Animals Behaving Badly

by Linda Lombardi

  In fact, researchers have found strangely familiar drinking patterns in general. The monkeys can be divided into the same categories as humans—there are binge drinkers, steady drinkers, social drinkers, and teetotalers. The majority drink in moderation and prefer their alcohol mixed with something sweet, but there are small percentages who never drink or who go to the other extreme:The binge drinkers gulp down the alcohol at a very fast rate and pass out on the floor. The next day they do it all over again.

  But while most animals pay the price of overindulgence, some get off completely scot-free. A certain tree shrew in Malaysia lives on a diet of fermented nectar, and scientists found that the shrews showed no signs of intoxication despite blood alcohol levels that would be several times the legal limit in most places.

  And next time you’re planning your Saturday night transportation, take a moment to be envious of fruit bats. They don’t just have better sex than you, as we saw in Chapter 3, but they don’t need a designated driver, either. Researchers who fed alcohol to fruit bats in Belize and then had them fly through an obstacle course predicted that they would basically stumble through it, colliding with stationary objects. Contrary to expectations, the bats’ flight and navigation ability was completely unimpaired.

  BEASTS BAKED, BLASTED, AND BUZZED

  Strong drink isn’t the only mind-altering substance that our fellow creatures indulge in. Many of us who live with cats frequently supply them with their drug of choice, either straight or in cute little toys. Catnip is no use for other species, but like alcohol, other drugs can affect our fellow creatures in familiar ways. Here’s the owner of a dog that ate a stash of pot found in a park in Seattle:“His eyes were kind of glossed over, very out of touch, I mean, he didn’t seem to recognize me at first,” Nestor Waddell said. “When he was trying to walk, he was looking at his paw, and then looking at the ground and then trying to get his paw to reach the ground, but was unsuccessful.”

  Just like with booze, recognizable behavior when high on drugs isn’t confined to creatures that are our close relatives. Our friends the bees, when given cocaine, dance more—and remember, in their world dancing isn’t just about partying, it’s about communication. The wiggle dance of the honeybee provides hive mates with directions to a food source, and it’s normally calibrated to the quality of the food and how badly the hive needs it. But when the bees are coked-up, they tend to exaggerate: They’re more likely to dance, regardless of those factors.

  YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE TO LOCOWEED . . .

  While at first glance it may seem a bit unfair to blame animals for what happens in a lab, scientists know better. Just like in the alcohol studies, they’ve gone out of their way to design experiments that give animals a choice. These days, study animals can even self-administer a dose by pushing a button or lever attached to an injection pump.

  But the first experimenters back in the nineteenth century didn’t need fancy medical technology to observe the same effect. Siegel describes what happened in the earliest studies on morphine and opium: Pigeons “came to the front of their cages, wings flapping with excitement, and stood without protest for their next injection,” and cats, after initially trying to bite and scratch, “would run to the experimenter, jump on his lap, and even lick his hand while waiting for the morphine.”

  And it’s not just scientists who help animals develop a habit. In some parts of the world, opium is still used as a training reward for elephants. This may seem fiendishly clever—who’s more motivated than an addict looking for a fix? However, they can apparently become rather insistent on the matter. Imagine a jittery, drug-deprived, four-ton beast searching your pockets with its trunk, and you might decide it’s safer to stick to peanuts.

  In any case, animals don’t need human assistance to develop a craving for mind-altering substances. Locoweed, which grows in the American West, was first described by an early settler who observed his horses having hallucinations and fits. Far from learning to avoid the plant, livestock will return to it insistently, and when farmers work to clear it from the fields, the animals will try to steal it back.

  In addition to making use of drugs they find in the wild, animals will steal our own hard-gotten harvests whenever they can. Siegel reports that dogs and goats will swipe any peyote left within reach by their Indian owners, and describes a trio of goats that ate a large stash and spent the day running amok, charging and butting each other and humans as well, occasionally pausing to stare into space and twitch their heads. (Admittedly, goats probably wouldn’t have spent that day doing anything much more productive anyway.)

  POPPIES . . . POPPIES . . .

  In the nineteenth century, animals enthusiastically participated in the fashion for opium, like the two blackbirds in one opium den who would perch near a human user and share the smoke. Writer Jean Cocteau observed: All animals are charmed by opium. Addicts in the colonies know the danger of this bait for wild beasts and reptiles. Flies gather round the tray and dream, the lizards with their little mittens swoon on the ceiling above the lamp and wait for the night, mice come close and nibble the dross.... The cockroaches and the spiders form a circle in ecstasy.

  While most humans shun opium in favor of more modern mind alterants, some animals still find a way to get a fix. In Australia, wallabies have been caught eating opium poppies and getting, in the words of a government official, “as high as a kite.” The effects of the opium inspire them to hop round in circles in the fields, creating crop circles (and frightening human bystanders who fear an alien invasion). Sheep are also reportedly developing a taste for the poppies.

  However, there’s still at least one place where animals can indulge in human-processed opium, and on a grander scale. An opium factory in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has been producing the drug from poppies since 1820, and one thing that hasn’t changed is that humans aren’t the only ones who take advantage of it, as the BBC reported:Monkeys still have the run of the factory, eating opium waste and dozing all day.

  “They have become addicted to opium. Most of the time we have to drag dozing monkeys away from this place,” a worker says.

  ANIMAL PUSHERS

  In fact, far from humans pushing drugs on animals, it’s sometimes the other way around. Animals are to blame for introducing us to many intoxicants. Khat (also spelled qat), which is chewed as a stimulant in East Africa and the Middle East, is said to have been discovered when a herder noticed that his goats were wired after eating the leaves and decided to follow their example. (One source describes the effect of qat as producing “feelings of euphoria and alertness that can verge on mania and hyperactivity,” which is about the last thing you want in a goat.) A researcher who studied the use of various drugs by African apes notes that they introduced humans to a hallucinogenic root used in Gabon:Most intriguing, said Professor Huffman, is how local people claim to have discovered the intoxicating effects of the plant by watching animals, including gorillas, go into a frenzy of fear, as if being chased by invisible objects, after eating the roots.

  Why this observation didn’t serve to warn people away rather than attract them is a subject for another book entirely.

  We don’t even need to go so far afield to find a case in which animals are to blame for our own addictions. Legend has it that we were introduced to coffee by goats. The story is similar to that of khat: A herder observed that his (no doubt already obnoxious) goats were even more energetic than normal, and realized that this was the result when they ate the berries of a particular shrub.

  The most charming renditions of the tale describe the goats “dancing” on their hind legs and the young goatherd’s concern that he would get in trouble if his herd became ill from eating the strange fruit. However, there’s also a hint of something darker: One character who’s particularly intrigued by the goats’ behavior is the head of a monastery, whose monks “had considerable difficulty keeping awake during their nocturnal devotions.”

  Have you ever suspected that coffe
e was deliberately invented to keep you working for hours on end when a reasonable person would take a siesta, demand an assistant, or quit their job? That it is, in fact, a tool of The Man? Well, now you know who to blame for providing it to The Man: It’s The Goat.

  HYPNO-TOAD AND COMPANY

  All the animals we’ve seen so far have confined their abuse to, well, normal drugs. However animals don’t restrict themselves to just plants and fungi to get a high—they’ll even use other animals. Certain primates, like lemurs, will catch a millipede, give it a little bite to stimulate its defensive toxins, and rub it all over their bodies. The toxins do seem to repel insects and parasites, but the lemurs’ half-closed eyes, drooling, and dazed dozing-off clearly shows that they’re getting another benefit as well.

  Toad-licking to get high may be an urban legend as far as humans go—unless you count people who heard the tale and were stupid enough to give it a try—but apparently it’s such a big problem for canines that in Arizona, where the native toads have a lethal toxin, you can sign your dog up for toad-avoidance training classes.

  * * *

  THIS IS YOUR CAT ON CATNIP

  You don’t need to apply for research grants or go on an expedition to an exotic wild locale to observe animal drug use in a natural setting—all that’s necessary is to plant some catnip in your own yard. Owners describe drooling, dilated pupils, and aggressive defense of the stash as some of the reactions of their cats to catnip. And much of the typical behavior suggests that cats are actually hallucinating: gazing into space at things that aren’t there and batting at birds and pouncing on mice nobody else can see.

  That’s all bad enough, of course. But here’s an odd fact: Catnip does not work on kittens. It doesn’t affect cats till they get older. Want to guess why?

  Cats react to catnip only once they have reached sexual maturity because its active ingredient is basically an artificial feline sex pheromone. The rubbing, vocalizing, and particularly the rolling-around are the same behaviors we see in female cats in heat.

  * * *

  In Australia, some dogs seem to have learned how to get the benefits despite the danger:Megan Pickering, a vet in Katherine, said she had treated a number of dogs affected by the deadly toad poison.

  “We have had quite a number of cases of dogs that are getting addicted to the toxin,” Ms Pickering told the Northern Territory News newspaper.

  “There seems to be dogs that are licking the toxin to get high. They lick the toads and only take in a small amount of the poison—they get a smile on their face and look like they are going to wander off into the sunset.”

  JUNK FOOD JUNKIES

  Maybe the biggest surprise in the annals of animal addiction, though, comes from the scientists who proved that they can be junk food junkies. Anyone who’s seen rats foraging in Dumpsters would probably suspect that they are attracted to the worst products of humankind’s fake-food factories, but the effects are way more profound than you might expect. When two neuroscientists fed rats a diet of junk food including Ho Hos, sausage, pound cake, bacon, and cheesecake, it was no surprise that the rodents became obese. But they also became compulsive eaters, and the researchers found that their brains showed the same changes as those of addicts. The rats continued to eat junk food even if they learned that an electric shock would follow it. And they find it just as hard to break the junk food habit as you do:When the junk food was taken away and the rats had access only to nutritious chow (what Kenny calls the “salad option”), the obese rats refused to eat. “They starve themselves for two weeks afterward,” Kenny says. “Their dietary preferences are dramatically shifted.”

  Maybe this should be the basis for the next big government nutrition education campaign. The next time you reach for that bag of chips, think about it—Do you really want to lower yourself to the level of a rat?

  SIX

  Beastly Devices and Deceits

  IT’S COMFORTING TO ASSUME THAT ANIMALS ARE ESSENTIALLY honest. After all, when your dog comes running to greet you at the end of a long day, no one wants to have to wonder if he’s faking it. And if there’s a moment of doubt, we can remind ourselves that it takes a quick wit to come up with a good cover story. Surely they’re just not smart enough to tell anything besides the truth.

  Sadly, this reassuring rationalization doesn’t stand up to the facts. Lying goes back way in evolutionary history, maybe because it’s just too useful for nature to miss out on. For many animals, in fact, deception is part of their fundamental biology. There are insects that look like another insect with a nasty flavor, relieving them of the burden of actually producing their own bad-tasting bodily fluids. Some harmless snakes imitate the appearance of venomous species, and don’t even have to do that good a job of it, since most animals (including us) can’t remember whether it’s red next to black or red next to yellow that’s the poisonous one.

  There are more complicated versions of this kind of physical deception as well. In some species of fish there are what even scientists call sneaker males—by staying small and looking like females, they can sneak into a nest and fertilize eggs right under the nose of the dominant male. In the flat lizard, “she-males” keep their juvenile coloration for the same reason—the dominant guy won’t chase them off, so they get a chance to mate with his girlfriends. (They still smell like males, though, so they need to be prepared to get a move on if he gets too close.)

  If you can’t take those cold-blooded creatures seriously, wait: This kind of thing also happens in a much more advanced species—a close relative, even. In orangutans, the dominant males are big bulky brutes, hairier and with wider faces than youngsters. But there are also adult males—the “Peter Pan” type—that keep looking like adolescents, sometimes for as long as twenty years. This lets them sneak around and mate with females without being driven away by the head honcho—and if the big guy meets with an unfortunate accident and Peter Pan gets to take over, soon he will be pumped up and bearded as well.

  THE LYING GAME

  It might not seem fair to accuse those animals of lying. No one gets to choose the color of their complexion, right?

  Ah, but some animals do. And guess what they do with it?

  Cuttlefish can control the color and pattern of their skin, changing it with amazing speed and great variety. And in the giant Australian cuttlefish, sneaker males use this ability to cross-dress. They will hide their extra male arms and hold the others up the way an egg-laying female does, but that’s not enough to fool the sharp vision of another cuttlefish. So they also change their skin to the typical mottled female coloration. “They are actually disguising themselves to get past the males they couldn’t beat in a fight,” says one researcher. Their tranny disguise can be almost too successful, causing all kinds of cephalopod sexual confusion: Sometimes other males will hit on the fakers, since even some sneaker males fail to recognize their fellow sneaks.

  PLAYING POSSUM

  Few animals have the quick-change talents of the cuttlefish, but less fancy changes to your appearance can work just as well, like when a bird pretends to have a broken wing to distract predators from her nest. And while that behavior may be a simple instinct, there’s also the chimp who was injured in a fight with a rival and limped for a week afterward—but only when his competitor was watching.

  Animals also take it further and look not just injured, but dead. And it turns out that playing possum to fool a predator is not as innocent a strategy as it might seem. Scientists have studied beetles that are preyed on by spiders to see exactly how this ruse works: Is it just that the predator loses interest? They found that in fact, playing dead works okay when you’re alone, but it’s most effective when the other creatures around you react by fleeing. The spiders go after them instead, so the beetle who fakes it survives by sacrificing its neighbors.

  HEY, LOOK OVER THERE!

  Appearances may speak volumes, but actual communication systems can be pretty handy too. And it seems like as soon as a species can
communicate with sound, lying is quick to follow.

  Many animals use alarm calls to alert their fellows that a predator has been spotted. Some even have different calls for different kinds of threats, so you know whether you’re fleeing an eagle or a leopard and can use the appropriate strategy to escape. Helpful, cooperative behavior, right?

  Of course, the whole point of this sort of thing is to react immediately, without wasting precious moments second-guessing—which makes it easy to use for other purposes. When you and another bird see a tasty insect at the same time, and the other guy says “Whoa, an eagle!” you’re going to look up automatically—while your helpful friend, knowing there’s no danger, snatches the treat from under your beak.

  If there’s too much crying wolf, though, everyone’s at risk of ignoring a real danger. So animals don’t waste this clever strategy if mere bullying will suffice. For example, great tits use alarm calls to chase a dominant bird away from food, but if it’s a subordinate, they threaten to beat it up instead.

  Some animals have even figured out how to use this ruse on different species: A South African bird called the drongo imitates the alarm calls of other birds. Their fake calls chase those birds away from food, and also fool meerkats, who’ve learned to rely on the birdcalls for their own safety. (And although it hasn’t yet been proven to the picky satisfaction of science, the drongo has been observed imitating the meerkats’ own predator alarms as well.)