MOMMIE AND DADDIE DEAREST
If infants manage not to get eaten, starved to death, or murdered by their siblings, that doesn’t mean they’re in the clear. There’s still the risk of child abuse by parents as well as by other adults who don’t seem to believe that it takes a village to raise a baby animal:■ Ever been driven crazy by a crying child in a public place? Rhesus monkeys feel the same way, and they’re not very nice about it. Mothers rush to give in to a temper tantrum when other monkeys are around, because otherwise the onlookers will kick, bite, and shove the mom and her annoying tot. The reason is familiar, according to a researcher: “They do it basically because they are annoyed by the sound.”
■ Ring-billed gulls incestuously mount their own chicks—and it’s mostly females who do it, some of which are habitual offenders.
■ Herring gulls mount their chicks too—the ones that manage to be born in spite of the fact that they also eat their own eggs. And if youngsters try to leave home to escape abuse, they don’t find help elsewhere: The youngsters are pecked, picked up and shaken and thrown, and killed and occasionally cannibalized by other adults.
■ In some species of monkeys, a certain percentage of mothers are serial child abusers. Moms in one colony of pigtail macaques were observed taking normal care of the kids as well as physically abusing them—dragging them by the tail or legs, pressing them against the ground, chewing on their extremities, and compulsively grooming around the eyes, sometimes causing blindness. And on an uncannily familiar note, researchers have discovered that it runs in families: If you’re a macaque raised by an abusive mother you’re more likely to be an abuser yourself.
Animal parents play favorites, too, and sometimes for the lowest of reasons: Earwigs take better care of offspring that are already well fed and vigorous and neglect the hungry ones that really need their care. And coots give more food to the chicks that have the most bizarrely colorful plumage.
SCREWING AROUND
Perhaps it’s only to be expected that animals are bad parents—it’s what happens when you bring children into a relationship that’s already a mess. Even putting aside incest and other warped lifestyle choices (swans, for example, are happy to marry their parents or siblings), our fellow creatures can’t seem to manage simple monogamy.
We used to believe that many animals formed faithful, tilldeath-do-us-part couples. In reality, they’re so good at sneaking around that they even fooled the experts. For instance, birds have traditionally been held up as paragons of monogamy, so it was a shock to scientists when a project to control blackbird populations failed. The paired-up guys were all vasectomized and released—but somehow, all their mates had offspring anyway. Now that DNA analysis is possible, what’s clinically called “extra-pair paternity” has been proven in birds all over the world, in every family. In the most promiscuous bird found so far, the salt marsh sparrow, 95 percent of females mate with more than one male. Researchers in Connecticut found that nearly every clutch of eggs had more than one father—an average of 2.5 daddies per nest—and in a third of the nests, every chick had a different father. Even a scientist hardened to the truth about bird relationships was taken aback:“We were not surprised to find some level of promiscuity,” he said. “But we were quite stunned at just how extreme the rate was.”
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MISSING THE POINT
When humans take an interest in animal family life, they tend to get the issues exactly backward. For example, staff at a garden in Somerset, England, must constantly reassure visitors who worry about a male swan living as a bachelor. “The public do get upset when they see the swan by himself because the general impression tends to be of swans being part of a loyal couple, devoted to one another,” says the head of the gardens.
However, the reason the swan is alone is that he can’t be trusted around the ladies—in fact, he’s possibly a serial wife murderer. He’s suspected of killing his first mate, who was found dead in the water while incubating eggs. The second apparently fled with the children, and the third “didn’t want to spend any time with him and later died of ‘depression,’ ” according to news reports.
In another demonstration of our misconceptions about bird families, many animal fans have been charmed by the devoted relationship between the adults portrayed in the picture book And Tango Makes Three, which depicts a gay penguin couple raising an adopted chick. However, the story bears little resemblance to reality. Divorce rates in various species of penguins are close to 50 percent, and promiscuity is rampant. In one species, one third to one half of heterosexual activity is adulterous, and nearly half of the gay sex involves male mates getting it on the side.
Penguin parenting is also a less rosy story in real life. Scientists have shown that penguins won’t work harder to pick up the slack for a handicapped spouse: When one Adélie penguin of a pair was fitted with a tracking device that slowed down its swimming, the other parent didn’t bring back more food for the chicks to compensate.
And gay penguin parents are no exception to these general trends. In fact, another long-term same-sex penguin couple in San Francisco who’d also raised an adopted chick broke up when one of them left his partner—and for a female penguin, no less.
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FUZZY INFIDELITY
The behavior of birds may be appalling, but don’t be too quick to feel morally superior just because you’re a mammal. Unlike birds, who at least maintain a facade in front of the children, less than 3 percent of mammal species even bother to pretend to be monogamous.
And that exceptional 3 percent? Turns out they’re the ones who are exceptionally good at hiding their affairs from the prying eyes of researchers. Prairie voles are supposedly part of that mammal minority that spend their whole lives with a single partner, and scientists have flocked to study this phenomenon of furry fidelity. However, it turns out that these models of monogamy routinely cheat. The females may share a home with only one male, but they’ll share a bed with others: A DNA study showed that almost a quarter of litters had a father other than the live-in mate. The hardened author of the study, apparently no longer capable of being shocked by the sex lives of animals, said: You can pair with a partner for life and still have sex with others—and that is what prairie voles do. There is a lesson there for humans.
This disappointing news about rodent morality may help solve an abiding mystery of animal family life, though. Some species live in groups where young adults, rather than leaving home to start their own families, help raise the offspring of the dominant pair. Evolutionary theorists have twisted themselves into knots trying to explain how such a social system can persist when the assistants don’t get to pass on the genes for their accommodating behavior. But part of the answer may be simple: The “helpful” male, at least, may not be so selfless after all. Chances are that he’s having sex with the group’s mom too, and some of the kids he’s helping raise are actually his own.
FAMILIAR DRAMAS
Many family dramas are repetitions of sad old stories—and sound oddly familiar. In recent years in some parts of Africa, large numbers of rhinos were being sexually assaulted and murdered. The mysterious deaths were eventually traced to young male elephants, who were also killing each other at unprecedented rates: In one park, up to 90 percent of male elephant deaths were due to other elephants.
What’s to blame for this heightened aggression? It turned out that these violent youth gangs were made up of the sons of single teen mothers. Because of human culling and relocation of herds, inexperienced young females were raising babies without the support of grandmothers and other female relatives, and their sons were growing up without adult male role models. The solution, it turned out, was support for creating traditional families: In one park, when rangers moved in older bull elephants to join the group, the young studs were brought under control.
FIVE
Party Animals
SUBSTANCE ABUSE HAS TO BE THE ONE KIND OF BAD BEHAVIOR that’s unique to humans, right?
Doing drugs, getting drunk—surely that’s not possible without the technology that gives us the ability to drive to the liquor store and pay for a six-pack, or at the very least, without opposable thumbs for opening bottles?
Sadly, this is completely untrue. As fermentation is a natural process, alcohol does occur in nature, and it’s hardly just the highly evolved that have a taste for the stuff. Animals including cows, goats, pigs, and monkeys are happy to chow down on fermented fruit. In yet another example of how wrong our romantic notions of nature are, one of the best documented animal drunkards is one of the few insects that humans have a positive feeling about: the honeybee.
BOOZING BEES
The drinking problems of bees have landed them in the news for as long as there’s been news, as seen in this 1898 New York Times report about bees hanging out around sugarcane factories:At first the bees carry on their labors diligently. Then, little by little, they learn that juices from the sugar cane contain alcohol....
Forsaking even the semblance of work, the bees imbibe the intoxicating fluid, and thenceforth the social and mental decline is marked. The sad fact is that the bees get drunk. They fly about in a dazed and listless condition, ambitionless so far as honey making is concerned. Once they have drunk from the fountain of Bacchus, they are moral and physical degenerates.
Some scientists take advantage of this taste for booze in the lab, using bees in alcoholism research. They’re the perfect subject, says one researcher:Most animals have to be tricked into drinking alcohol, says Charles Abramson of Ohio State University. But a honeybee will happily drink the equivalent of a human downing 10 litres of wine at one sitting.
“We can get them to drink pure ethanol, and I know of no organism that drinks pure ethanol—not even a college student,” he says.
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CAN AN APE GET SOME SERVICE HERE?
Lacking either grant-funded libations or the chance to snatch insufficiently supervised beverages, some animals will demand to be served by humans in any way they can. One chimp in Russia named Zhora was actually removed from his zoo and sent to rehab to treat his smoking and drinking habit. Some reports implied that this tragedy was all the fault of zoo visitors who, despite the pleas of management and a barrier of three fences, managed to supply the chimp with booze and cigarettes. But they were only giving Zhora what he asked for—as Reuters quotes the zoo director: “He would pester passers-by for booze.”
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The results of their enthusiastic participation in this research confirm the observations of the nineteenth-century Times reporter. Bees share with us not just the taste for liquor but its effects as well, including memory loss, impaired motor functioning, and poor personal hygiene:Researchers gave honey bees various levels of ethanol, the intoxicating agent in liquor, and monitored the ensuing behavioral effects of the drink—specifically how much time the bees spent flying, walking, standing still, grooming and flat on their backs, so drunk they couldn’t stand up. . . .
Not surprisingly, increasing ethanol consumption meant bees spent less time flying, walking and grooming, and more time upside down.
GIN AND TONIC, PLEASE
Even when given alternatives, many animals choose alcohol. Scientists devised a fruit fly–size drink dispenser (no word on whether they also invented tiny fruit fly–size paper umbrellas) and found that given the choice between plain and alcoholic beverages, fruit flies preferred booze. They even developed a tolerance, gradually coming to prefer stronger drink. The researchers also observed drunken behavior, although in fruit flies, this was pretty much confined to “hyperactivity and loss of coordination,” since the flies were not given access to lampshades to put on their heads or cars to drive into stationary objects.
A side result of this research was also intriguing, if you’ve ever wondered how certain alcoholic beverages become popular and traditional despite how nasty they taste. When quinine was added to their drinks, the fruit flies, which usually avoid the toxic, foul-tasting stuff, thought it was just fine as a mixer. “I was actually pretty surprised when they continued to drink it,” one researcher said.
CHOOSE YOUR POISON
You may be thinking to yourself, These are probably just hungry animals who have stumbled across some rotten fruit. An animal’s got to eat, right? Well, scientists are way ahead of you. A study by psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel (who we’ll be hearing a lot more from in this chapter) found that hunger had nothing to do with it. In a barn with free access to food, water, and alcohol, elephants chose to drink the equivalent of about thirtyfive cans of beer a day. The effects were noticeable:They started growling—a vocalization pattern associated with arousal—and flapping their ears more than usual.... They began swaying rapidly for an hour or two, then slowed down and leaned against their chains, which prevented them from falling over.
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REINDEER FLYING HIGH
Animals also don’t miss out on the magic of mushrooms. Reindeer in Siberia not only eat the fly agaric mushroom and then behave like they’re stoned but will even consume the urine of human mushroom eaters to get the same effect. Herders take advantage of this by using urine to assist in reindeer roundup, but the animals can be so aggressive about getting their fix that travelers are warned against peeing within sight of one.
Dogs go for psychedelic ’shrooms, too, and researcher Ronald Siegel, who’s made a career of testing and observing animals on drugs, reports:On ranches in Hawaii and Mexico, I saw dogs deliberately nipping the caps off psilocybin mushrooms and swallowing them. A few minutes later the dogs were running around in circles, headtwitching, yelping and refusing to respond to human commands.
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And just like us, drink kept these elephants from doing their jobs: Flapping their ears like a frustrated Dumbo, they had difficulty responding to commands from their handler. They kept dropping their trunkhold on each other’s tails—the trained elephant’s version of walking a straight line.
Siegel also tried offering alcohol to a free-ranging herd in a game park. He found that being bartender to elephants is not without its risks: They not only fought among themselves for access to the vat of alcohol, but when he tried to cut one off, it pursued his jeep and attacked him.
In fact, when not being plied with free drinks by generous researchers, animals will make special efforts to get their beverage of choice. Vervet monkeys on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts developed a taste for liquor by eating fermented sugarcane in cane fields, but they’ve long since found a better source and have become famous for stealing vacationers’ unattended drinks. In a Washington State campground, a bear was found sleeping off thirty-six cans of beer, but he clearly had a favorite brand. Evidently, the bear had tried one can of Busch and rejected it for the local favorite Rainier. He got his comeuppance, though, when wildlife officials took the cue:The agents decided to trap the bear with doughnuts, honey and, of course, two cans of Rainier beer. It did the trick and he was captured.
In India, elephants commonly break into fermenting vats of rice beer, and it’s not because they stumble on it accidentally. “It has been noticed that elephants have developed a taste for rice beer and local liquor and they always look for it when they invade villages,” an elephant expert in Guwahati told reporters. In southeast Asia, pigs and chickens are reported to share this taste as well.
THE MORNING AFTER
It’s clear, then, that animal drunkenness is not something that only happens when wicked scientists and zoo visitors push strong drink on innocent creatures or when nature or inattentive vacationers leave it where curious critters can stumble across it. Boozing beasts may have their reasons. It’s often been suggested that elephants, weary of their renowned perfect memories, drink to forget. But before you feel sorry for our fellow imbibers, remember that animal drunkenness isn’t always a victimless crime.
Sometimes the offenses are fairly minor, like the badger, dead drunk on fermented cherries, who was blocking traffic in the middle of a road i
n Germany. Others are more serious. Indian elephants drunk on local rice beer have brawls that can be fatal both to humans and to the pachyderms themselves, like the ones that electrocuted themselves on power lines.
In one strange case, a man in Sweden was arrested and jailed for ten days after finding the body of his wife, who had not returned from walking her dog. He was cleared only after technicians found physical evidence on her clothing pointing to a different perpetrator: hair and saliva of an elk—a normally reclusive animal that can become aggressive after eating fermented fallen apples in gardens.
And like humans, animal drinkers persist despite suffering unpleasant aftereffects themselves. Darwin wrote about an ancient method of trapping monkeys that involved leaving out open jars of wine, which the monkeys would drink till they passed out. He observed that they then woke up with hangovers:On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons.
Modern scientists studying the monkeys of St. Kitts observe parallels among partying primates:The parallels between the vervets’ behaviour and human behaviour are striking. A cageful of drunken monkeys is like a cocktail party. You have one who gets aggressive, one who gets sexy, one who thinks everything’s funny and one who gets really grumpy.
Animals Behaving Badly Page 5