Animals Behaving Badly

by Linda Lombardi

  The owner insists that with her, Blackie is as cuddly as can be, but she acknowledges that he has “problems with people in uniform” and “authority issues” and said from that point on, in addition to the sign, she’d be locking Blackie in another room whenever there is a knock at the door.

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  ■ On Long Island, New York, a man left his car running to keep his dog warm while he went into a coffee shop to sign up for an open mike night. Perhaps as a comment on his owner’s talent—or a desperate attempt to keep him from publicly embarrassing himself—the dog put the car in gear and drove it into the store window.

  Similar mishaps can occur even if you’re careful never to leave the dog alone in your vehicle: ■ When an Idaho man arrived home from picking up a pizza, his dog jumped in, knocked his Chevy Impala into gear, and drove it down an incline into a river. The dog, no fool, jumped out along the way and was unharmed.

  ■ In a brilliant combination of two types of bad dog behavior, a man in Minnesota lost control of his car and drove it into a power line pole when his dog began “throwing up all over him,” a story the police were careful to corroborate by finding vomit in the car.

  And some of these dogs seem to have intentions more sinister than a mere joyride: When a Florida man put his pickup in neutral and got underneath it to look for an oil leak, his bulldog jumped in, put the vehicle in gear, and ran over him, sending him to the hospital.

  Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

  ONLY HURTING THEMSELVES . . . AND YOUR WALLET

  Dogs have a particularly special talent for another kind of bad behavior: eating everything in sight, whether it’s actually food or not. If they were wild animals, of course, this would be their own problem. But since they’ve opted into this sweet domestication deal, what it means is that when we aren’t paying our own medical bills from all the car accidents, falls, and shootings, we’re paying the dog’s instead.

  There’s a pet health insurance company that gives the Hambone Award every year to the most outrageous claim, and as the name suggests, many of the nominees are poster pups for inappropriate canine consumption. The 2010 winner, Ellie the Labrador, ate a beehive full of dead bees after exterminators had sprayed it with pesticide. The vet said she’d be fine, but the owners were the ones who had to deal with the aftereffects:She acted just fine that week, really, but every time she went to the bathroom, she pooped bees. Thousands of bees. I don’t know where they all came from—the hive wasn’t that large.

  Ellie beat out a number of worthy competitors including:■ A terrier that bit a chain saw—while it was in use

  ■ A Labrador that ate twenty-three packages of instant breakfast mix

  ■ A poodle that ate two baby bottles and a dirty diaper, whose owner said:We thought we were being careful by putting the bottles underneath a metal cover in the sink and using a separate trash can for the diapers, but we underestimated Roscoe’s determination.

  Typically, owners will dismiss these incidents as innocent mistakes, but some cases present pretty convincing evidence against that rationalization. The owner of an earlier Hambone Award winner, Lulu the bulldog, assumed that all of those baby pacifiers had gone missing by accident. So when she saw Lulu eat one, she rushed to the vet, only to have the surgeon discover fifteen of them in Lulu’s stomach. I think we can agree that anyone could make the mistake of eating one pacifier. But when you get up into the double digits, there is clearly some deliberation involved.

  CANINE BRAINS

  One thing we can’t really blame dogs for, though, is that they take advantage of our delusions about them. We offer free food and lodging and ask almost nothing in return, and who’d be dumb enough to turn down a deal like that?

  However, dogs aren’t nearly as smart as we like to think they are. The pioneering psychologist Edward Thorndike observed way back in 1911, “Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account to a scientific magazine. But let one find his way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and it immediately becomes a circulating anecdote.” There are ways in which dogs are clever, it’s true, but the details are rather telling. Experiments where they perform better than other animals tend to have one thing in common—the dogs are using us:■ In a test where there are two containers and only one has food in it, chimps don’t seem to get it when a human points to one of the containers. They’ll still pick either one to try to get a treat. But dogs know what the pointing finger means almost immediately: We’ve done the work finding their food, just as they expect us to.

  ■ In another study, both dogs and wolves were presented with a piece of meat in a cage, with a rope attached, its end sticking out. Both kinds of canine quickly learned to get the meat out of the cage by pulling on the rope. Then the experimenters sneakily made the task impossible by fastening the rope in a hidden place. Wolves just kept on trying futilely on their own, but dogs would make a brief attempt and then turn to look at the human. Their expression was no doubt familiar to any dog owner; it was the one that means you’re supposed to come over here and do it for them.

  It’s also worth noting that the dog demanding your help getting the caged meat—or begging for a piece of your steak—is fibbing when he tries to convince you that it’s critical to his nutritional needs as a carnivore. In fact, it’s been quite convincingly argued that dogs are not mighty meat-eating hunters like their lupine cousins. They’re actually scavengers that evolved by hanging around human settlements, domesticating themselves in the process of eating our garbage. The researcher responsible for that theory makes this observation about our dumb, trash-eating, manipulative best friends:The wolf has a big brain; the dog’s got a little tiny brain. Well, who in the world has little tiny brains? Animals that don’t need brains. And the dog, you know, a scavenger, doesn’t need much of a brain. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot of cunning to figure out where a rotten tomato is.

  And yet, dogs shoot us with our own guns, run over us with our own vehicles, and still expect us to cheerfully serve them—and we do it. Ask yourself: Who’s the stupider one in this relationship?

  NINE

  Our Own Worst Enemies

  IN MANY CASES, THERE’S A VERY SIMPLE REASON WHY ANIMALS behave badly: Nature sucks. Unfortunately, human beings not only have lost sight of this fact but have managed to turn it completely backward. We think of nature as the unspoiled opposite of civilization. Advertisers even use the word natural to make you think “safe” or “gentle” or “healthy”—in short, something that isn’t going to hurt you.

  But civilization is the opposite of nature for a reason—we invented it because nature is dangerous. In nature, something is always trying to kill you, because that’s basically how the system works. The cow rips some grass from its comfortable home and turns it into cow, then we slaughter the cow and turn it into hamburger, then the heart attack from the hamburger kills us and the worms crawl in and out and turn our dead body into worm poop that fertilizes the grass. That’s the circle of life. In some ways it’s beautiful, but the one thing it isn’t is safe and cuddly.

  If you still feel a resistance to this notion, consider the following:

  Which set is natural? Okay, now: Which set is better at killing you? Exactly. Nature does quite well on her own, thank you.

  SELF-SACRIFICEOR SELF-INTEREST?

  Our ancestors couldn’t get away from nature, and their reaction wasn’t gratitude for how easy it was to stop and smell the flowers. Instead, they were inspired to invent buildings, central heating, medicine, guns—all meant to give our species a fighting chance against the totally natural things that were constantly trying to kill us.

  It turned out that there are unintended consequences of being comfy and protected from the natural world, though, and one of these is that we’ve forgotten what its residents are really like. If our distant ancestors, living close to nature, had heard of a dog that stayed with a child lost in the woods on a cold night, they’d never have written these headlines:PUPPIES SA
VE THREE-YEAR-OLD BOY LOST IN FREEZING VIRGINIA WOODS

  LOST CHILD DISCOVERED NEARBY WITH LOYAL DOG

  BOND WITH DOG HELPED GIRL SURVIVE

  Saving a child from freezing to death does seem heroic, until you think about it for about a minute. Because if you’ve never noticed that your pets are far more cuddly and affectionate in cold weather, you’re just not paying attention. (If it’s cool in the house right now and there’s a dog around, go lie down on the couch and see what happens.)

  It’s nice that this behavior is helpful, of course, but its motivation is totally self-serving. Dogs in past generations that wandered away from other warm bodies at night and died of hypothermia did not get to pass on their genes. So dogs alive today had great-great-grandparents that curled up next to other warm bodies on a cold night, and naturally they do the same.

  What about the much-praised loyalty of those child-saving dogs? Here’s a “professional dog trainer” quoted in a story about three-year-old Victoria Bensch of Arizona, who wandered away from home one afternoon and wasn’t found till the next morning.

  “This was a deeper connection the dog had with the child,” Coddington said. “Otherwise, if that connection wasn’t there, it might not have happened the way it did.”

  The trainer goes on to explain that the dog felt responsible for Victoria as a member of his pack. But then why did a stray dog in the Yukon wilderness do exactly the same thing with a boy he’d never met before who was lost during a family camping trip? It’s simple—you don’t need a “bond” or “connection” for a dog to appreciate the fact that you radiate a nice warm 98.6 degrees.

  ASKING FOR IT

  So, since we no longer live in unheated shacks that we share with our livestock, we don’t understand the natural behavior of a cold animal anymore. But what’s the harm of seeing it through rose-colored glasses? It certainly makes it easier to put up with some of the other things our dogs do. And as for other animals, if our ignorance is based on the fact that we hardly ever encounter them in natural situations, what’s the problem with believing that those faraway creatures are kind, noble beings frolicking in a land of rainbows and flowers?

  Well, what’s wrong is that since we haven’t quite managed to drive all our fellow creatures to extinction yet, people still do run into them from time to time. And believing that nature is benevolent and animals are noble and cuddly is likely to get you into some serious trouble. In some of the stories of animal assault in previous chapters, victims were at first put off their guard by the cuteness factor. Sure, seeing three otters in the wild is totally cool—till someone ends up in the emergency room getting rabies shots.

  Some people don’t even wait for the animals to make the first move. A man who took a seven-hour train ride just to see the panda at the Beijing zoo was overcome with a “sudden urge” to jump into its enclosure to pet and hug it. The panda, of course, reacted naturally, and—in another example of how nature is not always gentle, safe, and good for you—bit the man on both legs, putting him in the hospital. The pandahugger explained his thinking this way: “No one ever said they would bite people. I just wanted to touch it.”

  Another panda-hug perpetrator at a zoo in southern China said, from his hospital bed:Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn’t expect he would attack.

  It was not the first time Yang Yang had bitten someone who got too personal, but a zoo official was emphatic about where to put the blame:He said it was not clear whether the facility would add more signs around the enclosure or put more fences up.

  “We cannot make it like a prison. We already have signs up warning people not to climb in,” he said. “There are no fences along roads but people know not to cross if there are cars. This is basic knowledge.”

  KEEPING UP WITH INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

  The Chinese are hardly the only ones that are easily blinded to danger by a furry coat, and don’t think that leaping into zoo enclosures for a cuddle is an exotic foreign impulse, either. Western zoo patrons have also found inappropriate ways to express their affection for dangerous animals: ■ A woman (later found to have a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit) ignored warning signs and barriers and had several fingers bitten off when she tried to feed a bear at a zoo in Wisconsin, no doubt making it a memorable trip for her three-year-old granddaughter. (She was later fined for violating the zoo’s rules.)

  ■ A visitor climbed over a fence, scaled an eight-foot-tall rock structure, and bypassed an electric wire to jump into the elephant exhibit at Cameron Park Zoo in Texas, where no one blamed the elephant for smacking her upside the head. “They’re not used to somebody being in their space,” said the zoo’s director.

  Other zoo patrons have climbed into the exhibits of snow leopards and lions, offered body parts through fences to jaguars and otters, and one was bitten because he was trying to “help” a loose gibbon at the Cincinnati Zoo.

  CODEPENDENT CREATURES

  Our delusions about the nature of animals don’t always end in bloodshed, fortunately. It’s true that some of the offenses are minor and inconvenience only a few. A penguin named Kentucky at a zoo in England has become a favorite because of his troublesome dislike of water:“It’s a bit too cold for him in the water, so he spends all his time on the rocks just walking around,” said Adam Stevenson, the zoo’s assistant bird keeper. “It’s a bit of a pain having to go over especially to him to feed him because he won’t go in the water, but he’s a real character and everyone at the zoo loves him.”

  Stevenson said keepers douse Kentucky with water at least twice a day to keep his feathers healthy and clean.

  True, this penguin is making extra work only for a handful of zookeepers (which, as a career move, might actually qualify him for a promotion to management). But in many other cases, behavior that is a wider menace to the general public is seen as similarly charming. In New Jersey, a wild turkey took up residence on exit 14B of the New Jersey Turnpike and caused problems by dashing in and out of traffic and prompting people to do the same as they chased after her to take pictures. She also made the toll takers look bad:“Apparently, this turkey decided to make Jersey City her home, alongside of one of the top five busiest toll roads in America,” said turnpike spokesman Joe Orlando. “She didn’t want to leave, she was a regular, and to be honest with you, she probably had better attendance than a lot of the employees.”

  Despite this, as is typical, staff had no idea what side they were on. They nicknamed the bird “Tammy”; fed her Cracker Jack; and when she was finally captured and removed, were moved to make bad jokes about missing her. “I think I’m going to have empty nest syndrome,” one toll collector said.

  Animals can impede the progress of more than traffic and still elicit nothing from the victims except coos and chuckles. At the Smithsonian’s observatory in Arizona, muddy footprints started appearing on their telescopes, not just obscuring the view, but eventually damaging the delicate instruments. You’d think astronomers would react indignantly to this interference with scientific progress and waste of our tax dollars, right? But when the culprit, a relative of the raccoon called a ringtail cat, was found, the reaction was just the opposite:“We’re considering making the ringtail cat the unofficial mascot of the MEarth project,” said project leader David Charbonneau. “With those big eyes, they’ve certainly got the night vision to be natural-born astronomers!”

  EXPERIENCE COUNTS FOR NOTHING

  Even people who have every reason to know better are often bad animal enablers. Consider the monkey-phobic British woman who couldn’t leave well enough alone. Her fear went back to her childhood when her father raised a chimpanzee, an animal she described as “positively evil.” With more close-up and personal experience with nonhuman primates than most people, you’d think she’d realize that she should trust her instincts, right?

  No. She decided to go on a trip to Thailand, to tour an island full of macaques and “confront her fears.” Here’s what happened when she ar
rived on the beach, laid down her towel, and sat down to observe, as reported in the Daily Mail:The next thing I noticed, this monkey walked up next to me and I thought, “Oh dear.” I began to stand up to move away.

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  ANIMAL LOVERS

  The people who climb over fences to pet zoo animals no doubt hold a variety of misconceptions, including not just the idea that cute animals are sweet and friendly, but also one of my favorites, that animals instinctively know that you’re not going to hurt them, a delusion that we’ll see more of in the next chapter.

  They’d likely all call themselves animal lovers too, but with friends like these, animals don’t need enemies, because often it’s the animal who pays a much higher price. When a woman climbed a fence and put her arm through another fence to pet a sleeping wolf at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, the animal bit her arm and wouldn’t let go, so a zoo police officer shot it dead. In another case, a nine-year-old girl who climbed onto a rock ledge and reached over a Plexiglas barrier was bitten by a meerkat at the Minnesota Zoo. All five animals in the exhibit were euthanized to be tested for rabies, since they couldn’t be sure which one had bitten her, and the girl’s parents didn’t want her to have to undergo rabies shots if they weren’t necessary.