The Naked Ape

by Desmond Morris

  So far we have been considering the animal loves of children of all ages between four and fourteen. If we now split up the responses to these favourite animals, separating them into age groups, some remarkably consistent trends emerge. For certain of the animals there is a steady decrease in preference with the increasing age of the children. For others there is a steady rise.

  The unexpected discovery here is that these trends show a marked relationship with one particular feature of the preferred animals, namely their body size. The younger children prefer the bigger animals and the older children prefer the smaller ones. To illustrate this we can take the figures for the two largest of the top ten forms, the elephant and the giraffe, and two of the smallest, the bushbaby and the dog. The elephant, with an overall average rating of 6 per cent, starts out at 15 per cent with the four-year-olds and then falls smoothly to 3 per cent with the fourteen-year-olds. The giraffe shows a similar drop in popularity from 10 per cent to i per cent. The bushbaby, on the other hand, starts at only 4.5 per cent with the four-year-olds and then rises gradually to 11 per cent with the fourteen-year-olds. The dog rises from 0.5 to 6.5 per cent. The medium-sized animals amongst the top ten favourites do not show these marked trends.

  We can sum up the findings so far by formulating two principles. The first law of animal appeal states that ‘The popularity of an animal is directly correlated with the number of anthropomorphic features it possesses.’ The second law of animal appeal states that ‘The age of a child is inversely correlated with the size of the animal it most prefers.’

  How can we explain the second law? Remembering that the preference is based on a symbolic equation, the simplest explanation is that the smaller children are viewing the animals as parent-substitutes and the older children are looking upon them as child-substitutes. It is not enough that the animal must remind us of our own species, it must remind us of a special category within it. When the child is very young, its parents are all-important protective figures. They dominate the child’s awareness. They are large, friendly animals, and large friendly animals are therefore easily identified with parental figures. As the child grows it starts to assert itself, to compete with its parents. It sees itself in control of the situation, but it is difficult to control an elephant or a giraffe. The preferred animal has to shrink down to a manageable size. The child, in a strangely precocious way, becomes the parent itself. The animal has become the symbol of its child. The real child is too young to be a real parent, so instead it becomes a symbolic parent. Ownership of the animal becomes important and pet-keeping develops as a form of ‘infantile parentalism’. It is no accident that, since becoming available as an exotic pet, the animal previously known as the galago has now acquired the popular name of bushbaby. (Parents should be warned from this that the pet-keeping urge does not arrive until late in childhood. It is a grave error to provide pets for very young children, who respond to them as objects for destructive exploration, or as pests.)

  There is one striking exception to the second law of animal appeal and that concerns the horse. The response to this animal is unusual in two ways. When analysed against increase in age of children, it shows a smooth rise in popularity followed by an equally smooth fall. The peak coincides with the onset of puberty. When analysed against the different sexes, it emerges that it is three times as popular with girls as with boys. No other animal love shows anything approaching this sex difference. Clearly there is something unusual about the response to the horse and it requires separate consideration.

  The unique feature of the horse in the present context is that it is something to be mounted and ridden. This applies to none of the other top ten animals. If we couple this observation with the facts that its popularity peak coincides with puberty and that there is a strong sexual difference in its appeal, we are forced to the conclusion that the response to the horse must involve a strong sexual element. If a symbolic equation is being made between mounting a horse and sexual mounting, then it is perhaps surprising that the animal has a greater appeal for girls. But the horse is a powerful, muscular and dominant animal and is therefore more suited to the male role. Viewed objectively, the act of horse-riding consists of a long series of rhythmic movements with the legs wide apart and in close contact with the body of the animal. Its appeal for girls appears to result from the combination of its masculinity and the nature of the posture and actions performed on its back. (It must be stressed here that we are dealing with the child population as a whole. One child in every eleven preferred the horse to all other animals. Only a small fraction of this percentage would ever actually own a pony or a horse. Those that do, quickly learn the many more varied rewards that go with this activity. If, as a result, they become addicted to horse-riding, this is not, of course, necessarily significant in the context we have been discussing.)

  It remains to explain the fall in popularity of the horse following puberty. With increasing sexual development, it might be expected to show further increases in popularity, rather than a decrease. The answer can be found by comparing the graph for horse love with the curve for sex play in children. They match one another remarkably well. It would seem that, with the growth of sexual awareness, and the characteristic sense of privacy that comes to surround teenage sexual feelings, the response to the horse declines along with the decline in overt sex-play ‘romping’. It is significant here that the appeal of monkeys also suffers a decline at this point. Many monkeys have particularly obtrusive sexual organs, including large pink sexual swellings. For the younger child these have no significance and the monkeys’ other powerful anthropomorphic features can operate unhindered. But for older children the conspicuous genitals become a source of embarrassment and the popularity of these animals suffers as a consequence.

  This, then, is the situation with regard to animal ‘loves’ in children. For adults, the responses become more varied and sophisticated, but the basic anthropomorphism persists. Serious naturalists and zoologists bewail this fact, but providing it is fully realized that symbolic responses of this kind tell us nothing about the true nature of the different animals concerned, they do little harm and provide a valuable subsidiary outlet for emotional feelings.

  Before considering the other side of the coin – the animal ‘hates’ – there is one criticism that must be answered. It could be argued that the results discussed above are of purely cultural significance, and have no meaning for our species as a whole. As regards the exact identity of the animals involved this is true. To respond to a panda, it is obviously necessary to learn of its existence. There is no inborn panda response. But this is not the point. The choice of the panda may be culturally determined, but the reasons for choosing it do reflect a deeper, more biological process at work. If the investigation were repeated in another culture, the favourite species might be different, but they would still be selected according to our fundamental symbolic needs. The first and second law of animal appeal would still operate.

  Turning now to animal ‘hates’, we can subject the figures to a similar analysis. The top ten most disliked animals are as follows: 1. Snake (27 per cent). 2. Spider (9.5 per cent). 3. Crocodile (4.5 per cent). 4. Lion (4.5 per cent). 5. Rat (4 per cent). 6. Skunk (3 per cent). 7. Gorilla (3 per cent). 8. Rhinoceros (3 per cent). 9. Hippopotamus (2.5 per cent). 10. Tiger (2.5 per cent).

  These animals share one important feature: they are dangerous. The crocodile, the lion and the tiger are carnivorous killers. The gorilla, the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus can easily kill if provoked. The skunk indulges in a violent form of chemical warfare. The rat is a pest that spreads disease. There are venomous snakes and poisonous spiders.

  Most of these creatures are also markedly lacking in the anthropomorphic features that typify the top ten favourites. The lion and the gorilla are exceptions. The lion is the only form to appear in both the top ten lists. The ambivalence of the response to this species is due to this animal’s unique combination of attractive anthropomorphic characters
and violent predatory behaviour. The gorilla is strongly endowed with anthropomorphic characters, but unfortunately for him his facial structure is such that he appears to be in a constantly aggressive and fearsome mood. This is merely an accidental outcome of his bone structure and bears no relationship to his true (and rather gentle) personality, but combined with his great physical strength it immediately converts him into a perfect symbol of savage brute force.

  The most striking feature of the list of top ten hates is the massive response to the snake and the spider. This cannot be explained solely on the basis of the existence of dangerous species. Other forces are at work. An analysis of the reasons given for hating these forms reveals that snakes are disliked because they are ‘slimy and dirty’ and spiders are repulsive because they are ‘hairy and creepy’. This must mean either that they have a strong symbolic significance of some kind, or alternatively that we have a powerful inborn response to avoid these animals.

  The snake has long been thought of as a phallic symbol. Being a poisonous phallus, it has represented unwelcome sex, which may be a partial explanation for its unpopularity; but there is more to it than this. If we examine the different levels of snake hatred in children between the ages of four and fourteen, it emerges that the peak of unpopularity comes early, long before puberty is reached. Even at four, the hate level is high – around 30 per cent – and it then climbs slightly, reaching its peak at age six. From then on it shows a smooth decline, sinking to well below 20 per cent by the age of fourteen. There is little difference between the sexes, although at each age level the response from girls is slightly stronger than the response from boys. The arrival of puberty appears to have no impact on the response in either sex.

  From this evidence it is difficult to accept the snake simply as a strong sexual symbol. It seems more likely that we are dealing here with an inborn aversion response of our species towards snake-like forms. This would explain not only the early maturation of the reaction, but also the enormously high level of the response when compared with all other animal hates and loves. It would also fit with what we know of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. These animals also exhibit a great fear of snakes and here again it matures early. It is not seen in the very young apes, but is fully developed by the time they are a few years old and have reached the stage where they are beginning to make brief sorties away from the security of their mothers’ bodies. For them an aversion response clearly has an important survival value and would also have been a great benefit to our early ancestors. Despite this, it has been argued that the snake reaction is not inborn, but merely a cultural phenomenon resulting from individual learning. Young chimpanzees reared under abnormally isolated conditions have reputedly failed to show the fear response when first exposed to snakes. But these experiments are not very convincing. In some instances, the chimpanzees have been too young when first tested. Had they been retested a few years later, the reaction may well have been present. Alternatively, the effects of isolation may have been so severe that the young animals in question were virtually mental defectives. Such experiments are based on a fundamental misconception about the nature of inborn responses, which do not mature in an encapsulated form, irrespective of the outside environment. They should be thought of more as inborn susceptibilities. In the case of the snake response, it may be necessary for the young chimpanzee, or child, to encounter a number of different frightening objects in its early life and to learn to respond negatively to these. The inborn element in the snake case would then manifest itself in the form of a much more massive response to this stimulus than to others. The snake fear would be out of all proportion to the other fears, and this disproportionateness would be the inborn factor. The terror produced in normal young chimpanzees by exposure to a snake and the intense hatred of snakes exhibited by our own species are difficult to explain in any other way.

  The reaction of children to spiders takes a rather different course. Here there is a marked sex difference. In boys there is an increase in spider hatred from age four to fourteen, but it is slight. The level of the reaction is the same for girls up to the age of puberty, but it then shows a dramatic rise, so that by the age of fourteen it is double that of the boys. Here we do seem to be dealing with an important symbolic factor. In evolutionary terms, poisonous spiders are just as dangerous to males as to females. There may or may not be an inborn response to these creatures in both sexes, but it cannot explain the spectacular leap in spider hatred that accompanies female puberty. The only clue here is the repeated female reference to spiders being nasty, hairy things. Puberty is, of course, the stage when tufts of body hair are beginning to sprout on both boys and girls. To children, body hairiness must appear as an essentially masculine character. The growth of hair on the body of a young girl would therefore have a more disturbing (unconscious) significance for her than it would in the case of a boy. The long legs of a spider are more hair-like and more obvious than those of other small creatures such as flies, and it would as a result be the ideal symbol in this role.

  These, then, are the loves and the hatreds we experience when encountering or contemplating other species. Combined with our economic, scientific and aesthetic interests, they add up to a uniquely complex inter-specific involvement, and one which changes as we grow older. We can sum this up by saying that there are ‘seven ages’ of inter-specific reactivity. The first age is the infantile phase, when we are completely dependent on our parents and react strongly to very big animals, employing them as parent symbols. The second is the infantile-parental phase, when we are beginning to compete with our parents and react strongly to small animals that we can use as child-substitutes. This is the age of pet-keeping. The third age is the objective pre-adult phase, the stage where the exploratory interests, both scientific and aesthetic, come to dominate the symbolic. It is the time for bug-hunting, microscopes, butterfly-collecting and aquaria. The fourth is the young adult phase. At this point the most important animals are members of the opposite sex of our own species. Other species lose ground here, except in a purely commercial or economic context. The fifth is the adult parental phase. Here symbolic animals enter our lives again, but this time as pets for our children. The sixth age is the post-parental phase, when we lose our children and may turn once more to animals as child-substitutes to replace them. (In the case of childless adults, the use of animals as child-substitutes may, of course, begin earlier.) Finally, we come to the seventh age, the senile phase, which is characterized by a heightened interest in animal preservation and conservation. At this point the interest is focused on those species which are in danger of extermination. It makes little difference whether, from other points of view, they are attractive or repulsive, useful or useless, providing their numbers are few and becoming fewer. The increasingly rare rhinoceros and gorilla, for example, that are so disliked by children, become the centre of attention at this stage. They have to be ‘saved’. The symbolic equation involved here is obvious enough: the senile individual is about to become personally extinct and so employs rare animals as symbols of his own impending doom. His emotional concern to save them from extinction reflects his desire to extend his own survival.

  During recent years, interest in animal conservation has spread to some extent into the lower age groups, apparently as a result of the development of immensely powerful nuclear weapons. Their huge destructive potential threatens all of us, regardless of age, with the possibility of immediate extermination, so that now we all have an emotional need for animals that can serve as rarity symbols.

  This observation should not be interpreted as implying that this is the only reason for the conservation of wild life. There are, in addition, perfectly valid scientific and aesthetic reasons why we should wish to give aid to unsuccessful species. If we are to continue to enjoy the rich complexities of the animal world and to use wild animals as objects of scientific and aesthetic exploration, we must give them a helping hand. If we allow them to
vanish, we shall have simplified our environment in a most unfortunate way. Being an intensely investigatory species, we can ill afford to lose such a valuable source of material.

  Economic factors are also sometimes mentioned when conservation problems are under discussion. It is pointed out that intelligent protection and controlled cropping of wild species can assist the protein-starved populations in certain parts of the world. While this is perfectly true on a short-term basis, the long-term picture is more gloomy. If our numbers continue to increase at the present frightening rate, it will eventually become a matter of choosing between us and them. No matter how valuable they are to us symbolically, scientifically or aesthetically, the economics of the situation will shift against them. The blunt fact is that when our own species density reaches a certain pitch, there will be no space left for other animals. The argument that they constitute an essential source of food does not, unhappily, stand up to close scrutiny. It is more efficient to eat plant food direct, than to convert it into animal flesh and then eat the animals. As the demand for living space increases still further, even more drastic steps will ultimately have to be taken and we shall be driven to synthesizing our foodstuffs. Unless we can colonize other planets on a massive scale and spread the load, or seriously check our population increase in some way, we shall, in the not-too-far-distant future, have to remove all other forms of life from the earth.