Elephants on Acid

by Boese, Alex

  Eyeing an Ungulate

  Their eyes lock in a stare. It is a battle of wills. Who will look away first? The man focuses all his mental energy on his opponent. His eyes are like twin laser beams, intense and unwavering. His opponent stares back, her eyes black and impassive. For five long seconds they hold each other’s gaze, until abruptly the sheep looks away. She bleats once and urinates on the ground.

  Have you ever caught a stranger staring at you? Did it make you feel nervous, uncomfortable, or afraid? Now imagine you were a sheep. How do you think you would feel if a human was staring at you and wouldn’t stop? That was what researchers at New Zealand’s Massey University wondered.

  To find out the answer, one of them stood inside a wooden-floored arena and stared at a sheep for ten minutes. He followed the animal’s every movement with his eyes. The study’s design protocol specified that “if the test sheep made eye contact, it was maintained until the sheep looked away.” Thankfully for the pride of all involved, no instances were recorded in which the sheep stared down the human.

  Throughout November 2001, a total of twenty sheep were subjected to the staring test. Next, the researchers repeated the experiment, substituting, in place of the staring man, either a cardboard box or a guy who gazed at the floor. Hidden observers recorded the behavior of the sheep in each situation. They looked, in particular, for signs of fear, such as freezing in place, attempting to escape, or glancing repeatedly at the stimulus.

  The final data offered both expected and unexpected results. As expected, “individual sheep showed more fear-or aversion-related behavior in the presence of a human than with a cardboard box.”

  But, unexpectedly, the sheep displayed less fear toward the staring man than they did toward the eyes-downcast man. The sheep kept their distance from the guy staring at the floor, as if to say, “You won’t look at me, so I don’t trust you.” However, they did urinate more often when directly stared at. The reason for that was unknown.

  The Massey University study might seem a little eccentric, but there’s actually a wealth of research involving the reactions of animals to staring humans. Animals that researchers have spent time staring at include iguanas, snakes, gulls, sparrows, and chickens. Such studies are part of a larger effort to understand predator-prey relationships—specifically, how prey animals react to visual cues from predators.

  Researchers have also tested the reactions of humans to being stared at, although these studies get published in social-psychology journals rather than animal-behavior ones. In a widely cited 1972 experiment, Stanford University researchers pulled up to a red light on a motor scooter and fixedly stared at the driver of the car next to them. About four feet typically separated the experimenter and subject. Most of the people who were stared at exhibited a similar response. They would notice the staring scooter operater almost right away and then:

  Within a second or two, they would avert their own gaze and begin to indulge in a variety of apparently nervous behaviors, such as fumbling with their clothing or radio, revving up the engines of their cars, glancing frequently at the traffic light, or initiating animated conversation with their passengers. If there was a long time interval before the light changed, the subjects tended to glance furtively back at the experimenter, averting their gaze as soon as their eyes met his.

  The experimenters stared until the light turned green, and then timed how quickly the drivers crossed the intersection. The drivers typically jammed down on the gas and flew through the lights. The researchers concluded that we humans interpret staring as a threat display and respond with avoidance behavior, such as speeding away from staring weirdos on motor scooters, to remove ourselves from danger.

  Comparing the sheep and human studies, you might conclude that sheep are braver than humans. After all, the sheep didn’t try to flee the presence of the staring human. However, it probably has nothing to do with bravery. A more likely interpretation is that sheep are so used to humans acting strange that they don’t really care what we do anymore. And we humans can take comfort in the knowledge that at least we don’t urinate when stared at. Or do we? The Stanford researchers had no way to observe whether that particular response occurred in any of their subjects. So if you ever decide to stare at another driver at an intersection and they 36suddenly get a sheepish grin on their face, you now might wonder why.

  Lassie, Get Help!

  Timmy has fallen down a well. “Lassie, get help!” he calls up from the darkness. Lassie pricks up her ears, looks down the well, and then takes off running. Soon she finds a ranger.

  “Bark! Bark! Bark!”

  “What is it, Lassie?” he says. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Bark! Bark!” Lassie motions with her snout, then begins running back toward the well. Concerned, the ranger follows closely behind.

  If you were trapped down a well like Timmy, what would your dog do? Would it run to get help, or would it wander off to sniff a tree? If you own a trained rescue dog it would probably get help, but what about an average dog, the kind whose greatest passions in life are (a) bacon, and (b) barking at the neighbor’s cat? Would it figure out what to do in an emergency situation?

  To find out, researchers Krista Macpherson and William Roberts from the University of Western Ontario arranged for twelve dog owners to pretend to have a heart attack while walking their dogs through an open field. The owners all performed the exact same actions. When they reached a pre-designated point in the field, marked by a target painted on the ground, they began breathing heavily, coughed, gasped, clutched their arm, fell over, and then lay motionless on the ground. A video camera hidden in a tree recorded what their dogs did next. In particular, the researchers were curious to see whether the dogs would seek help from a stranger sitting ten meters away.

  The dogs—from a variety of breeds, including collies, German shepherds, rottweilers, and poodles—didn’t do much to promote the theory of canine intelligence. They spent some time nuzzling and pawing their owners before taking the opportunity to roam around aimlessly. Only one dog—a toy poodle—directly made contact with the stranger. It ran over and jumped in the person’s lap—not because it was trying to signal that its owner was in distress, but because it wanted to be petted. It probably figured, Uh-oh! My owner’s dead. I need someone to adopt me!

  Concerned that the heart-attack scenario may have been too subtle for the dogs—perhaps they thought their owners were just taking a nap—and that the presence of the passive stranger might have suggested to the dogs that nothing was wrong, the researchers designed a second, more dramatic test.

  They arranged for each of fifteen dog owners to bring their dogs into an obedience school, greet a person in the front lobby, and then walk into a second room, where a bookcase then fell on the person. (Or, at least, the bookcase appeared to fall on the person. In reality, the researchers had shown each dog owner how to pull the piece of furniture down in such a way that it would only look like an accident without actually hurting the person.) Pinned beneath the shelves, each owner let go of his or her dog’s leash and began imploring the animal to get help from the person in the lobby.

  Once again, the canine response to the emergency was somewhat lacking. The dogs spent a good deal of time 37standing by their owners, wagging their tails, but not a single one went to get help. The researchers concluded that “the fact that no dog solicited help from a bystander—neither when its owner had a ‘heart attack’ nor when its owner was toppled by a bookcase and called for help—suggests that dogs did not recognize these situations as emergencies and/or did not understand the need to obtain help from a bystander.” In other words, don’t expect Fido to save your life.

  The researchers were quick to point out that in some cases, dogs clearly have saved their owners’ lives by seeking help. The media loves to report these stories, since they provide feel-good tales to end news broadcasts with—“Stay tuned for the dog that dialed 911!” But the researchers argue that such stories should n
ot be considered indicative of typical dog behavior. So much for the urban legend of the life-saving pooch.

  And while we’re on the subject of urban legends, here’s another one. “Timmy fell down a well” is perhaps the most quoted line from the Lassie TV show. So much so that Jon Provost, the actor who played Timmy, titled his autobiography Timmy’s in the Well. However, although Timmy endured many calamities during the show—including falling into a lake, getting caught in quicksand, and being struck by a hit-and-run driver—he never once fell down a well.

  Horny Turkeys and Hypersexual Cats

  Male turkeys aren’t fussy. They’ll try to mate with almost anything, including a head on a stick.

  During the late 1950s Martin Schein and Edgar Hale, animal researchers at Pennsylvania State University, observed that when they placed male turkeys in a room with a lifelike model of a female turkey, the birds responded sexually to the model in a manner “indistinguishable from their reaction to receptive females.” The turkeys let out an amorous gobble announcing their intentions, began waltzing around and puffing up their feathers, and finally mounted the model and initiated a copulatory sequence.

  Intrigued, Schein and Hale wondered what the minimal stimulus was that would elicit a sexual response from a male turkey. Specifically, how many of the model’s body parts could they remove before the turkey would lose interest? As it turned out, they were able to remove quite a few.

  Tail, feet, and wings—they all proved unnecessary. Finally the researchers gave the turkeys a choice between a headless body and a head-on-a-stick. To their surprise, the turkeys invariably chose the head-on-a-stick over the body. Apparently this was all it took to get a turkey going. The researchers wrote:

  A bodyless head supported 12 to 15 inches above floor level elicited courtship display, approach, and mounting movements properly oriented behind the head . . . The male’s subsequent response to the model head included treading movements, tail lowering, and movements directed towards achieving cloacal contact. At this point ejaculation could be evoked by applying mild tactile stimulation to the exposed penile papillae of the male. Effective stimuli included a warm watchglass, a human hand, or any warm smooth surface.

  The male’s fixation on the female head appeared to stem from the mechanics of turkey mating. When a male turkey mounts a female, he is so much larger than her that he covers her completely, except for her raised head. Therefore, it is her head alone that serves as his erotic focus of attention.

  Having isolated the head as the ultimate turkey turn-on, Schein and Hale next investigated how minimal they could make the head before it failed to elicit a response. They tested turkeys with a variety of heads-on-a-stick—a fresh female head; a fresh male head; a two-year-old female head that was “discolored, withered, and hard”; a similarly dried-out male head; and a series of balsa-wood heads that varied with respect to the presence of eyes and beaks.

  The fresh female head was the clear winner, followed by the dried-out male head, the fresh male head, and the old female head. All the wooden heads came in a distant last place—indicating, perhaps, that turkeys prefer women with brains. But it should be noted that even though the wooden heads were not a preferred object of passion, they nevertheless did elicit sexual behavior.

  Curious about the mating habits of other poultry, Schein and Hale performed similar tests on white leghorn cocks. They discovered that these birds, unlike turkeys, required a combination of head and body for adequate sexual stimulation. They detailed this research in a paper with the evocative title, “Effects of Morphological Variations of Chicken Models on Sexual Responses of Cocks.”

  38Poultry are not the only birds easily misled in matters of romance. Konrad Lorenz once observed a shell parakeet who grew amorous with a small celluloid ball. And many other animals exhibit mating behavior toward what researchers refer to as “biologically inappropriate objects.” Bulls will treat almost any restrained animal as a receptive cow. Their general rule in life seems to be, in the words of Schein and Hale, “If it doesn’t move away and can be mounted, mount it!”

  During the early 1950s researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center surgically damaged the amygdala (a region of the brain) in a number of male cats. These cats became hypersexual, attempting to mate with a dog, a female rhesus monkey, and an old hen. Four of these hypersexual cats, placed together, promptly mounted one another.

  At the summit of this beastial pyramid of the perverse stands Homo sapiens. We, as a species, are in no position to laugh at the mating habits of turkeys, bulls, or any other creature, since there are no apparent limits to what can serve as an erotic stimulus for a human being.

  Case in point—Thomas Granger, a teenage boy who in 1642 became one of the first people to be executed in Puritan New England. His crime was having sex with a turkey (as well as a few other animals). Granger confessed to the deed, but defended himself by arguing that sex with animals was a custom “long used in old England.” Ah yes, Merrie Olde England! For some reason, this story—though entirely true—seldom makes its way into history books. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting piece of trivia to weave into the conversation during Christmas dinner.

  The Brain Surgeon and the Bull

  The matador stands in the bullring, the hot Spanish sun beating down on his head. Thirty feet away stands a bull. A hushed crowd watches in the stands. The matador flourishes his red cape. The bull stamps one hoof, snorts, and then charges. At the last moment, the matador lifts the cloth and gracefully steps to the side, but the bull unexpectedly swings its head and knocks the matador to the ground. The crowd gasps. People start screaming as the bull circles around and charges again, bearing down on the matador, who lies clutching his stomach. It seems like a bad situation for the matador. The bull is only yards away. In a few seconds it will all be over. But suddenly the matador reaches to his side and presses a button on his belt. Instantly a chip inside the bull’s brain emits a small burst of electricity, and the bull skids to a halt. It huffs and puffs a few times, then passively walks away.

  Could this be how bullfights of the future will be fought, with brain-control devices implanted in bulls to prevent injuries to the matadors? It might lead to a drop in ticket sales, but it could also save lives. However, there’s no need to wait for the future. Such technology has existed for decades. The ability to use brain chips to stop bulls was first demonstrated by Yale researcher José Delgado in 1963.

  Delgado was a Spanish-born researcher who accepted a position at Yale University’s School of Medicine in 1950. Over the next two decades he became one of the most visible members of a generation of researchers who pioneered the science of Electrical Stimulation of the Brain (ESB).

  ESB involves using wires implanted inside the skull to stimulate different regions of the brain. Such stimulation can produce a wide variety of effects, including the involuntary movement of limbs, the eliciting of emotions such as love or rage, or the inhibition of appetite and aggression. To its critics, it has always smacked of Orwellian mind control, but its defenders insist this is a misconception, pointing out that it’s difficult to predict exactly what will happen when a specific region of the brain is stimulated. Nor is it possible to control thoughts or complex forms of behavior.

  Delgado’s great innovation was to invent an ESB chip with a remote-control unit. He called the chip a stimoceiver. It allowed him to study subjects as they moved around in a natural way, free of cables dangling from their heads. Even though TV remote controls were not yet in widespread use during the 1960s (and were the size of a brick), this was the metaphor he used to describe his invention:

  The doors of a garage can be opened or closed by pushing a button in our car; the channels and volume of a television set can be adjusted by pressing the corresponding knobs of a small telecommand instrument without moving from a comfortable armchair . . . These accomplishments should familiarize us with the idea that we may also control the biological functions of living organisms from a distance. Cats,
monkeys, or human beings can be induced to flex a limb, to reject food, or to feel emotional excitement under the influence of electrical impulses reaching the depths of their brains through radio waves purposefully sent by an investigator.

  With the stimoceiver, most of Delgado’s experiments followed a similar pattern. He would stimulate different regions of a subject’s brain and then observe what happened. He described much of this research in his 1969 book Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. One of his more sensational experiments involved a monkey called Ludy. By pressing a button, he caused her to perform a complex sequence of actions that included turning her head to the right, standing up, circling to the right, climbing a pole, descending to the floor, uttering a growl, threatening a subordinate monkey, and then returning to the monkey group in a peaceful manner. She performed this behavior twenty thousand times in a row.

  Delgado could use his remote-control unit to manipulate human subjects just as easily as animal ones. He made one patient repeatedly clench his fist against his will, until the man said, “I guess, Doctor, that your electricity is stronger than my will.” Anxiety, rage, and love could also be dialed up on command. He rigged up a knob that he used to increase or decrease the amount of anxiety a female patient experienced. He pressed a button and caused another patient to fly into such a rage that she hurled a guitar across the room. Yet another patient violently shredded sheets of paper even as she moaned, “I don’t like to feel like this.” Other patients were luckier and got to experience the love button. When stimulated in this way, two patients became so overwhelmed that they expressed a desire to marry the researcher. One was a thirty-six-year-old woman. The other was an eleven-year-old boy.