Mad cows (and livid lambs)
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 10/08/2008Page 3 of 3



Stories like these remind us that there are millions of beasts armed with teeth and stingers, who can out-sniff, out-run, out-fly, out-fight and out-bite every one of us. The eerie truth is that, right now, we're surrounded. As a species, we've been at the top of the food chain for so long, we've forgotten that 'humans' are mere anthropoid apes and, in distant millennia, we had to fight the feral armies to get here. In our hubris, we imagine we're an animal apart. For centuries, we've been told by priests and scientists that animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking, unselfconscious automatons. They're a gift from God, and their purpose is to have paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned into fancy trousers to be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. Many mainstream scientists still warn against anthropomorphism. But it doesn't stop the many people who are secretly wondering what's really going on behind those inscrutable black eyes? Are the birds talking about us? Do lobsters sulk? Can one moose love another? The more scientists have discovered about the inner lives of animals, the more troubling and strange things have become. 'Things are really changing,' acknowledges Bekoff. 'There's a lot of new behavioural research, a lot of new neuroscience research that demonstrates they are far more complex than was thought. We're not inserting into animals something they don't have.'


A man is mauled by a bear in Kashmir, India
Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this gigantic paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the capacity for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years they've been evolving, then why not theirs? 'If you believe in biological continuity then, if we have emotions, they have emotions. If we have a heart, they have a heart.'

But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be misguided sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists that animals don't consciously feel pain, and therefore 'make no real claims on our sympathy'. When vets and vivisectionists anaesthetise their subjects, the argument runs, they're indulging in schmaltzy, greetings-card reasoning.

Dr Paul McDonald, of the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal Behaviour, in Sydney, also warns against the sort of talk Bekoff persists in. 'There's a temptation to put human emotions into animal interactions, which I think is not the way to go,' he says. 'The danger is it'll shape your interpretations. Take noisy mynah birds, for example. They have a dominance hierarchy, so there's often aggressive interactions where one bird appears to beat the other up. Through human glasses that could be a punishment or something along those lines, where in reality it's about maintaining social rank.'

But McDonald's worldview and his observations seem at odds. 'Altruism remains a conundrum,' he says. 'Why do you have so many animals helping? Particularly animals that aren't related. If you're helping to raise a nephew, at least you're replicating part of your genome. But when you're raising a totally unrelated individual, that becomes much more difficult - and that happens quite commonly.' He points to bell mynah birds, which feed chicks in many nests at the same time, even though they may have chicks in their own nest. 'That seems very, very strange.'

advertisementEven stranger is the incident Gay Bradshaw reports, of a hero crow helping hungry kittens. 'The crow would go get worms and fly down and feed them to these starving kittens. Eventually, they became friends and played together.'

And altruism isn't the only documented animal behaviour that was once thought to have been purely human. Take empathy and Kuni, the bonobo. Kuni watched a starling fly into the glass wall of its enclosure and thud to the floor. He picked it up, climbed to the top of the tallest tree, stretched the bird's wings out and launched it back into the air. When it thudded back down again, the ape climbed back down and stood over it for a long time.

And here's another complex mental state - grief. Elephants, for example, stand vigil over the bodies of dead companions for a week, before gently covering the corpse with earth. They then visit the gravesite for years afterwards, taking turns to handle the bones. 'They lift the bones with incredible sensitivity,' says zoologist Dr Tammie Matson, the WWF's human-animal conflict specialist. 'It's as if they can somehow read something about the elephant that was once attached to them.'

Bekoff, meanwhile, has witnessed a magpie funeral. 'I saw a dead magpie on the road and stopped to look at what was happening. One magpie went in and touched the corpse and backed away, another magpie went in and backed away, then another flew off and brought grass back and laid it around the corpse, then another did the same.' And then there was the fox funeral. 'This fox had been killed by a mountain lion and the next day a female fox found the carcass. She covered it up with leaves and pine needles and dirt and branches. She stamped it down and stood over it.'

British neuroscientists have found that sheep can remember at least 50 ovine faces, even when they've been separated for years. Cows, meanwhile, get anxious. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol university, has discovered that they have between two and four best friends. They also have enemies, bearing grudges for years.

Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of - and is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness - is language. But even chickens talk to each other. 'If a hawk flies over a chicken, it gives a particular call,' says Dr McDonald. 'Whereas if it's a fox, it's a different call.' Indeed, according to Bekoff, many birds have regional dialects and wolves have, 'very complex communication systems. A wolf's tail has 13 to 15 positions which send different messages. And when you combine the tail position, ear position, gait, odour and sound, you've got a kaleidoscope of different modes of communication.'

And if there's any remaining doubt that animals have the capacity to feel anger at humans, take the case of traffic-jamming rhesus monkeys. When a baby monkey had its legs crushed by a car in Tezpur, India, 100 others encircled it and blocked the road. Onlookers described the monkeys as 'angry', while a shopkeeper said, 'It was very emotional. Some of them massaged its legs. Finally, they left the scene, carrying the injured baby with them.'

If revenge is one possible motive behind the dramatic global rises in animal-on-human violence, it's surely a minor one. We shouldn't be surprised when animals play nasty. They're all at it. In 2002, scientists at Michigan State University discovered that even bacteria engage in chemical warfare. And even species that we believe to be benign turn out to be ruthless. Robins, for example, fight each other to the death. And in January, marine scientists released footage of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby porpoises, tossing them in the air and chasing them to their death. Researchers in Scotland described 'perhaps the worst example of inter-specific aggression any of us has ever seen. This young female had the life beaten out of her.' ?Worse, it has been discovered that they're fond of infanticide.

The rise in animal-on-human violence turns out to have several causes which initially appear separate but are all linked. Dr Matson is clear on the elephant problem; both its causes and its nature. When she arrived in Bushmanland, Namibia, 15 years ago, an elephant had just killed an elderly woman. 'That sort of thing happened pretty regularly,' she says. When Matson arrived in Assam, last year, she met a family who had suffered similarly. 'It all comes back to humans, ultimately. It's a competition for resources. You've got this clash between the world's most dominant primate and the world's largest terrestrial animal.'

Even pet dogs and their considerably less cuddly cousins, dingos, have been clashing with humans. Dr Paul McGreevy, a British veterinary scientist, uses the run of dingo attacks in Australia's Fraser Island as an example. In April 2001, a nine-year-old boy was killed and his seven-year-old brother injured after they were chased and pounced on by the dogs. It was said to be only the second attack in modern times. Then, just six days later, two British backpackers were bitten on the legs and buttocks.

'The first step is habituation, a loss of fear,' McGreevy says. 'Familiarity breeds a form of contempt. If the animals are no longer frightened of humans they begin to hang around instead of running away. In Fraser Island, tourists became a predictor of food. The second possibility is that animals learn to fear humans under certain circumstances. This means they're coming closer to humans, but are prepared to defend themselves. When they're primed by this arousal, they can have lowered thresholds for aggression and produce hair-trigger responses.'

When a wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a human, but still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a frenzy at the slightest provocation, it's in a uniquely dangerous state. It's not hard to see how McGreevy's dingo theory could be applied to cougars, mountain lions, boars, bears and wolves, all of whom are having their traditional habitats and feeding grounds annexed.

Scientists studying the increase in big-cat attacks in America have suggested that their growing familiarity with us is leading them to view humans as hotdogs in trousers. 'There has been a huge increase in the opportunities pumas have to observe people,' Lee Fitzhugh, of the University of California, told New Scientist. 'Cats have to learn what's prey and what's not - it's not instinctive. They spend time observing a strange creature before they decide how to classify it.'

Researchers think the same process might be responsible for the increase in shark attacks: the popularity of surfing and shark-watching dives give the fish more chance to see that we're basically harmless and possibly tasty.

Perversely, conservation may also have worsened the situation. Elephant numbers are up as is the crocodile population. In Australia, where croc-hunting was banned 30 years ago, numbers of the most deadly saltwater variety have risen from 5,000 in the early 1970s to more than 70,000.

What all these problems have in common is, of course, us. We're in their face a lot more these days. And that face is full of teeth. According to Gay Bradshaw, we shouldn't be asking why they're turning on us. A more reasonable question would be, why aren't they attacking us more?

'Animals have the same capacity that we do, in terms of emotions and what we consider to be high-mindedness and moral integrity. In fact, I'd argue they have more, because they haven't done to us what we've done to them. That's a sobering thought. It's amazing that all the animals are as benign as they are. It's amazing their restraint. Why aren't they picking up guns?'