Animals Behaving Badly

by Linda Lombardi

  NOT THE APES YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

  Though many of the stories in this chapter are from zoos, captive apes don’t learn how to lie from observing us. They do it in nature too. For example, in the wilds of Borneo, orangutans lie about their appearance at a distance, even without the Internet to help. They use leaves held up to their mouths to make their calls deeper, which makes them sound to predators like much bigger animals. The strategy works because interactions in the dense rain forest often aren’t face to face.

  In fact, orangutans seem to think humans are even easier to fool about who they really are—they’ll try it right in front of our faces. One zoo orang that escaped from its cage into the service area grabbed a floor squeegee when discovered, apparently figuring the keepers would believe he was nothing but a big, orange, hairy employee cleaning up at the end of his shift.

  PSYCH OUT

  To make a lie work, you need to understand the psychology of your fellow creatures, and orangutans are masters of this as well. One orang managed to make a device to open his cage door latch using just a piece of cardboard. However, the most unnerving part of the story is that he knew enough to hide his tool-making project from the keepers, but realized it wasn’t worth the bother to keep it a secret from lowly volunteers.

  One of the most accomplished planning, tool-making apes ever recorded turned out to be a master of psychological manipulation as well. Fu Manchu made several escapes a few decades ago at the Omaha Zoo. Positive they’d locked all the doors—and on the verge of being fired for carelessness—keepers set up a secret watch. They saw him pull a door back from its frame, then take out a piece of wire hidden in his cheek and use it to trip the latch. He’d bent the wire into a comfortable shape to hide in his mouth, and had been carrying it around like a set of keys to use whenever he felt like getting out on a nice day.

  The most fiendish part of his plot was revealed when the humans tried to figure out where he’d gotten the wire in the first place. They discovered that it came from a light fixture in an adjoining cage, home to an orang called Heavy Lamar. She was housed alone to keep her on a strict diet, but they’d seen Fu Manchu passing her forbidden extra pieces of chow through the bars. Did he offer a straightforward trade, or did he get her used to the treats and then withhold them, taking advantage of her weakness? That part we’ll never know.

  SEVEN

  Masters of Misdirection

  ANIMALS WORK TO DIVERT OUR ATTENTION FROM THEIR BAD behavior in many ways. Our species is easily distracted by their grace, majesty, or apparent cleverness. And as many animals have discovered, one of the best strategies is to be cute.

  Consider, for example, the rabbit, whose disarming cuddliness distracts us from its other most deadly weapon: Its legendary prowess at producing more adorable little rabbits.

  As one reporter on the rabbit-invasion scene insightfully observed, “As a destructive force cloaked in cuteness, bunnies are hard to beat.” And no one knows this better than Australians. Domestic rabbits arrived in Australia along with Europeans, and like any good immigrant they seized the opportunities presented by a new land. A dozen or so were released in 1859 and in a few decades they’d spread to most of the country. A seventeen-hundred-kilometer-long rabbit-proof fence built in the first decade of the twentieth century didn’t stop them, and it’s estimated that by the 1920s, their population had grown to ten billion.

  Rabbits ate the heck out of native plants—with the assistance of feral goats they reduced one island to bedrock—and outcompeted indigenous wildlife for resources. While it’s hard to keep precise score, they’ve probably contributed to the fate of many of the twenty-two species of Australian mammals known to have gone extinct as of 2007. At that date, naturalists calculated that of the native creatures that were still hanging on, at least seventeen bird species, thirteen mammals, four reptiles, and 121 native plant species were threatened by the cuddly little invaders.

  You’d think we’d have learned a lesson from the foolishness of our ancestors and now know better than to deliberately release nonnative species, no matter how adorable. Unfortunately not. Ask the folks of Long Beach, California, where hundreds of bunnies descended from former pets live on the city college campus. They hop around charmingly and, according to one report, “fight bloody turf wars, burrow deep holes in the lawns, and devour thousands of dollars of landscaping.”

  These more recent bunny colonizers are helped along by both their cuteness and their reproductive prowess. In Long Beach, one activist experienced the effects of the latter:A few years ago, Ms. Olson rounded up 100 rabbits on the south side of campus, and found other homes for them. Only two rabbits on that part of campus evaded her. “Unfortunately, one was male and one was female,” she said. Within six months, the population on that side of campus had climbed back to 100 rabbits, she said.

  North of the border, the University of Victoria in British Columbia had a similar problem, where an estimated sixteen hundred rabbits were destroying a prized rhododendron garden. When officials tried to reduce the population, they were blocked by the mesmerizing effects of cute: Bunny-hugging humans actually got a legal injunction that temporarily delayed trapping.

  BEAUTY IS ONLY FEATHER DEEP

  Cuteness isn’t the only quality that animals use to blind us to their nature; we’re also suckers for natural beauty. And what’s more beautiful than a hummingbird? To their fans, these tiny, colorful creatures are as magical as fairies. Wildlife writer Richard Conniff met a birding guide who knew these deluded souls well:“These creatures have a following like mythical beasts,” said one of the guides, a little ruefully. “There are people who don’t care anything about birds, or other wildlife or nature, but they love hummingbirds. We had one woman tell us: ‘I just love hummingbirds and unicorns.’ And I don’t think she drew any distinction between the two.”

  However, the birding guide harbored no such illusions: “We’re probably lucky these things aren’t the size of ravens, or it would not be safe to walk in the woods.” As we saw in Chapter 3, hummingbirds practice prostitution and will knock a female out of the air to rape her; they also use their beaks, claws, and long pointed bills as weapons against rivals. This sort of thing is no secret to science, as Conniff discovered:A scientific paper about the rufous hummingbird includes this endearing notation: “SOCIAL BEHAVIOR: None. Individual survival seems only concern.”

  What makes hummingbird fandom all the more mysterious is that you don’t need an advanced degree or a foreign expedition to observe the creature’s true nature.

  One website written by hummingbird aficionados describes them puffing themselves up to look larger, using their beaks and claws as weapons, and being so aggressive toward their own kind that they attacked a plaque decorated with fake hummingbirds. If you want to see for yourself, they advise, set out a large number of feeders, spaced in a way that makes it impossible for one bird to guard them all, and step back:Don’t bother to try and stop them from fighting. It’s best to just leave them alone and let them work it out. We have a rule on the top deck of the World of Hummingbirds: Hummingbird Farm of “no body-slamming.” Whenever the hummingbirds start to body-slam each other, we yell, “Hey.” Now they just do it when they think no one is looking.

  MENDACIOUS MAGNIFICENCE

  Cuteness and magical beauty aren’t the only qualities animals use to cloak their true nature: Some go for power and majesty instead. One example is the noble lion, which as we saw in Chapter 4, has the charming habit of killing baby lions. The king of beasts has other flaws as well, including extreme laziness. Smithsonian Magazine profiled a scientist who has spent his life studying lions and whose very first research conclusion was rather disappointing:When he first visited the Serengeti lions in 1974, he concluded that “lions were really boring.” The laziest of all the cats, they were usually collapsed in a stupor, as if they had just run a marathon, when in reality they hadn’t moved a muscle in 12 hours.

  And if you haven’t already had enough of
your illusions smashed about these supposedly brave beasts, here’s what one journalist discovered about what they’re afraid of:Earlier I had asked what kind of anti-lion gear the researchers carried. “An umbrella,” Jansson said. Apparently, lions don’t like umbrellas, particularly if they’re painted with large pairs of eyes.

  Fearsome reputations with no foundation go way back in evolutionary history. It turns out that even impressively frightening extinct animals don’t live up to their press. Picture the Tyrannosaurus rex: mighty carnivorous giant, battling fierce rivals to the death! Or . . . not so much. A couple of scientists looked at the fossilized contents of T. rex stomachs and droppings, then put those data together with the rarity of bite marks on the bones of large prey species and the surprising absence of fossilized young given the large numbers of eggs that dinosaurs laid. Their conclusion: T. rex must have been another of those species with a spectacular press agent, because in reality, you know what they killed and ate? Little tiny defenseless baby dinosaurs, of course.

  FAMILY SECRETS

  It’s a fact of life: We’re often the last to know the secrets of those who are closest to us. Perhaps this is why we’ve been so blind to the faults of our primate cousins. Yet despite repeated revelations about the true nature of our fellow apes, we can’t seem to get out of the habit of putting them on a primate pedestal.

  For a long time, scientists used to believe that humans were uniquely violent. It was conventional wisdom that other animals, even those that share most of our DNA, like chimps, killed for food or competed for mates but they didn’t assault or murder their own kind just for the heck of it and certainly not for control of land. Then in 1974, an observer at Jane Goodall’s research station in Tanzania saw eight chimps cross into another troop’s territory, come upon a lone male, and attack him. One of the intruders held him facedown in the dirt while the others bit and pummeled him for a good ten minutes.

  * * *

  IF THEY DO THE CRIME . . .

  Some academics have argued that dolphins are so intelligent that we need to treat them as more than animals, based on evidence that they have large brains, pass on cultural activities, recognize themselves in mirrors, have sophisticated communication systems, and so on.

  Setting aside the implication that it is okay to treat someone badly as long as they’re stupid—because honestly, who hasn’t had the temptation—I am happy to grant the premise that dolphins are brilliant, since it takes nothing away from my argument that they are basically bastards. In fact, I’m quite intrigued by the suggestion of one author that these evil geniuses should be considered “non-human persons.”

  “Dolphins should be considered non-human persons,” says ethicist Thomas White, “because they have the kind of consciousness that, in the past, we thought was unique to our species. They’re not just aware of the world around them but they have the ability to look inside and say ‘I.’ They have a sense of choice and will.”

  White argues that dolphins, like humans, should be given “moral standing” as individuals, and surely any reasonable person who has read this chapter would support this. Yes, we’ve seen that dolphins are gang rapists, murderers, and baby killers and pose a serious threat to innocent, ignorant humans—but that’s exactly the point. It’s about time we start treating dolphin persons in the same way that we treat human persons who commit those crimes. Enough putting them on T-shirts, then, and more putting them on trial: Let them pay the price like the rest of us have to.

  * * *

  It turns out that this kind of raid was no isolated incident, but rather a regular feature of chimp territorial warfare. Another researcher witnessed eighteen chimp murders committed in the course of ten years and found that the attacking group would then take over the home turf of the victim, eventually increasing their troop’s territory by over 20 percent. And how about the bonobo, the chimp with the allegedly blissful, un-hung-up sex life? They supposedly resolve conflicts without violence by making love in all possible combinations as casually as we shake hands in greeting. We thought they treated other primates equally peacefully, grooming monkeys and playing with their babies—but now they’ve also been seen hunting monkeys in a pack to kill and eat them.

  At least one expert, a primatologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo, who heard about this discovery, had the sense to suspect these new-age primates of harboring dark secrets all along: “The second I read this, I thought: Oh good, finally! I was just waiting for something like this to come up.”

  And another sexually enlightened species of primate has also turned out to be a disappointment: Scientists thought they’d found a monkey in Brazil with such a peaceful, egalitarian society that the males waited patiently in line to mate with females. They even referred to the muriqui as the “hippie monkey.”

  They just hadn’t been looking long enough. Sure, these monkeys were peaceful when there was enough of everything to go around—who isn’t? But at another study site, mates were harder to come by, with no ladies offering their favors to multiple males in a row. There, researchers saw behavior just like that of chimps, including an unprovoked gang attack on a lone individual who was bitten and pummeled to death. The unlucky fellow was attacked over his whole body but particularly, it seemed, his genitals. That’s what happens when you deprive the hippies of their free love.

  DECEIVERS OF THE DEEP

  The more we love and admire an animal, the worse the truth is likely to be. Two species in particular have done such an astonishing job of manipulating our minds that they deserve individual attention. One has even managed to worm its way into our very homes, and for this accomplishment the dog gets the whole next chapter to itself. For now, though, we will take some time to examine another—an animal we have raised almost to the level of a mythological creature, ignoring the dark secrets it hides behind its smiling exterior: the dolphin.

  “Everybody who’s done research in the field is tired of dolphin lovers who believe these creatures are floating hobbits,” said renowned animal trainer Karen Pryor, quoted in the New York Times—in 1992. She must be a whole lot more tired now, because nothing has changed.

  WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

  Consider the courtship behavior, if you can call it that, of these supposedly gentle creatures. For obvious reasons it’s difficult for humans to observe dolphin sex, so some of the details still remain obscure. But given what we do know, that’s probably just as well. You may read descriptions of dolphins “nuzzling” and “caressing” each other, but it’s pretty clear that not all dolphin sex is so tender—or even consensual.

  Ever been impressed by dolphins leaping and somersaulting in unison at an aquarium show? They do that in the wild too. First they gang up to capture a female from a rival group of males. Then to keep her where they want her, they perform those aquarium-show acrobats as they circle around, forming a moving perimeter that she can’t get past. If that’s not enough, they’ll chase, bite, and body slam her. “Sometimes the female is obviously trying to escape, and the noises start to sound like they’re hurting each other,” says one expert. “The hitting sounds really hard, and the female may end up with tooth-rake marks.”

  We’re also impressed by dolphin communication. Wouldn’t it be amazing to decipher it and learn what these remarkable creatures are saying? Well, you might be sorry you asked when it comes to their conversation on a date:Sometimes a male will make a distinctive popping noise at the female, a vocalization that sounds like a fist rapping on hollow wood. The noise seems to indicate “Get over here!” because if the female ignores the pop, the male will threaten or attack her.

  And apparently it’s also fairly obvious what the female is trying to say in return. In one of the few cases observed close-up, a dolphin communication researcher described a female’s vocal reaction to what looked like a rape attempt:She would basically put her genitals above the water and she’d keep putting her belly above the water so the males couldn’t get to her. And as she did that there was a really inten
se emission of whistles, and basically it was the same whistle being called over and over and over again and it was quite a distressed type of call.

  BUOYANT BULLIES

  If we ever do learn to translate dolphin language, we’re sure to find that they have no words for “pick on someone your own size.” Scottish researchers who found stranded dead bodies of harbor porpoises first considered boats and fishing nets as the likely causes of their injuries. As one researcher describes it, these small marine mammals were “suffering massive haemorrhages and their internal organs were all mushed up. They were being battered to death, really.”

  Then a corpse turned up that also had recognizable bite marks, perfectly matching the spacing of bottlenose dolphin teeth. Since then, attacks by dolphins on their smaller relatives have actually been witnessed, and postmortem exams in one part of Scotland showed that 60 percent of the dead porpoises found had been killed by dolphins.

  The researcher just quoted is conducting acoustic research to try to figure out why dolphins commit these brutal murders. My hypothesis would be “because they’re assholes,” but a more specific reason has also been suggested. Scientists who examined the bodies of dead dolphin calves found that their injuries didn’t look like they were caused by predators, boats, surf injury, or similar causes. Rather, they looked exactly like the injuries previously found on harbor porpoises.