Praise for Tamed and Untamed
“In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures.”
—from the foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of Elephant Company
“Two kindred spirits treat animals as they ought to be treated, with understanding, knowledge, and humor. These well-crafted essays are a pleasure to read and make you marvel at our fellow travelers on this planet.”
—Frans de Waal, author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
“Are humans the ultimate species? Nope, not according to these authors. Water bears are: They have been around for 500 million years and will survive after we destroy the planet. Will chickens in your backyard sooner or later give you a name? Do eels dream? Can an octopus have a sense of humor? Read and learn. This is an absolutely enchanting book that anybody who loves animals will not only want to own but also to give to good friends. It is full of precious lines and deep wisdom, and there is a delicious sense of humor throughout. The authors constantly bring us back to the recognition that we are just one among millions of remarkable animals, each one worthy of study and deep admiration, the kind these very authors accord them.”
—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of Dogs Never Lie About Love; coauthor of When Elephants Weep
“Two of the most tuned-in people in the world have now given us these marvelous narratives of nonhuman beings living their lives on our shared planet. This is exactly what we need more of. We need to understand who we are here with. And, more and more urgently, to understand that we are not alone on our planet. As humans become more isolated and alienated, stories of other animals offer us our best chance for succeeding at being human.”
—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
“I cannot recommend highly enough this memorable collection of essays about the secret life of animals from two of the most thought-provoking, animal-savvy writers of this time, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. A must-read for anyone interested in all creatures great and small.”
—Nicholas Dodman, DVM, author of Pets on the Couch; professor emeritus, Tufts University
“A beautifully written, fascinating compendium of essays about many species with whom we share our planet. Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas impart their insights into the behavior of a variety of nonhumans in this extremely informative and thought-provoking read.”
—Irene M. Pepperberg, author of Alex & Me
“Tamed and Untamed is a beautiful duet between two of the world’s finest nature writers. These enchanting essays bring to life creatures both novel and familiar, from pink dolphins to domestic dogs, war elephants to garden slugs. Each chapter reveals a new animal mystery and adds to the menagerie of our minds.”
—Abigail Tucker, author of The Lion in the Living Room
“Tamed and Untamed is a gem of a book. Written by two incredibly gifted writers, it’s a multicourse buffet of wonderful and thought-provoking stories about the surprising and wide-ranging intelligence, and deep and rich emotional lives of many different nonhuman animals. These eloquent authors weave solid science into their stories so that nonresearchers can well understand what is happening in the heads and hearts of the dogs, cats, rats, hawks, octopuses, and many other animals about whom they write. The bottom line is that we are not all that unique among the fascinating and diverse beings who are called ‘animals’ and with whom we share our magnificent planet. They, like this book, are gifts we must cherish.”
—Marc Bekoff, author of Rewilding Our Hearts; coauthor of The Animals’ Agenda
“Who but Sy Montgomery could describe a hawk’s eyes as having ‘an intensity stronger than rage and brighter than joy’? Who but Elizabeth Marshall Thomas would take in a wild mouse, ‘sort of like helping a relative’? This is a book to cherish, full of enlightenment, curiosity, and admiration for all things animal. I loved it.”
—Patricia McConnell, author of The Education of Will
Also by Sy Montgomery
For adults
The Soul of an Octopus
Birdology
The Good Good Pig
Search for the Golden Moon Bear
Journey of the Pink Dolphin
Spell of the Tiger
Walking with the Great Apes
The Curious Naturalist
The Wild out Your Window
For children
The Snake Scientist
The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans
Encantado
Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropics
The Tarantula Scientist
Quest for the Tree Kangaroo
Saving the Ghost of the Mountain
Kakapo Rescue
The Tapir Scientist
Chasing Cheetahs
The Octopus Scientists
The Great White Shark Scientist
Amazon Adventure
Also by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Dreaming of Lions
The Hidden Life of Deer
The Old Way
The Social Lives of Dogs
Certain Poor Shepherds
The Tribe of Tiger
The Hidden Life of Dogs
The Animal Wife
Reindeer Moon
Warrior Herdsmen
The Harmless People
Copyright © 2017 by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Editor: Joni Praded
Project Manager: Angela Boyle
Copy Editor: Paula Brisco
Proofreader: Laura Jorstad
Indexer: Shana Milkie
Designer: Melissa Jacobson
Printed in the United States of America.
First printing September 2017.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 117 18 19 20 21
Our Commitment to Green Publishing
Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Tamed and Untamed was printed on paper supplied by Thomson-Shore that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Montgomery, Sy, author. | Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, 1931– author.
Title: Tamed and untamed : close encounters of the animal kind / Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas ; foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke.
Description: White River Junction, Vermont : Chelsea Green Publishing, [2017] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017023243| ISBN 9781603587556 (paperback) | ISBN 9781603587563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781603587730 (audiobook)
Subjects: LCSH: Animals. | Animal behavior. | BISAC: NATURE / Animals / General. | NATURE / Essays. | PETS / Essays. | NATURE / Animals / W
ildlife.
Classification: LCC QL45.2 .M66 2017 | DDC 591—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023243
Chelsea Green Publishing
85 North Main Street, Suite 120
White River Junction, VT 05001
(802) 295-6300
www.chelseagreen.com
In deep, loving memory of Molly, Tess, Sally, Pearl, Sundog, Georgia, Shelah, Misty, Maria, Cokie, Suessi, Fatima, Windigo, Viva, and Miska.
Contents
Foreword
Part One: Animals and People
Animals as Teachers and Healers
Your Brain on Pets
Is ESP Possible?
Thunder
Animal Minds
Octopus Love
Bushmeat
Cecil the Lion
Discarded Animals
A Memorial Day Tribute to War Animals
A Failure to Communicate
Fear of the Dark
Fear of Snakes
The Spirits among Us
Part Two: Birds
Birds Rock the Beat
Puffin M
Chicken Indestructible
Hawk Migration
Bubbles Wrapped in Feathers
Part Three: Dogs and Cats
Pets with Disabilities
Breeding Dogs
Tiny Dogs
How Best to Educate a Dog
Cat Vandalism
Cat Tracker
Sleeping Dogs
Feral Cats and Stray Cats
Death of a Dog
Part Four: Wild Animals
Bears
The “Dog” We Love to Hate
Great White Sharks
Feeding Deer
The Lion
Hyraxes
Christmas Ermine
One Mouse
Pink Dolphins
Happy Rats: Playful, Ticklish, Optimistic
Part Five: Tiny Animals
Slugs
Worms: Lowly and Exalted
Amphibians
Bumble, Bee Happy, Bee Smart, Bee Safe!
Water Bears
Part Six: Animal Abilities
Abandoned Acrobats
What’s in a Name?
In the Snow
Music for Animals
Animals Who Imbibe
Do Animals Dream?
Window to the Wild
Different Information
Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?
Octopus: The MENSA Mollusk
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Foreword
Outside of gothic works of fiction set in Transylvania, we rarely read of enduring friendships that have been initiated by a bite. But that is exactly how nature writers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—the two extraordinary, quirky, and iconoclastic women whose essays are collected here—formed their attachment to one another.
Liz and Sy met more than thirty years ago, within months if not weeks of Sy moving to New Hampshire, just minutes away from Liz. Sy was a journalist, writing often about wildlife and soon to embark on her first book, on great apes and the women who studied them. Liz had written classic accounts of life among the San (or Bushmen) hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert as well as novels set in Paleolithic times. As a keen observer of animals, she had also been helping researcher Katy Payne study elephant bioacoustics. So when Sy’s husband, author Howard Mansfield, saw an article about Liz in a local newspaper, he urged Sy to get in touch and, before long, Sy was interviewing Liz about the emerging knowledge of how elephants communicate.
As soon as Sy and Liz sat down together, the two women, who still live in neighboring towns, found common ground talking about the natural world. The discussion that day might have begun with elephants, but it inevitably moved on to lots of other species, including ferrets—Sy’s pet ferrets to be exact. Liz wanted to meet them in person. Sy, eager to oblige, escorted Liz to her house, though she worried that the timing wasn’t optimal. Sy was just back from six months in Australia, and the pet sitter had turned out to be allergic to ferrets. That meant they weren’t very used to being handled. Sure enough, one of the animals did, in fact, sink his pointy teeth into Liz. Sy apologized and started to explain, but she found her defense was completely unnecessary. Liz said—emphatically—that she didn’t mind at all. “She really didn’t mind being bitten by a weasel,” Sy says. And that’s when it hit her. “I knew we were soul mates.”
Since that day in New Hampshire, Liz and Sy have traveled together to Costa Rica, where they mist netted bats with Bat Conservation International; to Maine, where they followed moose cows and calves on foot in the woods; and most recently to Tanzania, to track the wildebeest migration with another illustrious “neighbor” of theirs, ungulate expert Richard Estes. Liz and Sy are in each other’s lives and in each other’s thoughts. Ipso facto, the prolific writers are in each other’s books. Sy has “a cameo appearance” in Liz’s game-changing bestseller The Hidden Life of Dogs—as the two happily forgo souvenir hunting in the capital of Costa Rica in order to track a female dog in heat. Liz is a hero in Sy’s The Good Good Pig, when she figures out how to best comfort Sy’s distraught and ailing dog Tess during one of Sy’s absences, bringing an old barn coat belonging to Sy for the dog to cuddle up with. “I think I’ve quoted or included a scene with Liz in almost every book I’ve written for adults since we met, and she’s mentioned me in every nonfiction book she’s written since The Harmless People and Warrior Herdsmen. We read and critique each other’s drafts, and we talk almost every day.”
The essays here are mostly collected and adapted from their joint column in the Boston Globe, the newspaper that brought me together with these remarkable women. It’s where I worked as an editor and writer starting in the late 1980s, when Sy was a regular contributor to our Science section. And it was for my own column there, “Animal Beat,” that I interviewed Liz several times. When I discovered somewhere along the way that they were friends, I wanted in. Lucky for me, inclusion comes naturally to them. In fact, it is a hallmark of their work and lives. They’ve always rejected any kind of reflexive exclusion, scientific or personal. Sweet as they are, there’s a real saltiness to their skepticism. They are, one might say, the kettle corn of nature writers.
And their concept of inclusion is pretty darn inclusive—stretching across life-forms. Both Liz and Sy are iconoclasts writing with rare insight and nuance about the many ways we humans have attempted to separate ourselves from nonhuman animals—in our language, in our taxonomies, and in our expectations. The two have rigorously poked holes in some widely held but flawed assumptions about human superiority, and they often do it with humor. When I first interviewed Liz in 1993, we talked about the stealthy power of language to reinforce old notions of “other.” Why is it that we humans experience “love” but allow nonhuman animals only “pair bonds”? How can a dog giving birth to puppies be an “it,” but a woman with a baby is a “she”? Some readers had objected to the fact that Liz referred to the relationship between two of her huskies, who were devoted to one another, as a marriage.
Liz was a pioneer. “Excluding miracles,” she told me at the time, consciousness is something “we acquired through our long mammalian past.”
“Are we the only creatures to think and love and feel?” I asked her.
She scoffed. As she had written in The Hidden Life of Dogs, then just released, “thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value.” In other words, being able to learn means being able to deal with life’s variables more effectively. Then as now, Thomas insists that it is sheer arrogance for humans to assume we are the only mammals to have developed consciousness; the only mammals to love; the only mammals to feel empathy; the only mammal
s to possess morals.
Was she out of bounds with these thoughts, I prodded. She had one reply to those who would say so: “Fiddle-dee-dee.”
In this same talk with Liz, I asked her about the great ripples of controversy her rather slim book had set in motion. “Well,” she said, flashing that huge smile I love so dearly, “I didn’t write the book to be artistic, I wrote it to be Messianic!”
Sy shares this worldview that questions a human-centric sense of superiority. She’s expressed it often in writing and in person. In a conversation I once recorded with her, I asked her about it. She, too, spoke of evolution and the fact that we humans owe our emotions and morality to our fellow animals. Limiting our friendships only to other humans is as absurd as insisting on a poor diet made up of only one item, she declared: “The idea that we’re only supposed to have friendships with one species among the thousands and thousands . . . that’s crazy. If somebody said, ‘I only eat one food. I eat nothing but nachos. I never eat anything else.’ It’d be crazy!”
Well, those nachos bring us back to that long-ago bite of the weasel. Liz wasn’t being generous when she shrugged off the incident. It’s just that she understood. She saw the incident from the perspective of that other being. And the understanding Sy and Liz bring to their love of fellow creatures includes a deep and kind understanding of fellow humans. I can testify. And it is that unique understanding that shows up in the essays collected in Tamed and Untamed.
In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures. They help us see the connections. It reminds me of something Helen Macdonald said in her beautiful book H Is for Hawk: “Wild things are made from human histories.” If that’s the case, how lucky we are to read the work collected here, to let the braided essays of Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas help move us closer to being better humans—by making wild things what they should be: our soul mates.
—Vicki Constantine Croke
Part One
Animals and People
At the delightfully retro Peterborough Diner, where locals in our corner of New Hampshire often gather for lunch, I always order the same sandwich: the “Meatless Grinder.” I always thought it hilarious that the restaurant defined this menu item—cheese, tomatoes, and lettuce on a hoagie roll—by what it was not. (They don’t offer “Sauerkraut-Free Jell-O” or “Sugarless Sausage.”)
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