Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  In this we were guilty of misjudgment now identified as “anthropodenial.” That word was created by the famous primatologist Frans de Waal and is the opposite of anthropomorphism, or describing animals as if they had human characteristics. Anthropodenial means describing animals as if they did not have human characteristics. Pet owners have always known that anthropodenial was a big mistake, and now many scientists seem in agreement.

  The observations that follow show the depth of animal thought and, to my mind, establish forever the fact that other animals not only think as we do but also ask some of the same questions. A similar observation is discussed in a previous essay about the lioness who yawned empathetically, showing that as she watched me, she felt similarity.

  Other observations, also about lions, are somewhat more dramatic and appear here thanks to the research work of Katy Payne at the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University. As a young woman without formal scientific credentials, she made one of the most important biological findings of the twentieth century when she discovered that elephants make infrasound. Before her discovery, it was held that no land animal other than a certain grouse made sounds too low for humans to hear.

  It was my great privilege to be with Katy when she made this discovery and to be with her in Namibia’s Etosha National Park as her research continued. One evening we were up on a high platform she had built near a water source, waiting for elephants to show up, when an aging, black-maned lion came walking slowly from the east. Taking no notice of us, he climbed to the top of a nearby rise of ground and lay down facing west, propped on his elbows.

  The sun was setting. He watched it. As it approached the horizon he roared, then roared again and again as the sun went down. He fell silent when it went under. He waited for a moment, still looking at the west, then stood up slowly and walked back the way he came.

  When I tell people about this observation, they usually insist that he was roaring at another lion. But there was no other lion. He was roaring at the sun. This was also Katy’s interpretation of a later event when she was recording lion voices from the top of a tall, wide mesa. Around the base of the mesa were five or six lionesses, spaced over more than half a mile, all of them roaring as the sun went down. This took place on several successive evenings but not every evening.

  What was their purpose? Were they were chasing the sun away? Were they warning it not to come back? They didn’t like the sun—it made them hot and prevented them from hunting successfully, because with its light their prey could see them. But that interpretation may seem too simple, and anyway, when a lioness once chased me to get rid of me, she didn’t roar: She ran toward me, then slowed down and turned aside in a satisfied manner when I jumped in a vehicle.

  Was roaring at the sun a local custom, or do lions everywhere do it? It was probably local. Not all lions do it by any means—not even all Kalahari lions did it. When I was camping in other parts of the Kalahari with lions nearby, I seldom heard roaring at sunset, and if I did, whoever was roaring didn’t do it as the Etosha lion did—beginning when the sun was perhaps two fingers above the horizon and ending quite precisely when the top of the sun disappeared.

  There may be no obvious answer, except that it was a cultural practice of the Etosha lions, but the interesting behavior wasn’t unique to them. I knew two captive wolves, for instance, who every morning stood side by side in an east-facing window and sang a song in two parts as they watched the sun rise. They had to see the sun itself, though. They never sang if the sky was cloudy.

  Surely most species understand the importance of the sun, and members of at least two species do something about it. Because they look straight at it while they roar or howl, they seem to be addressing it, or at least sending the world a message about it, making their most important, most communicative calls when the sun is leaving or arriving. We may never know what they’re thinking as they howl or roar, but that’s the kind of thinking that gave rise to philosophy.

  —Liz

  Bears

  — Liz —

  Being dark-colored and the most massive animals in New England, black bears inspire the human imagination and are credited with behaviors that arise from human fantasy. For instance, they are believed to make a hooting call that some people say they can copy, and when they do, a bear sometimes answers them, these people claim.

  But bears don’t make a hooting call, and if a human tries to make one and hears an answer, the “answer” is probably from another human with the same belief. Where the idea comes from remains a mystery.

  Then, too, mother bears with cubs are thought to be exceptionally dangerous. But according to Benjamin Kilham, the world’s foremost expert on black bears, attacks by mother bears with cubs account for “only 3 percent of the fatal attacks on humans in the past 109 years.” I’m quoting from his spellbinding book In the Company of Bears.

  This is not to say that it’s safe to mess with a mother bear’s cubs—doing so could raise the tally to 4 or 5 percent. In the unlikely event that you meet such a bear while on a hike, she will send her cubs up a tree and you will probably be okay if you don’t get excited and try not to run but move away quietly with an agreeable facial expression. (Ben Kilham’s book offers detailed instructions on what to do in bear encounters.)

  So far, since the year 2000, black bears have attacked fewer than thirty people in all of North America. That involves 600 million people and 600,000 bears. Thus we fear black bears without much reason, except that in recent years, danger has increased due to the human desire to take a cell phone selfie while standing beside a bear, an unwise practice that has prompted internet warnings.

  Why discuss this? Because each autumn, bears must gain enough weight to support themselves while hibernating. They know that humans treat plenty of their edible material as garbage, so sometimes bears come around our houses in hopes of finding food. Certain researchers have found that if bears are fed by game wardens in predictable areas, they are unlikely to scavenge around people’s homes or campsites. Other researchers tell us that feeding bears encourages them to visit human habitations, which frightens the humans, who then shoot the bears or report them to the authorities who shoot them.

  Speaking from personal experience, I’ve seen that bears do very little harm and will move away from a house if asked. One night a bear started to come in our open kitchen window. Her facial expression was pleasant—ears forward as if in interest, lips relaxed—but our kitchen is small and my disabled husband in his wheelchair couldn’t move fast. I thought a bear inside would not be good and made a blast of noise with a boat horn I keep handy. The bear withdrew and left.

  On another occasion I noticed that the window on the kitchen door was completely dark, as if someone had put a black blanket over it, while through the other window I saw moonlit grass and trees. This seemed strange. I went to look out the darkened window, pressed my nose against the glass, and saw that if not for the glass, my face would be buried in fur. A bear had come for our bird feeder, which normally I bring in at night but had forgotten, so he was standing on his hind legs, leaning against the kitchen door and eating the seeds. I’m just over five feet tall, and I was looking at his lower rib cage, which means that on his hind legs he might have been eight feet tall.

  I cherish the experience of being the width of a windowpane from a bear’s furry body, but the experience didn’t last. When I realized what I was seeing, I drew back quickly, and when the bear realized that he was all but touching a human, he dropped to all fours, tearing down the bird feeder along with the steel pole that held it, which bent like a paper clip. He walked away but came back a little later to eat the seeds he had spilled while I watched him through the window. When I wrote about this incident in a newspaper column, I expected emails from readers telling me what I should have done—maybe called the police or fired a gun—but actually I did what I should have done, which was nothing. I enjoy the presence
of bears.

  Bears were here long before people. For a while they were eliminated from New Hampshire but they’ve repopulated, and they’re doing well now with no help from us, or not much. May we forever respect them and enjoy their presence, and if we can’t do that, may we at least let them live in peace.

  The “Dog” We Love to Hate

  — Sy —

  The fluffy, spotted babies wrestle and lunge, spin and pounce. They’re still a little wobbly on their paws, and their furry baby tails still seem as flexible as rubber. The scene reminds me of the first time I met my border collie puppy, when he was six weeks old: He was playing just like this with his siblings at the farm where he was born in a neighboring New Hampshire town.

  But I am half a world away, in Kenya, watching through the windscreen of a Land Cruiser, and instead of darling puppies, the animals I am watching are almost universally despised across human cultures. In the company of the world’s top expert on the species, Kay Holekamp, I am charmed and captivated by the action at a den of spotted hyenas.

  “How can you not like hyenas when you see this?” asks the Michigan State University biologist. “They’re even cuter than puppies or kittens!”

  With long, dark muzzles, blond coats with black spots, bristly black tails, and ears that look like a cross between a teddy bear’s and an elf’s, spotted hyenas might be mistaken for an exotic breed of dog—and not that long ago, some researchers thought hyenas might indeed be dogs’ ancestors. Actually they are more closely related to cats. Yet even though they remind us of our most beloved household pets, hyenas get about the worst press of any mammal known to humankind. Hyenas are almost anti-pets: They are characterized as the very opposite of the animals we pamper in our homes.

  Ernest Hemingway called the hyena “devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul. . . .” In 1859 one famous naturalist noted that while villains like Aaron Burr and Judas Iscariot had their defenders, no one would say a kind word about hyenas. Even Disney seems to hate them. In The Lion King they’re portrayed as cowardly, stinking thieves.

  For twenty-seven years Holekamp’s observations of hyena families in Kenya’s famous Masai Mara National Reserve have been dismantling these stereotypes. Turns out that spotted hyenas are not mainly scavengers; they kill 60 to 95 percent of the food they eat. A single 130-pound female can kill, unaided, a 500-pound bull wildebeest; in fact hyenas—not lions—are, she says, “the most formidable predators in Africa.” Lions steal kills from hyenas more often than the other way around.

  Though most closely related to mongooses and meerkats, hyenas are more like monkeys in their social complexity, Holekamp has discovered. Spotted hyena society comprises clans that can number more than a hundred individuals. All members of the clan know each other, and each has an assigned rank, inherited from birth. Clan members cooperate to raise cubs in communal dens. They defend a common territory from rival clans. In this way hyena society is sort of like a feudal kingdom, but with a twist: This society is dominated entirely by females.

  And even more unusual, the females look like males. It’s so confusing that years ago, when a collector was sent to capture hyenas for a zoo, he reported he could find only males . . . until one of his captured “males” gave birth in front of his eyes—through a tubelike organ that looked exactly like male equipment.

  So why have hyenas evoked horror instead of awe and amazement in most human societies?

  Well, they do sometimes scavenge and dig up bones—including those of human corpses. Like most predators they sometimes attack children. And they like to roll in smelly substances—but so do our beloved dogs.

  Why some animals are loved—our dogs and cats, for instance—and others hated, eludes even animal behaviorist and Psychology Today blogger Hal Herzog. The author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat has studied the people-animal connection for as long as Holekamp has studied hyenas, and even he doesn’t know. “What you see are these big themes in human nature: part biology, part culture, part voodoo magic that we don’t understand,” says Herzog.

  Ironically, part of the human dislike of hyenas may stem from the very reason they are so fascinating. “Hyenas are just weird,” says Holekamp. That may make people uncomfortable. But it’s what has kept her studying these families for so long—one of the longest studies of any wild animal in the world.

  Hyenas “appear to violate the rules of mammalian biology,” Holekamp tells me. “Studying the oddballs can teach you about the basics,” she explains. “They allow us to gain insight into what the rules actually are.” And by showing us an alternative way to sociality and intelligence, they help us better understand our own beloved pets, and perhaps even ourselves.

  Great White Sharks

  — Sy —

  A few summers ago, on every one of my trips to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, I worried about sharks.

  I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see one.

  That summer I was lucky enough to accompany the state’s Division of Marine Fisheries shark biologist Greg Skomal to document his study of some of the Cape’s latest newcomers: great white sharks.

  But at first the sharks were not cooperating.

  Drawn by a rebounding population of gray seals who come to these shores to birth their pups, these most feared and powerful of all sharks show up at the Cape each summer—right about the time human beachgoers get there. What could go wrong?

  To hear some people tell it, big, scary great whites are lurking everywhere, waiting to snatch swimmers. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” says Skomal. “They don’t want to eat people,” he explains. “They want to eat seals.” On the rare occasions when they bite someone, it’s by mistake—and they spit the person out. This is what happened to a Truro tourist in 2012, who was swimming far from shore and close to seals—the first shark attack in Massachusetts waters in seventy-six years (and one from which the victim recovered completely).

  “Great whites are not at all what people say about them,” Skomal told me. “They’re not all curmudgeonly and angry and wanting to kill something. I’ve never met one like that.” In fact, great whites can be surprisingly shy—as I discovered on my first shark sortie with Skomal and his team.

  To find the sharks in the Cape’s pea-green waters, Skomal and his fellow researchers perform a delicate ballet on sea and air. Flying at 1,200 feet in his single-engine Citabria, pilot Wayne Davis searches for the torpedo shape of a great white in the water. When he finds one, he directs Skomal’s boat to film it.

  The purpose of the study is to identify as many individual great white sharks as possible, in an effort to find out how many there are. Along the shark’s sides, near the gills, pelvic fins, and base of the tail, the meeting of the shark’s steely gray upper surface and its white underbelly forms a distinctive, individual pattern.

  Filming this sounds like a tall order—and by the end of our second, unsuccessful sortie together, searching sharkless, bucking waves cloaked in glaring sun, I was worried we’d never get the chance to try.

  But then came our third sortie, in August. Everything changed: Davis spotted shark after shark. Again and again our captain piloted the boat directly alongside one huge, silvery shadow after another. Skomal’s delight was infectious. “Sweet!” he cried, recognizing one of the sharks he’d already tagged—a male named Chex. “Big shark—big boy!” he shouted, as he filmed an exceptionally impressive fourteen-footer. The team captured GoPro footage of six different sharks that day—five males and one female.

  The thrill of that day made me long for even closer contact. Later that fall I got my chance. I found myself in an underwater cage, breathing through a hookah, just off the coast of Guadalupe Island, Mexico. Its clear blue waters afford exceptional views of this storied predator.

  Inside the cage, I understood
I’d be perfectly safe. But what would it feel like to be just yards away from a 1,500-pound fish whose three hundred serrated teeth were capable of severing the head of a twenty-foot bull elephant seal in a single bite?

  As I donned my scuba gear to descend into the cage with my fellow divers, my heart pounded.

  For the first few minutes, small striped fish called fusiliers swam into the cage; bits of tuna bait floated by; a tiny jellyfish stung my cheek. We swiveled our necks, willing a shark to materialize.

  And then, literally out of the blue, from about a hundred feet away, the ocean seemed to gather itself into the shape of a shark, and it swam toward us. Sleek and sinuous, silver above and cream below, the shark was as elegant as a knight in white satin. His dark eye swiveled in its socket to glance at me, then flicked away. There was no menace in his glance.

  In that moment I shared Skomal’s devotion to a fish many people wrongly fear. Earlier, on one of our sorties, he had described the typical demeanor of these massive, powerful fish: “They’re laid back. They’re calm. They’re beautiful. I want these sharks to survive.”

  Mysterious and misunderstood as apex predators, for millions of years great whites controlled the balance of the ocean ecosystem. On humans’ watch, we have decimated shark populations: We kill 100 million yearly. By 2050 we will have filled the sea with more plastic than fish. No wonder, then, that when that great white approached me in the shark cage, instead of fear, a great sense of calm swept over me. With him in charge, the ocean would be in good hands.

  Feeding Deer

  — Liz —

  Most authorities on deer, especially those in the New England fish and game departments, strongly advise people not to feed deer in winter because this can kill them. However, far fewer deer are killed by being fed than by being shot—in 2014, the time of this writing, hunters “harvested” more than 19,000 deer just in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, not counting deer who were wounded but escaped the hunter to die later. But the same authorities point out that at least in New England, deer have few natural predators and would overpopulate if hunters didn’t do their part. Then, too, in severe winters deer die of starvation—in spring you find circles of their hair after other animals have eaten their corpses. Even so, there are good reasons not to feed them.