

The last full chapter is titled "Sentience". Although it shifts to a discussion of the way we treat animals captive or not, and the ethics thereof, the author dwells much on the possible self-knowledge and consciousness of animals. A few mammals and birds respond to the "mirror test" in a way that shows they can recognize themselves, and thus that they know themselves as individuals. I think our house cat, though she could never "pass" the mirror test, knows who she is, and knows she is something other than an undersize, furry human. Will a scientific experiment one day be devised that can determine what she really thinks of herself, and of us? I guess we can only "stay tuned."

This book is the latest of several I have seen in the past few years, that fully backs up something I have long contended:

It is not anthropomorphic to say that animals are like us; the proper view is that we are like them, because we came from them.

A delightful book, and not only because the author agrees with me. He has had the opportunity and the skills to back up such a supposition with scientific data. I love it.

Animal personality comes out of hiding

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

The rat-runner's motto:

Given any combination of feeding, temperature, and light level, the rat will do what the rat wants to do.

There is a word I'd like to abolish from the scientific dictionary: Anthropomorphize. In common understanding, to anthropomorphize is to talk about some thing or animal as though it were human. We do this all the time: "My phone thinks it knows better than I do," or "My cat loves to have his belly rubbed." But in a scientific article, to speak of any animal as having emotions, feelings, or intentions; indeed, to speak about an animal in any way other than as a piece of automatic machinery that is operating according to (never-to-be-properly-defined) "instinct", was forbidden for decades, upon pain of losing tenure and being blackballed from the hallowed halls of getting published in "good" journals.

John A. Shivik is one of many researchers who are doing away with this blinkered perspective. In his new book, Mousy Cats and Sheepish Coyotes: The Science of Animal Personalities, he explains his own shift of viewpoint and presents many examples of animals that have been proven to have personalities, from familiar dogs, cats, coyotes, horses, and cougars to mosquito fish, spiders, and even protozoans. Yes, an amoeba can have a personality! No brain, but the tiny critters have their preferences.

Here is an example of a familiar sight. The kittens all look the same. They are a purebred litter, bred under controlled circumstances so there's no chance of multiple fathers here. It looks like they are all ready for a nap, but Roger, there, has a different idea. I suspect that seconds later he scampered off. Maybe you've been to the SPCA to adopt a puppy. One comes right to you, and her litter mate hangs back looking shy (Me, I'd pick the shy one, as long as she was friendly when I went over to her).

In Mousy Cats the author explains in some detail how the anti-humanizing trend became a straitjacket for biological researchers. He tells us of his own experiences with coyotes—including one much more wolf-like than he wished!—and other animals; even more, he tells of the work of a growing number of researchers who work with all kinds of animals to demonstrate their differences in personality and how they shape the lives of the individual animals and their species' survival.

We might step back and ask, "Why does there need to be such a wide array of personalities, not only among people but among animals? Why doesn't evolution, or God, or something just produce the 'perfect' animal?" Nature isn't static. The average rainfall where I live is a very solid 3 inches per month (sometimes manifested as 3 feet of snow). But a few years ago the precipitation for the year was not 36 inches, as expected, but about 25. The governor issued orders against lawn watering and washing cars. And then this Spring we had an entire year's rainfall in two months; mold grew in unusual places, such as the rafters in my attic.

More to the point with animals, a litter of coyote pups with a bold, calm disposition will do well when there are plenty of prey to eat and few dangers, but if a pack of wolves moves into the neighborhood, they'd better beware. Wolves kill coyotes, and it's better to be more timid. A litter of coyote pups with a variety of styles of personality, some more bold and adventuresome, and some more retiring and watchful, are more likely to have at least one or two that survive the present environment and go on to gain a mate and have offspring of their own. Sometimes, the bold ones can safely adventure here and there, finding more prey and growing up faster than their more retiring litter mates. During such times they'll have more offspring. Sometimes, all the bold ones are killed off by wolves, and the shy ones manage to avoid that fate. The pendulum never stops swinging.

Varied and changing environments are behind the evolution of varied personalities. You look at a bunch of orb-weaver spiders; my favorite is the Golden Garden Spider. They all look the same. They spin webs that look a lot alike. Scientists have gathered spiders by the dozens to test if they have different personalities. They might take 60 of a particular species and raise them in individual terrariums. How do you test the startle response of a spider? To be simple, you sneak behind it and poke its rear with a pencil eraser! Nearly all the spiders run off the web and hide. How long will it be before each one comes out of hiding? How long before they are back on the web? The researchers will wait a day or two, so the spiders are hungry, and then drop a small cricket into each web. How long does it take for each spider to dash out and attack the cricket? It should come as no surprise that the spiders who take the longest to "recover" from being poked by a pencil eraser also take the longest, and are most cautious, when approaching and attacking the cricket, even when they are famished.

Well, if spiders have personalities, however rudimentary, it follows that any more complex animal ought to have one as well. Indeed, whether we keep pets or not, we all know somebody's cat or dog or cockatiel or whatever, if not our own. We know that each is a unique individual. The researchers that the book highlights are proving it, scientifically. It is about time the scientists caught up with what we all knew all along.

So I repeat what I've said before: It's not that animals are like us, the important point is that we are like them. We have personalities because they have personalities.

The warmest and fuzziest -- with big claws!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, pets, wildlife

It takes extraordinary experiences to set the stage for a wild animal to become bonded to a person. In the case of a bobcat, soon to be named Trooper, these experiences included being the only survivor of his family's massacre by coyotes and getting stuck in a patch of cholla; for Johnson, they included a life that led to particular love for wild places and wildlife, and a temperament that just matched the bob-kitten's need. Basically, Johnson found the dying kitten, extracted him from the cholla (a most dangerous cactus), and took him to a veterinarian who was able to meet his medical needs and, even more, knew just how to prepare the kitten and Johnson for a life together in and around the home Johnson and his wife had created. Thus begins Trooper: The Bobcat Who Came in from the Wild by Forrest Bryant Johnson.

Years later, when a self-styled animal activist accused Johnson of "imprisoning" the cat, he was able to show her that Trooper came and went as he pleased and was never caged except when he needed to be taken to see the vet. Trooper loved the vet, just not the car ride. He also preferred to sleep snuggled against Johnson's arm.

At the risk of spoiling, although Trooper was a gentle companion and friendly to people, he kept enough of his wild nature to kill a coyote that began to stalk him and other animals around the Johnson mini-ranch. It was a collaboration: Johnson and neighbors first killed all the coyotes but one of a small pack that "moved into the neighborhood" and began preying on pets and even stalking children. Trooper finished off the last one.

In the years between, Trooper and Johnson learned from each other. Johnson ruminates, somewhat ruefully, that he knew Trooper thought of him as a rather inept cat. Not for Trooper the notion of being a "person". The book is full of stories of cat and man, and the man's wife, grown daughter and other family members. Of the time his wife good-naturedly tried to hire a "home-call" grooming service to "bathe" Trooper, and the way Trooper so thoroughly intimidated the groomer, without harming him in the slightest, that the groomer simply turned and left. Of the time a great horned owl knocked itself silly against a window, and Trooper brought it inside, not to eat, but perhaps hoping for a new kind of playmate; it was a job and a half getting the irate owl back out the door! Of the time the alarm service kept phoning Johnson that there was an intruder tripping the light beam in the house's hallway, but nobody was ever found. What was found? Trooper and another (ordinary) cat that had come to live there, jumping off furniture and interrupting the beam; the alarm company removed that particular sensor.

There are still many people who say animals are totally instinctual and cannot think, or plan, or feel pain. Such people have never owned a pet, never watched it plan, perhaps for days, how to attack a particular kind of prey or enemy. They've never thought through the fact that animals seem to easily learn a number of our spoken words, but we learn hardly any of theirs, or none at all. Even the most inbred, bred-for-looks-not-for-smarts Pomeranian pup or Persian cat shows these attributes. Johnson found that a bobcat, that must live by its wits, had quite a lot going on in that big, fuzzy head of his.

This book gets my Heart-Warming, Heartstring-Tugging, Drippy-Nose Award for the year!

Animals are like us because we are like them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

A few minutes ago I saw a video on Facebook, in which a mother pit bull brings her newborn pups, one by one, to her owner to hold, until the young woman's lap is full of puppies. Then the dog rests her head in the woman's lap also, enjoying the cooing and cuddling, apparently showing utter trust in her. "Trust?" Can a dog feel trust? Why not? If we humans can (even when we find it hard to define the word), it must have come from somewhere.

The first sentence of the epilogue of The Inner Life of Animals: Love, Grief and Compassion, by Peter Wohlleben, reads,

When I look at animals, I like to make analogies to people, because I cannot imagine that animals feel so very differently from us, and there's a good chance I'm right. (p. 244)

This is the author's second published book, the first being The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World … guess what is the next book I'll look for?

In the meantime, I have had a delightful read of the lucid translation from the German, by Jane Billinghurst. Mr. Wohlleben manages a municipal forest near Hümmel, Germany. He has ample opportunity to witness animal behaviors across the spectrum of woodland habitats, from weevils in the leaf litter to the rodents, deer, and other mammals and birds that abound there. His book's 41 chapters are part essay, part story, and part lyrical musing.

Did you ever have the thought to consider happiness in an insect? Is such a thing possible? In the chapter "Alien Worlds", one animal he writes of is a weevil barely 2mm long (0.08") that feeds on fallen leaves. Having no wings, and being slow, weevils have predators aplenty. Their only defense is to be still; they are well camouflaged, looking like a bit of broken leaf stem. So they must know fear. Perhaps they feel happy when they are not fearful.

The more that scientists delve into animal communications, the more they realize that they have rather rich vocabularies, so, as mentioned in various ways in several chapters, we can have a pretty good idea that, when a horse or cat or dog greets us, they really are happy to see us (or not!). The scientists have finally figured out what most of us already knew.

Many animals raise their young, in larger numbers than was known when I was first learning Biology 50+ years ago. While many things do seem to be innate, a matter of "instinct" (one of the least-understood words out there), many things do need to be learned: bird songs, the best paths to take, the kind of nesting material to use, the most effective way to gather or kill one's next meal.

I am particularly taken with bird songs. I can recognize just a few—the "cheerio! cheerio!" of a territorial Robin or the "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee" of a Chickadee—but even the Robin has dozens of other calls (the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has quite a library of them). We all know that mockingbirds and catbirds and others such as the Brown Thrasher mimic the songs of many other birds. They learn them; they aren't born with them. But many birds have hundreds to thousands of songs and song variations. The ones we usually notice are the territorial defense calls, the equivalent of "This is MY tree!" We pay less attention to the little "chip chip" sounds that are actually more frequent. Those are the warning sounds the birds make to each other because we are there. People have paid attention to bird warning sounds. The birds' calls differ depending on whether the intruder is a hawk, snake, or cat, for example. There are also calls for different kinds of food, for keeping in contact when relatives are out of each other's sight, and other "relationship" sounds.

But there is much, much more. For example, animals (furred or feathered) of all sorts deceive one another. When you are watching a squirrel busily digging to bury acorns in the yard, and you are visible to it, it will make hole after hole, but few of those holes contain an acorn! Most are decoys, to frustrate you if you are planning to steal the acorn. They also use decoy holes when being observed by other squirrels, perhaps even the more: they don't know whether you'll steal acorns, but they know a rival squirrel will! Both deceiving and thieving are problem-solving behaviors, that is, cognitive thinking.

In this book you'll find example after example of animals that exhibit reasoning and emotions…I almost wrote, "just like ours." But really, our reasoning and emotions are like theirs. Perhaps some of our thinking is deeper and so forth, but it is similar in principle. As the author writes in "Artificial Environments", our own emotions and senses are somewhat blunted because of the built environment in which most of us live. It is hard to enjoy a starry sky when you may never see one (lifelong residents of mega-cities can go a lifetime and never see a star, not one). Few of us understand Napoleon's love letter to Josephine, telling her he expected to return home the following day, asking her, "Don't bathe!". Our noses are so overwhelmed with artificial perfumes, air "fresheners" (contaminants, I call them), and such, that we have lost the ability to detect smells that could provide warning, or enhance a joyful reunion, and many other things.

I have had a good dose of animal stories, in this book and the last. Very gratifying. Knowing the depth of feeling that even a barnyard chicken has, however, is not likely to make me into a vegan. Rather, it gives me pause, that perhaps it would be well to follow the example of some Native Americans of earlier generations, that thanked a deer for offering itself to feed his family, or a grouse for the same, even thanking a netful of fish. We may think "more" than other animals (at least some of us do), but it is not certain that we think "better". Time will tell.

A turning point in psychozoology

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

Those who care enough to read the keyword list will note the term "animal psychology". Not so many years ago this was considered a serous error. No biologist would admit that animals could think or feel pain, and one must never, ever impute emotions to them. Thankfully, that is changing, and the new book Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by researchers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, celebrates this sea change in the "professional" understanding of what animals feel and think…or even that they do feel and think.

I hope we never again are subjected to cries of "Anthropomorphism!" when describing a pet, domestic animal, or any animal in the wild as "wanting", "loving", or even "planning". As the authors note, even paramecia (single celled, rather largish protozoa) can remember and plan. To recall a motto from an earlier post of mine:

We are like Them because We came from Them

The supposed "sin" of Anthropomorphism is to consider an animal as being in some way like a human. That takes it backwards. Everything in our psychology is based on animal psychology, and even to some extent on protozoan psychology.

The 54 essays in the book range across the Kingdom Animalia, though I don't think they managed to touch on every one of the 9 animal phyla. The majority of the stories are of vertebrates (Phylum Vertebrata, animals with an internal, bony skeleton), the next largest number are of octopuses (formerly octopi or octopodes), which are mollusks (Phylum Mollusca and class Cephalopoda). If playfulness is a sign of high intellegence, compared to creatures that don't play, the ordinary octopus is as playful as a cat or dog (or deer or horse or otter). One section does delve into other invertebrate phyla, with stories of slugs (also Mollusca), worms (Phylum Annelida), bumble bees (Phylum Arthropoda), and water bears (Phylum Tardigrada), plus the vertebrates known as amphibians, mainly frogs.

Can a bumble bee feel cheerful or downcast? Indeed it can, based on some clever research using sugar water, colored signs, and a chemical that blocks dopamine, the "happy" neurochemical. Charles Darwin wrote, "Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy and love." Biologists pooh-poohed this for 150 years. You might say that "human chauvinism" held back psychozoology by more than a century!

Of course, we are more prone to expect sorta-human responses from "charismatic megafauna" such as horses, tigers and elephants, and "charismatic mesofauna" such as typical house pets and other animals of a size that we can pick up, if they are tame enough to permit it (my cat hates being picked up and held; how tame is she?). What about chickens? One of the essays, titled "Chicken Indestructible", chronicles the day a beloved but elderly hen went missing. When she showed up a few days later, after much worry on Ms Montgomery's part about the many predators and other dangers she might have succumbed to, a little detective work showed that on a suddenly squally day, the intrepid hen had taken refuge in a hayloft until the stormy weather passed, happily eating whatever bugs were to be found there.

Wonderful stories abound in this enjoyable book, and I won't ruin any more of them by repeating them here. It's worth anybody's while to curl up with this one and devour it from end to end.

We came from them and we are like them

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

Consider the vivisection theater. Hundreds of years ago curious investigators began tying or nailing down animals such as dogs and cutting them open to see how their organs worked. But sometime in the 1700's such dissections began to be carried out in public theaters, as part of the scientific lecture circuit which had become popular as the "renaissance" and "enlightenment" eras unfolded. Some investigators, after a single such experience, forswore the practice, being horrified at the barbarities inflicted on animals whose suffering was so obvious to them. Others, claiming that only humans could truly feel pain, forged ahead. Their descendants are with us even today, still claiming that while the shot deer or elk may "feel" the arrow or bullet, it does not "suffer" because they have no existential feelings; still claiming that it is OK to put various noxious chemicals into the eyes of rabbits clamped in a frame, for the sake of learning which ones cause inflammation, all the while saying that of course the rabbit may flinch but that it is not "feeling pain", only "exhibiting a physiological response to nerve impulses"; claiming that catch-and-release does no harm to a fish, that fish can't possibly "suffer" from having a hook stabbed through a jaw or even caught in the lining of the stomach; and so it goes. I say beware of people who use "only" too frequently.

Of course, considering with what callous indifference so many humans are treated by other humans, it really seems that the ability to be "humane" is seldom to be found, and in many it is entirely lacking. Animals in general may be amoral, but humans seem to have a corner on evil and wickedness. When you think your housecat is playing with a mouse in some cruel way, think again. It is getting the mouse too tired to bite back when the cat's sensitive mouth goes in to bite the neck and kill it.

Among the "core curriculum" required of all Arts and Sciences students in the 1960's were courses in Anthropology and Archaeology and other Humanities, but nothing in a realm remotely like Animal Husbandry. Only in a Biology course was the matter of animal behavior brought up, and then primarily in a negative way. Only "observed actions" could be reported, and then in the most dry and objective of terms. To mention, even to whisper, that any animal might have any purpose, thoughts, emotions, or make decisions, was "anthropomorphism" and was a much more serious sin than mere robbery or adultery (unless it was with one of the professor's children).

I did not like this attitude from the beginning, but I didn't know what to do about it. A copy of Edward Tolman's 1932 classic, Purposive Behavior in Rats and Men, came into my hands after I graduated, in Geology not in a life science: I could hit rocks without "hurting" them. Dr. Tolman was reviled in his day. Now we know that he was nearly always right. His writing helped me grow a little more. Finally, in much more recent years, I concluded: We have been looking at this backward all along! Of course anthropomorphism is incorrect, but only because the animals we observe live in a different world than we. In those parts of our shared world, where our experiences and theirs can overlap, we and they are very similar. But it is not because "they are like us." No, no no no, it is because we are like them, because we came from them.

Take that in. Make it a motto:

We are like Them because We came from Them

Why do you have emotions? Because your ancestors had emotions. Not just your parents, but your hominid ancestors of 5 million years ago, your tiny primate ancestors of 25 million years ago, your pre-mammal ancestors of 300 million years ago, even the tiny chordates of millions of years before that had emotions.

Why can you plan? Because your ancestors could plan, all the way back to half a billion years ago. Because with careful observation, we can discern that not only to warm, fuzzy animals plan, but so do turtles, fish, worms, even insects. A tiny nematode with less than 1,000 cells in its entire body, only about one-fifth of them making up its nervous system, can plan. Nematode plans are simple, but they exist.

It has been demonstrated that noxious stimuli are just as painful for a spider as they are for you. Animals right up and down the "evolutionary scale" feel pain, fight for their lives, and either enjoy or suffer in accord with things that help or harm them. But don't take any comfort in the notion of the "evolutionary scale". It is a deceptive concept. Evolution began on Earth about four billion years ago. You are the product of four billion years of evolution. But so is a hamster, a bumblebee, a swallow, or a brook trout. There is an odd fish called a Coelacanth, the "poster child" of "living fossils." Specimens caught since they were re-discovered in 1938 look just like fossils of 65 million years ago. Prior to 1938, scientists thought they'd gone extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. No fossils of Coelacanth bones younger than 65 million years had been found. But just because they look so much like their ancestors of so long ago, don't think evolution left them behind. Many aspects of their environment in the sorta-deep ocean have remained stable, but not all, and they have continued to evolve along with everything else. It just didn't change their skeleton very much.

Three types of animal were chosen by Carl Safina, to study and to learn from, in his quest to see just how similar we and they might be: Elephants, Wolves, and Killer Whales. He has written Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. Fortunately, very early in his research, he met Cynthia Moss, who works with elephants. When he asked her what the elephants might teach us about humanity, he got a gentle answer that turned his question on its head. In part, she said, "Comparing elephants to people—I don't find it helpful. I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself." (p 12).

When we look at an elephant as an elephant, what do we see? Firstly, observing a single elephant is like observing a goblet and trying to infer what the rest of the place setting might be like with its plates, flatware, and so forth. Cynthia Moss and others observe elephant families and groups of families. An elephant has a social life as rich as yours (ignoring the 478 Facebook "friends" you've never met and who have no measurable impact on your life). Elephants don't rank themselves the way most primates do. But each family group has a Matriarch, a "Mom", whose accumulated wisdom earns her immense respect from the rest. Elephants together are a lot like big cows. But life is about more than eating and drinking. They play at times, even adults, and can be quite silly. When one member has been away for some reason, they enjoy very emotional reunions.

What do they experience differently from humans? They have two voices. We are familiar with the trumpeting calls they make, at frequencies humans can hear. Those are usually for sounding some kind of alarm, or for loud greetings when another is nearby. We are not familiar with their other voice, which is pitched too low for our ears. But if you happen to stand close to an elephant who is talking to another who happens to be 100 yards away, you might feel the voice. It'll make your chest shake. Most of their communication goes on in infrasound, and without special equipment, we can't even discover what elephant "words" sound like! They have worse eyesight than we, but a better sense of smell. Their thick hides prevent them from feeling quite as keenly as we do over most of their bodies, but the tip of the trunk is as sensitive as your tongue. It is also dexterous as a thumb and finger; I've seen an elephant peel and eat a tangerine, in less than a second. That's faster than I can do it!

A lot of things "everyone knows" about elephants was learned from elephants in captivity, or in family groups devastated by the loss of all the older family members because they were poached for their large tusks. A lot of what "everyone knows" about elephants comes from anecdotes about elephants who were mourning such losses, or driven almost mindless from boredom. Mr. Safina defines consciousness as the thing that feels like something. (p 21, his emphasis) The evident feelings of elephants and other animals must cause us to move the boundary of "consciousness" way, way back into the past. Consciousness isn't a unitary item, that you have or you don't. It is a scale, a spectrum, like fainter or brighter light. An elephant or killer whale has a larger brain than any human. Perhaps there's just as much, or more, "extra gray matter" in there, and their consciousness shines brighter than ours. Until we learn their languages, we'll probably never know.

Spending a good part of a winter watching wolves in Yellowstone, Safina learned more about consciousness. Seeing how wolves cooperate to hunt elk, on one hand communicating clearly with their fellow hunters while working equally hard to deceive their prey, it is easy to see how they plan and coordinate, solving problems on the fly (unless, of course, you are an anti-anthropomorphistic professor of animal behavior). He writes again about consciousness: "People who play with a dog—or a squirrel or a rat—and then believe that the animal lacks consciousness, themselves lack a certain consciousness." (p 288)

Just because other animals don't talk in human languages, doesn't mean they can't communicate. It is interesting, how many tame and domestic animals learn some human words, sometimes dozens of hundreds!, yet we never learn any of their words, and they must resort to the crudest pantomime to communicate with us. Who is the smarter one? D'you have a pet dog? He or she can make several dozen distinct sounds. Why not learn what some of them mean? About all most of us can learn is the sound of an angry growl (but we usually confuse it with an offended growl or a play-growl) and maybe the begging whine (and there are a few kinds we don't bother to distinguish).

Wolves have social lives more like elephants than like the Akela-Alpha-led wolves that sprang from the mind (certainly not the experience) of Rudyard Kipling. You know the drill. When the Alpha misses his first kill, the other wolves kill him and a new Alpha takes his place. Actually, the Alpha female has more status than her mate. He can't have pups; she can. And when food is abundant, other females are allowed to breed, and not always with the Alpha male only. Wolves do have some habits that prevent excessive inbreeding. And a wolf misses about 80% or more of its attempted kills. It takes persistence and continual practice and exercise to bring down deer or elk frequently enough to avoid starvation. Every wolf in a pack is equivalent to an Olympic athlete. But some hunt better than others. So they take the lead in a hunt, and they share their kills. Wolves care for each other. The notion of "dog eat dog" is a human concept, not a canine or lupine one.

Before going on to the killer whales, Mr. Safina dives into seven chapters that make up a section titled "Whines and Pet Peeves", in which he eloquently and convincingly takes on seven myths about the supposed lack of consciousness and so forth among nonhuman animals. This is the most powerful section of the book. Put extra-simply: if animals didn't have a "theory of mind", if they didn't have powerful social emotions (even the so-called solitary ones like tigers), if they didn't have a way to distinguish "me" from "not me" in their own thoughts, if they couldn't plan, and several other skills we tend to think we have in a monopoly, they would quickly become extinct. Every one of them.

We can plan because trilobites and worms and clams figured that out half a billion years ago, and animals ever since have been refining it. We just have the brain power to make extra-detailed plans. One thing after another. We came from them. Thus we are like them.

Killer whales. Makes you shiver, does it? All most of us ever knew of them was that they kill baleen whales, eat the tongue and let the rest sink. Steely-eyed, remorseless killers, these killer whales, even if they have been called the more fashionable term Orcas in recent years. Now we find there isn't only one worldwide species of killer whales. There are at least five and maybe 12 to 20. Some do indeed prey on non-toothed whales. Some prey only on fish. Members of one population, currently numbering 81 (more or less; it may have changed in the past year), feed only on salmon. Some prey only on sea lions or large seals. Some live in a home range of a few dozen or a few hundred square miles. Some range much more widely, and when they pass through the home range of another group with its different diet, they ignore them, and the home group ignores the passers-by.

They are matriarchal, like elephants. It's interesting, that all the really social animal species are matriarchal, except humans. Maybe patriarchy is why we have wars. Has any country on Earth that has a female leader (President or Prime Minister), caused a war? Of course a couple have fought defensive warfare, including Margaret Thatcher. Another side thought: I've had both male and female supervisors and managers, and the females generally were better leaders.

So back to the whales. People remember the few times (probably only twice) that a killer whale in captivity has killed a human. No wild killer whale, of any of the known groups (species?) has ever killed a human, nor deliberately threatened one. Maybe when our Prince of Peace returns, Jesus will come as a whale. Just like elephants, just like wolves, just like animals in general, killer whales are gentle with everything they don't intend to eat. They are playful, They love sex. They clearly love each other. They are emotional, they have personalities: some are more shy and some more outgoing; some are more playful and some seem rather monkish or contemplative.

But whales are whales. They are not "like us". They are descended from thinking, emoting, planning, playful animals just as we are. There is no justification for granting them "human rights", because they are not human. Suppose we found ourselves needing to be granted "wolf rights" or "whale rights" in order to get along with them?

Many folks are deathly afraid of "space aliens", who "abduct" some humans, perform "experiments" on them, perhaps with a reproductive intent, and even plant mysterious machines in their bodies. Isn't that what we do throughout nature? We have done this to almost every kind of animal out there, and there is a tiny radio transmitter that can be pasted on the back of a honeybee! I think all the fear of space aliens is a form of guilty displacement: we are afraid of ourselves, not because of what we might do, but because of what we have done and are doing. Including to people. The quintessential space alien of the early Twentieth Century was Josef Mengele, who abducted people, mostly Jews and homosexuals, and did all kinds of barbaric experiments on them. Do we need to destroy in order to learn? One would hope not. But tens of thousands of scientists would say, more or less reluctantly, that we must. Sad but true.

The author's point is not some anti-human, liberal rant. Even in the "rant chapters", section three, he is hopeful that we will figure out how to preserve and conserve and live with the biosphere before we heedlessly eliminate it. But drawing his book to a close, he wrote, "For every ballerina there are thousands of soldiers." The more I learn about it, the more I think hope is all we have.