The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal

by Desmond Morris

  A third major influence in the creation of a persistent homosexual is the childhood assessment of the roles of his or her parents. If a child has a weak father who is dominated by the mother, it is particularly likely to get the masculine and feminine roles confused and reversed. This then tends to lead to a choice of the wrong sex as a pair-bond partner in later life.

  The fourth cause is a more obvious one. If members of the opposite sex are totally absent from the environment for a long period of time, then members of the same sex become the next best thing for sexual encounters. A male isolated from females in this way, or a female isolated from males, may persistently indulge in homosexuality without any of the other three factors I have mentioned having any influence at all. A male prisoner, for instance, may have escaped mal-imprinting, may be fond of the opposite sex, and may have had a father who dominated his mother in a completely masculine way, and yet he may still become a long-term homosexual if he is confined in an all-male prison community, where the nearest thing to a female body I is another male body. If, in prisons, in boarding-schools, on naval vessels, or in army barracks, the uni-sexual condition lasts for some years, the opportunist homosexual may eventually become conditioned to the rewards of his enforced sexual patterns and may persist in them even after he has returned to a heterosexual environment.

  Of these four influences leading to persistent homosexual behaviour, only the first one is relevant to the present chapter, but it was important to discuss them all here in order to explain the partial role that mal-imprinting plays in this particular sexual phenomenon.

  Homosexual behaviour in other animals is usually of the next-best-thing variety, and disappears in the presence of sexually active members of the opposite sex. There are a few cases of persistently homosexual animals, however, in instances where special social experiments have been carried out. If young mallard ducklings, for example, are kept in all-male groups of from five to ten individuals for the first seventy-five days of their lives, and never encounter a female of their species during that time, they become permanently homosexual. When released on to a pond as adults, now with both males and females present, they completely ignore the females and set up homosexual pair-bonds between themselves. This situation persists for many years, probably the whole life-time of the homosexual ducks, and nothing the females can do will alter it. Doves kept in homosexual pairs are well known to copulate with one another and may form complete pair-bonds. Two males that became sexually imprinted on one another in this way went through the whole breeding cycle together, co-operating to build a nest, incubate eggs and rear the young. The fertile eggs, of course, had to be provided from the nest of a true pair, but they were quickly accepted, each of the homosexual males reacting as if they had been laid by his partner. If a real female had been introduced after the homosexual pair-bond had launched the two males into their pseudo-reproductive cycle, it is doubtful if they would have taken any notice of her. By that stage the homosexuality would have become persistent, at least for the duration of that complete breeding cycle.

  Mal-imprinting in the human animal is not confined to sexual relationships. It can also occur in the parent-offspring relationships. As far as human infants becoming imprinted on parents of the wrong species is concerned, good evidence is lacking. The famous cases of so-called ‘wolf-children’ (abandoned or lost babies being suckled and reared by wolf bitches) have never been fully substantiated and must remain for the time being in the realm of fiction. If such a thing could occur, however, there is little doubt that the wolf-children would become fully mal-imprinted on their foster-parents.

  The reverse process, by contrast, is encountered almost every day. When a young animal is hand-reared by a human foster-parent, it is not only the pet animal that becomes mal-imprinted. The human foster-parent also often becomes intensely mal-imprinted and responds to the young animal as if it were a human baby. The same kind of emotional devotion is lavished on it and the same kind of heartbreaks occur if something goes wrong.

  Just as a pseudo-parent, such as the duckling’s orange balloon, has certain key qualities that make it suitable for mal-imprinting (it is a large moving object), so the pseudoinfant becomes more suitable if it possesses certain qualities typical of the human infant. Human babies are helpless, soft, warm, rounded, flat-faced, big-eyed, and they cry. The more of these properties a young animal possesses, the more likely it is to encourage the setting up of a parent-offspring bond with a mal-imprinted human foster parent. Many young mammals have nearly all these properties and it is extremely easy for a human being to become mal-imprinted with them in a matter of minutes. A soft, warm, big-eyed fawn bleating for its mother, or a helpless, rounded puppy crying for a missing bitch, projects a powerful infantile image which few human females can resist. Since some of the childlike properties of such animals are even stronger than those of a real human baby, the exaggerated stimuli from the pseudo-infant can frequently become more powerful than the natural ones, and the mal-imprinting becomes intense.

  Animal pseudo-infants have one big drawback: they grow up too quickly. Even slow developers become active adults in only a fraction of the time it takes for a real human infant to mature. When this happens they often become unmanageable and lose their appeal. But the human animal is an ingenious species and has taken steps to deal with this unfortunate development. By selective breeding over a period of centuries, it has managed to make its domestic pets more infantile, so that adult cats and dogs, for example, are rather juvenile versions of their wild counterparts. They remain more playfid and less independent, and continue to fulfil their roles as child substitutes.

  With some breeds of dogs (the lap dogs or ‘toy’ dogs) this process has been taken to extremes. They not only behave in a more juvenile way, they also look, feel and sound more juvenile. Their whole anatomy has been altered to make them fit more closely to the image of a human baby, even when they are adult. In this way they can act as a satisfying pseudo-infant, not just for a few months as puppies, but for ten years or longer, a time span that begins to match that of human childhood. What is more, they go one better than the real baby, because they remain baby-like throughout the whole period.

  The Pekinese is a good example. The wild ancestor of the Pekinese (as of all domestic dogs) is the wolf, a creature that can weigh up to 150 pounds or more. The average weight of an adult European human is much the same, about 155 pounds. The weight of a newborn human baby is roughly between five and ten pounds, the average being slightly over seven pounds. So, to convert the wolf into a good pseudo-infant, it has to be reduced in size to about one-fifteenth of its original, natural weight. The Pekinese is a triumph of this process, weighing today between seven and twelve pounds, with an average of about ten pounds, So far, so good. It matches the baby in weight and, even as an adult, has the first of the vital pseudo-infant properties: it is a small object. But some other improvements are needed. The legs of a typical dog are too long in relation to its body. Their proportion is more reminiscent of the human adult than the short-limbed human baby. So, off with their legs! By careful selective breeding it is possible to produce strains with shorter and shorter legs until they can only waddle along. This not only corrects the proportions, but as a bonus it also renders the animals more clumsy and helpless. Again, valuable infantile features. But something is still missing. The dog is warm enough to the touch, but not soft enough. Its natural wild-type hair is too short, stiff and coarse. So, on with the hair! Selective breeding again comes to the rescue, producing long, soft, flowing silky hair, creating the essential feel of infantile super-softness.

  Further modifications are necessary to the natural wild shape of the dog. It has to become plumper, bigger-eyed, and shorter-tailed. One only has to look at a Pekinese to see that these changes have also been successfully imposed. Its ears stuck up and were too pointed. By the device of making them bigger, floppier and covered in long flowing hair, it was possible to convert them into a reasonable semblance of a
growing infant’s hair-style. The voice of the wild wolf is too deep, but the reduction in body size has taken care of that, producing a higher-pitched, more infantile tone. Finally, there is the face. A wild dog’s face is far too pointed, arid a little genetic plastic surgery is needed here, too. No matter if it deforms the jaws and makes feeding difficult, it has to be done. And so the Pekinese has its face squashed flat and childlike. Again there is an added bonus, because this also makes it more helpless and more dependent on its pseudo-parent for providing suitably prepared food, another essential parental activity. And there sits our Pekinese pseudo-infant, softer, rounder, more helpless, bigger-eyed and flatter-faced, ready to set up a powerful mal-imprinted bond in any susceptible adult human who happens along. And it works. It works so well that they are not only mothered, but also live with humans, travel with them, have their own (veterinary) doctors, and are frequently buried in graves like humans and even left money in wills like real human offspring.

  As I have said before, on other topics, this is a description, not a criticism. It is difficult to see why so many people criticize such activities when they so obviously fulfil a basic need that often cannot be satisfied in the normal way. It is even harder to see why some people can accept this kind of imprinting, but not other kinds. Many humans are repelled by sexual mal-imprinting, for example, and revolted by the idea of a man making love to a fetish object, or copulating with another male, yet they happily accept parental mal-imprinting where a human adult is fondling a pet lap-dog or feeding a baby monkey from a bottle. But why do they make the distinction? Biologically speaking, there is virtually no difference between the two activities. They both involve mal-imprinting and they are both aberrations of normal human relationships. But although, in the biological sense, they must both be classed as abnormalities, neither of them causes any harm to bystanders, to individuals outside the relationships. We may feel that it would be more gratifying for the fetishist or the childless animal lover if they could enjoy the rewards of a full family life, but it is their loss, not ours, and we have no cause to be hostile to either of them.

  We have to face the fact that, living in a human zoo, we are inevitably going to suffer from many abnormal relationships. We are bound to be exposed in unusual ways to unusual stimuli. Our nervous systems are not equipped to deal with this and our patterns of response will sometimes misfire. Like the experimental or zoo animals, we may find ourselves fixated with strange and sometimes damaging bonds, or we may suffer from serious bond confusion. It can happen to any of us, at any time. It is merely another of the hazards of existing as an inmate of a human zoo. We are all potential victims, and the most appropriate reaction, when we come across it in someone else, is sympathy rather than cold intolerance.

  CHAPTER SIX: The Stimulus Struggle

  When a man is reaching retiring age he often dreams of sitting quietly in the sun. By relaxing and ‘taking it easy’ he hopes to stretch out an enjoyable old age. If he manages to fulfil his sun-sit dream, one thing is certain: he will not lengthen his life, he will shorten it. The reason is simple—he will have given up the Stimulus Struggle. In the human zoo this is something we are all engaged in during our lives and if we abandon it, or tackle it badly, we are in serious trouble.

  The object of the struggle is to obtain the optimum amount of stimulation from the environment. This does not mean the maximum amount. It is possible to be over-stimulated as well as under-stimulated. The optimum (or happy medium) lies somewhere between these two extremes. It is like adjusting the volume of music coming from a radio: too low and it makes no impact, too high and it causes pain. At some point between the two there is the ideal level, and it is obtaining this level in relation to our whole existence that is the goal of the Stimulus Struggle.

  For the super-tribesman this is not easy. It is as if he were surrounded by hundreds of behaviour ‘radios’, some whispering and others blaring away. If, in extreme situations, they are all whispering, or monotonously repeating the same sounds over and over again, he will suffer from acute boredom. If they are all blaring, he will experience severe stress.

  Our early tribal ancestor did not find this such a difficult problem. The demands of survival kept him busy. It required all his time and energy to stay alive, to find food and water, to defend his territory, to avoid his enemies, to breed and rear his young and to construct and maintain his shelter. Even when times were exceptionally bad, the challenges were at least comparatively straightforward. He can never have been subjected to the intricate and complex frustrations and conflicts that have become so typical of super-tribal existence. Nor is he likely to have suffered unduly from the boredom of gross under-stimulation that, paradoxically, super-tribal life can also impose. The advanced forms of the Stimulus Struggle are therefore a speciality of the urban animal. We do not find them amongst wild animals or ‘wild’ men in their natural environments. We do, however, find them in both urban men and in a particular kind of urban animal— the zoo inmate.

  Like the human zoo, the animal zoo provides its occupants with the security of regular food and water, protection from the elements and freedom from natural predators. It looks after their hygiene and their health. It may also, in certain cases, put them under severe strain. In this highly artificial condition, zoo animals, too, are forced to switch from the struggle for survival to the Stimulus Struggle. When there is too little input from the world around them, they have to contrive ways of increasing it. Occasionally, when there is too much (as in the panic of a freshly caught animal), they have to try and damp it down.

  The problem is more serious for some species than for others. From this point of view there are two basic kinds of animals: the specialists and the opportunists. The specialists are those which have evolved one supreme survival device on which they depend for their very existence, and which dominates their lives. Such creatures are the ant-eaters, the koalas, the giant pandas, the snakes and the eagles. So long as ant-eaters have their ants, koalas have their eucalyptus leaves, pandas have their bamboo shoots, and snakes and eagles have their prey, they can relax. They have perfected their diet specializations to such a pitch that, providing their particular requirements are met, they can accept a lazy and otherwise unstimulating pattern of life. Eagles, for instance, will thrive in a small empty cage for over forty years without so much as biting their claws, providing, of course, they can sink them daily into a freshly killed rabbit.

  The opportunists are not so fortunate. They are the species — such as dogs and wolves, raccoons and coatis, and monkeys and apes— that have evolved no single, specialized survival device. They are jacks-of-all-trades, always on the look-out for any small advantage the environment has to offer. In the wild, they never stop exploring and investigating. Anything and everything is examined in case it may add yet another string to the bow of survival. They cannot afford to relax for very long and evolution has made sure that they do not. They have evolved nervous systems that abhor inactivity, that keep them constantly on the go. Of all species, it is man himself who is the supreme opportunist. Like the others, he is intensely exploratory. Like them, he has a biologically built-in demand for a high stimulus input from his environment.

  In a zoo (or a city) it is clearly these opportunist species that will suffer most from the artificiality of the situation. Even if they are provided with perfectly balanced diets and are immaculately sheltered and protected, they will become bored and listless and eventually neurotic. The more we have come to understand the natural behaviour of such animals, the more obvious it has become, for example, that zoo monkeys are little more than distorted caricatures of their wild counterparts.

  But opportunist animals do not give up easily. They react to the unpleasant situation with remarkable ingenuity. So, too, do the inmates of the human zoo. If we compare the animal zoo reactions with those we find in the human zoo, it will serve to bring home to us the striking parallels that exist between these two highly artificial environments.

 
The Stimulus Struggle operates on six basic principles and it will help if we look at them one by one, examining in each case first the animal zoo and then the human zoo. The principles are these:

  1. If stimulation is too weak, you may increase your behaviour output by creating unnecessary problems which you can then solve.

  We have all heard of labour-saving devices, but this principle is concerned with labour-wasting devices. The Stimulus Struggler deliberately makes work for himself by elaborating patterns that could otherwise be performed more simply, or that need no longer be performed at all.

  In its zoo cage, a wild cat may be seen to throw a dead bird or a dead rat up into the air and then leap after it and pounce on it. By throwing the prey, the cat can put movement and therefore ‘life’ back into it, giving itself the chance to perform a ‘kill’. In the same way, a captive mongoose can be seen ‘shaking to death’ a piece of meat.

  Observations of this kind extend to domestic animals as well. A pet dog, pampered and well fed, will drop a ball or a stick at its master’s feet and wait patiently for the object to be thrown. Once it is moving through the air or across the ground, it becomes ‘prey’ and can be chased after, caught, ‘killed’ and brought back again for a repeat performance. The domestic dog may not be hungry for food, but it is hungry for stimulation.

  In its own way, a caged raccoon is equally ingenious. If there is no food to search for in a near-by stream, the animal will search for it anyway, even if there is no stream. It takes its food to its water-dish, drops it in, loses it, and then searches for it. When it finds it, it scrabbles with it in the water before eating it. Sometimes it even destroys it by this process, pieces of bread becoming a hopeless mush. But no matter, the frustrated food-searching urge has been satisfied. This, incidentally, is the origin of the long-standing myth that raccoons wash their food.