Animals Behaving Badly

by Linda Lombardi

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  Unfortunately, she’d waited too long to have second thoughts. The monkey pounced, sank his teeth into her arm, and hung on. Then, backup arrived:Then another, bigger monkey bit my arm, just next to the other one biting me, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by monkeys.

  From her hospital bed, the woman tried to shift the blame onto the tour operator, but he responded, reasonably, “We can’t control the monkeys if they decide to bite someone, that’s why we always warn the tourists.”

  The prize for enabling bad behavior, though, probably has to go to the group of victims of shark attacks who lobby for shark conservation. These people, some of whom are missing limbs, have testified before the U.S. Senate and at the United Nations in favor of prohibiting fishermen from slicing off a shark’s fin and throwing the animal back in the water. A barbaric act, indeed—if only the sharks had the same consideration as these extremely forgiving victims.

  ONLY TRYING TO HELP

  Along with their misguided urges to cuddle and feed and enable, many people feel the need to help allegedly helpless innocent creatures in distress. Some of the clueless find this desire so overwhelming that they provide assistance that is worse than unnecessary. Many a perfectly contented outdoor cat has found himself scooped up from his daily route and confined, then seen his photo plastered on “found cat” posters, when all he wanted was to be left alone to get home in time for dinner.

  Some do-gooders take it further by trying to help animals that aren’t even animals. Animal control officers regularly respond to calls such as these, taken from reports from local jurisdictions by the Washington Post:BOWIE, Sept. 5. A resident reported seeing an “injured animal” in the yard of a recently burned-out house on her block.... An animal control officer arrived and determined the “injured” creature was actually a stuffed animal.

  UPPER MARLBORO, May 4. A motorist reported a “stray black Labrador retriever” lying motionless in the median on Route 301. . . . An animal control officer found the stray black dog to be a woman’s black coat with fur trim.

  BELTSVILLE, March 15. A resident reported seeing a swan on the side of the road; it appeared to be injured and unable to move. When an animal control officer arrived with a blanket to try to capture it, he realized the “swan” was a white, long-neck, plastic windshield-washer tank that had fallen from a vehicle.

  These calls are so common that an animal control officers’ Internet message board has a discussion thread titled “Things that turned out to be other things.” Officers know better than to express their opinions of citizen animal ignorance in their written reports, but a little of what’s behind the official objective phrasing comes out under the cloak of Internet anonymity:Weeping caller barely able to tell me where the poor egret was hanging off the wire fence next to the freeway. (Plastic trash bag.)

  Weeping caller barely able to tell me where the poor injured baby raccoon was in the road. (Stuffed toy bear. With purple ears.)

  Dedicated ACO [animal control officer] journeying way up rough country, over stream, through marsh, TOTALLY soaked, to injured deer. (Same dam’ old log that’s been there for ten years.)

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  WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?

  When it comes to making excuses for animals, sometimes naturalists—who really ought to know better—are the worst culprits:• In Australia, a wombat that attacked a man for twenty minutes, putting him in the hospital, was stopped only via the use of an ax. A spokesman from the Department of Sustainability and the Environment seemed to call for equal sympathy for the distress of the animal: “If it had mange, it would have been suffering a great deal and would be very intolerant to human interference.”

  • In South Africa, baboons are devastating to the wine industry, stealing tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of grapes ready to harvest—they even prefer the more expensive Pinot Noir over cheaper varieties. But when vineyard owners try to drive away the monkeys with rubber snakes and annoying noise, it brings out the tenured monkey-huggers: “The poor baboons are driven to distraction,” said a professor from the University of Cape Town’s Baboon Research Unit.

  • And in England, scientists have proposed that certain invading species have been around for so long that we might as well give up and declare amnesty, granting “ecological citizenship” to the gray squirrels that have driven out native red squirrels and to the rabbits that cause millions of pounds’ worth of damage to crops. They even call for the use of politically correct language:Objecting to such terms as “American tree-rats” to describe grey squirrels, they said, “Terms like ‘alien species’ can risk jingoistic or moralistic stances.” They suggest that researchers should instead use such neutral terms as “non-native.”

  * * *

  After a few calls about a poor dog hit by a car and lying in the snow, sent the officer. It was a dirty snow bank! Several calls later, I made him shovel the snow so people would quit calling and tying up the 1 phone line!

  LESSON LEARNED

  Some of those who make excuses for animals do eventually realize the mistake they’re making. But it’s remarkable, and disheartening, to see what it takes. A disabled veteran who was savagely attacked by his service monkey—an animal he called his best friend—said it was worse than the war in Vietnam, where he lost an eye. Joseph Hamric gave this harrowing description to a reporter:I got hit all over my body.... Cut the vein, tore ligaments out of my wrists. I’m pumping blood all over.... I’m looking around and saying “well, never thought I’d go out this way. . . .” I’m sitting there thinking I’m going to die.

  A murderous assault is enough to put an end to most human friendships, but apparently it’s harder to see the truth when the offender is cute and furry. “He’s a great monkey. Even though this happened, he’s still my baby,” the victim said, and here’s how he was rewarded for his forgiving nature, less than two weeks later: The 7-year-old capuchin monkey went berserk Monday night just after Hamric fed him pork chops, said Hamric’s brother, Bill.

  The monkey bit off a pinky and landed his owner in the hospital again—after he fed him pork chops, no less. Perhaps that’s what was the last straw:Now, he’s ready to either “put Noah down or give him away,” Bill Hamric said.

  TEN

  Ungrateful Beasts

  BY NOW IT SHOULD BE CLEAR THAT NOT ONLY ARE WE BLIND to the flaws of animals but we actually work to maintain a state of denial. We’re able to ignore evidence, even if it comes in the form of our own blood.

  Still, this might not be so much of a problem if our relationship with animals were more of a two-way street. Of course, it would be unreasonable to demand complete equality. If you’re going to do something like spend almost £200,000 ($320,000) to build bridges to help dormice cross the highway, like the Welsh government did, you can’t expect the little rodents to return the favor in kind.

  However, is it really too much to ask that animals at least show a little gratitude? Apparently so. As we’ll see in this chapter, they have no appreciation for our deluded devotion, even though we’re doing more and more to please them all the time.

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  CONSERVATION “SUCCESS STORIES”

  Long ago, interactions between humans and animals were pretty much a free-for-all legally. But now, we’ve got laws protecting animals. And you can just guess what that means.

  In Italy, bears are now a protected species after decades of declining population. So a bear nicknamed Dino took that as a license to run amuck. Going beyond normal bear bad behavior like raiding chicken coops and stealing honey from farmers’ hives, he also killed and disemboweled donkeys and sheep—and shed a radio collar that at least allowed people to track his location, even if they couldn’t do anything about his manners.

  Meanwhile in the United States, wild turkeys have not only been protected but encouraged, with predictable results. In Massachusetts, turkeys were extinct by the mid-nineteenth century, but instead of counting their blessings, wildlife officials made repeated attemp
ts to reintroduce the species. Now there are an estimated twenty thousand in the state, and no doubt emboldened by this worshipful treatment, the formerly rare and elusive bird sees no reason to stick to the protection of the woods. They’ve moved into suburbia, resulting in scenes like this one, which occurred in 2007, when a woman parked her car in Brookline and came face to face with a wild turkey:The turkey eyed Jean-Felix. Jean-Felix eyed the turkey. It gobbled. She gasped. Then the turkey proceeded to follow the Dorchester woman over the Green Line train tracks, across the street, through traffic, and all the way down the block, pecking at her backside as she went.

  “It doesn’t take much for them to go berserk,” a Brookline resident said of the birds. Mobs of turkeys chasing pedestrians and cyclists and blocking traffic were just the start. Further north in Rockport, Massachusetts, in 2009, mail delivery had to be halted to some houses because turkeys were attacking the carriers and chasing their trucks. In one incident, passers-by had to rescue a mailman: “He was trying to wave a bag full of mail at the turkeys as he ran when some folks pulled over to shoo the turkeys away,” said a manager at the post office.

  Reports of attacking turkeys are now coming in from all over the country:• Videotape shows turkeys harassing a small child in a suburb in Pennsylvania.

  • In Illinois a turkey crashed into a living room through a plate-glass window.

  • In Michigan turkeys trapped a man in his truck at a repair shop.

  • Washington State reports another car-attacking turkey.

  • A flock in Virginia has taken to attacking commuters. One trapped a sheriff’s deputy in his car, requiring him to call an animal control officer, who said that when she arrived, the turkey “just looked right at me and wasn’t concerned a bit.”

  These birds have generally escaped unpunished except when their careless overconfidence gets them hit by vehicles. An exception was in Georgia, where wildlife officials finally passed the death penalty on a gang that was terrorizing a neighborhood, blocking traffic, kicking and biting, and chasing people into their homes. “I tried spraying them with a garden hose and chasing them away with a broom, but they kept coming back,” a resident said. “I’ve been feeling like a prisoner in my own home. I had to look out the window to make sure they weren’t out there.”

  It’s the sociopathic irrationality of their criminal acts that is the most terrifying to some. As one victim said, “If you’re attacked by a person, there’s usually some reasoning, but a turkey has no reason.”

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  RESCUE ME

  Some people claim that animals instinctively know when someone is trying to help them. So why can’t they be a little more cooperative? Animals running loose on the roadways, like the many cases we saw in Chapter 2, actively resist efforts to remove them from the dangers of playing in traffic, sometimes taking it to extremes. One dog in Santa Cruz was captured only after eighty attempts, and a swan sitting in traffic on a bridge in London ignored attempts to guide it to safety for over an hour.

  And when we’ve finally saved their furry butts from some peril, we can’t expect thanks—on the contrary. Consider, for example, the effort to rescue a dog from a raging rain-swollen river in Los Angeles:At least 50 firefighters responded to reports that the dog was in the river. For an hour, firefighters stood at the top of the steep, concrete banks, throwing life vests and float rings, hoping the dog would grab on.... One firefighter got into the river and tried to catch him, but the dog took off.

  A firefighter dangling from a helicopter tried to reach the dog, but when it hovered near, the dog would scramble away to the banks of the river. Still, the rescuers persisted, and when a brave man finally snatched the dog out of the water, what did he get in return?

  Joe St. Georges, a 25-year Los Angeles Fire Department veteran, said he received a “real bite in the thumb” but was otherwise feeling fine.

  Another dog expressed his opinion of a similarly involved rescue in an even more insolent manner. Stranded on an ice floe on Lake Erie, this pooch was also whisked to safety by a brave officer dangling from a helicopter—and then, as soon as they got to shore, ran back out on the lake ice and had to be rescued again.

  And in China, see what a pig thinks of not just a miraculous rescue, but the adoration of an entire country:A pig that survived 36 days buried in the rubble of May’s massive Sichuan earthquake has been voted China’s favorite animal, but the attention has made him fat, lazy and badtempered, state media said....

  People come from all over to see the pig at its new home in a museum, the newspaper said, but it was becoming increasingly spoiled and ungrateful.

  And the pig is getting fed up with visitors, after initially being quite friendly.

  “Now it just blocks the door to its bedroom when there are too many visitors outside. It’s been increasingly difficult for us to convince it to open the door.”

  THEY CAN’T ALL BE FAIRY-TALE ENDINGS

  It’s a sad fact of life that not all noble rescue missions have happy outcomes, and it’s possible that certain unfortunate incidents make animals skeptical of our motives. For example, it wasn’t safe for the squirrel on the plane in Chapter 2 to be running around in the wiring above the cockpit, but he can’t have been any more pleased with his final destination: Honolulu authorities, fearing it may have been carrying rabies, had the rodent killed.

  Other somewhat less dire outcomes may leave a creature feeling ambivalent at best. A male capybara named Boris escaped from a farm park in Scotland and led the free, single life for months till the temperatures started to fall below comfort for a native of South America. The quest for warmth was his downfall when he wandered into the garage of retired businessman David Hammond:David’s wife Margaret had the washing machine and tumble dryer on.

  “He was in there heating his backside,” said David, who quickly closed the garage door.

  But he had mixed feelings about assisting with the capybara’s homecoming: The giant rodent returned to his mate to discover that she’d given birth to a litter of three while he was gone. “I don’t know if I’ve done Boris a favour or not,” Hammond mused. We can only hope that Boris came to appreciate being made to do the right thing.

  Still, animals ought to appreciate that sometimes when things don’t quite work out, it’s the humans who get the worst of it. In fact they sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice, even for the lowliest of creatures, as happened to the six people in Egypt who tried to save a chicken that fell into a well:An 18-year-old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said. His sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help. But they apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent. The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo. The chicken was also pulled out. It survived.

  NOTHING MORE DANGEROUS THAN AN EDUCATED ANIMAL

  Animals have just as little gratitude for longer-term efforts to better their lives. A man in China who found a seriously injured monkey took him home, amputated his ruined limbs, gave him medicine, and nursed him back to health. He then made the one-armed, one-legged primate a part of his family. The monkey supposedly performs chores around the house, if you can call it that: Seeing his master crack some eggs to cook, the monkey went into the chicken coop and smashed all the eggs in it. Then, the man said, the monkey saw him slaughter a chicken:From then on, whenever it’s not occupied, it jumps into the chicken pen, and kills the chickens, no matter how big or small, and tries to pluck them.

  His record is nine chickens in one day. The lesson I have learned is to never slaughter a chicken in front of a monkey.

  That monkey learned merely by observation, but another man in China put in what must have been enormous efforts to teach some monkeys the martial art of Tae kwon do and give them a career. Bad idea:Lo Wung, 42, taught the monkeys s
o they could entertain crowds outside a shopping centre in Nshi, in eastern China’s Hubei province.

  But the money-spinning primates turned the tables on their trainer when he slipped during a show, with one quickthinking monkey flooring him with a kick to the head.

  Hu Luang, 32, a bystander who photographed the incident, said: “I saw one punch him in the eye—he grabbed another by the ear and it responded by grabbing his nose. They were leaping and jumping all over the place. It was better than a Bruce Lee film.”

  One last story of this sort is perhaps a different sort of cautionary tale about being careful what you teach an animal: In Kyrgyzstan, a bear on ice skates attacked two people during a rehearsal at a circus, killing one of them. Not to take the animals’ side, but if I thought someone was going to make me wear one of those ice skating tutus in public, I might bite their leg off too.

  TRAVEL THE WORLD, MEET INTERESTING ANIMALS, AND EAT THEM

  As demonstrated in Chapter 7 by the bunnies that emigrated to Australia, if you want to cause the most far-reaching bad behavior, take animals to see the world. Consider the brown tree snake. Humans did this snake a big favor, sometime in the 1940s, by giving them a free ride to Guam, probably in military cargo. There were no predators of snakes on Guam, and no native snakes except a tiny, blind, insect-eating creature, so harmless that everyone thought it was some kind of worm.