On an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean, visiting conservationists spent the night in a tent. They slept poorly, because the island is a nesting site for shearwaters, and toward dawn the baby shearwaters discovered that if they flew up to the top ridge of the tent, they could slide down the canvas sides, making a great scraping, screechy racket.
Object play
Playing with objects may sometimes be a precursor to tool use, something we humans consider extremely classy. Or the object could be a stand-in allowing a young animal to practice tooth use and claw use. Young hawks and eaglets love to carry objects high into the air, drop them, and then catch them in their feet, and entertain themselves this way for hours at a time.
Some object play seems to stem simply from a spirit of exploration and is hard to relate to the animal’s adult life. A young garden warbler dropped a stone, which happened to fall into a glass and make a ringing tone, and then all the little warblers had to try. Aerial photographs taken by pilots looking for fish show sperm whales playing with a log. One whale grabbed the log in its jaws and the other whales chased it, spouting like madmen. Hal Whitehead, while complaining that if play is not carefully defined, it becomes a wastebasket term that can be applied to any inexplicable behavior, has also seen whales play. “Off Newfoundland we saw a solitary humpback rolling a plastic bucket. The whale, a male, finally turned upside down, so that its belly was grazing the surface, and then tried to urinate into the bucket that was floating alongside. There is no conceivable function for toilet training in whales, so we can reasonably assume that the whale was playing.”
The parrots are in the trash again
Trial-and-error learning in play is illustrated by the adventures of young keas at Arthur’s Pass National Park in New Zealand. Keas are zany parrots found in alpine regions. They have a hard time finding enough to eat and are apt to die of starvation. While they will eat fruit, nectar, and insects, they also eat carrion when they can get it. Also car parts. “In this rigorous and unforgiving environment the kea has evolved a level of intelligence and flexibility that rivals that of the most sophisticated monkeys,” write biologists Judy Diamond and Alan Bond in their book Kea, Bird of Paradox. “They show more elaborate and extensive play behavior than any other bird.” Diamond and Bond have spent many seasons observing keas and have found that the best place to bird-watch is the garbage dump, where keas have been coming for 40 years.
They like to roll on their backs and wave their feet in the air. When keas play together, they do such unbirdly things as throw rocks at each other, fight upside down in trees while hanging by their feet, and drag each other around by the throat.
In addition to playing with each other, keas play with things. “Fledglings spend hours at the study site mauling and destroying inedible objects, in what is essentially continuous object play.” Batteries, string, foam rubber all must be examined. Some of it turns out to be food. Diamond and Bond describe a young kea trying to rip open a bag of chips by trial and error. Adult keas know that the way to do this is to grab the bag with your beak, hold it down with one foot, and jerk your head and neck back. Young keas have the general idea, but often do it in the wrong order. First they pull. Nothing happens so they stop and kick the bag. No good. They stand on the bag with both feet and have another pull. And so forth.
If you can’t eat it, you can at least play with it. And an excellent way to play with things is to make an all-out, crazed attempt to destroy them. Keas are world-famous for their interest in taking cars apart and their willingness to be filmed while doing so. Keas land on cars and sample the wiper blades. “Can I eat this? No. Well, can I rip it off and toss it away? Yes! How about this gasket around the window: edible? No. Shreddable? Yes! How about this antenna: edible? Not really. Does it snap off? Yes!”
Diamond and Bond tell the sad story of a jeep parked in the mountains while its owners went on a five-day hiking trip. Keas spotted the jeep, landed on its soft roof, tore the roof to shreds, and tossed the shreds to the winds. Then they shredded the seat cushions. They topped this off by clambering under the dashboard and ripping out the wiring. It is not reported whether keas also sat in the driver’s seat and shouted “Vroom vroom!” but I wouldn’t put it past them.
Diamond and Bond report that tourists find this hilarious if it is not their jeep. Residents grimly “wire their garbage cans down and anchor them with concrete blocks, cover their television antennas with polyvinyl chloride piping, and close off chimneys and other attractive openings with chicken wire. Unattended backcountry sheds are often sheathed in steel siding, and the wiring and motors on ski lifts are protected with steel conduit and heavy metal casings.”
Bubble stuff
Handless, dolphins still play with objects. They grab things in their jaws and they manipulate objects with water and air pressure, blowing and sucking water and air. They create toys out of thin air, by blowing and otherwise manipulating bubbles. Shilo, a captive bottlenose dolphin, once blew a series of bubble rings as three other dolphins looked on. One fetched a piece of fish and spat it into a rising ring. The turbulence spun the fish around wildly, and the fascinated dolphins did it again.
Vater, a freshwater dolphin in the Duisberg Zoological Gardens, learned to make bubble rings. His technique was to rise to the surface, take a mouthful of air, swim to the bottom of the pool, and wait for the water to still. He’d crack open his mouth to let air out while turning his head, creating a ring of bubbles. Then Vater would swim through the ring. If he could, he’d quickly turn and try to swim through the other way before the bubbles reached the surface.
Vater and his companion, Baby, played with objects, often trying to see how many they could carry at once. A photograph shows Vater with one plastic ring looped around his lower jaw, one around his upper jaw, a rugby ball gripped in his mouth, and a third ring tucked around his upper jaw after the rugby ball. They also tucked balls under their flippers and tickled each other with brushes held in their jaws.
Tabo and Golia, dolphin half-brothers at an aquarium in Italy, had learned to make bubbles with their blowholes as very young calves, and could make chains and rings this way. When they were 9 or 10 months old they invented a way of making bubble rings with their tails that hasn’t been seen in other dolphins. They discovered that if you arch your body downward and slap the surface of the water—hard—with your tail, a curtain of bubbles will follow your tail down into the water, and then, if you arch your body the other way, swishing your tail through the water, you can create a large bubble ring. Tabo and Golia made bubble rings, followed them, pushed them, bit them, swam through them, and chased them to the surface.
Learning to create and manipulate bubbles is more than a charming pastime, since many grown dolphins (and orcas, and humpback whales) use bubbles to confuse and confine fish, so object play shades into tool use.
Bubbles and grabbing things in their mouths aside, dolphins have at least one other option. Shilo was once seen playing with a rock on the bottom of her tank. She swam above the rock, turned upside down, sucked it onto her blowhole, righted herself, and swam around the tank with the rock balanced on her head.
Captive octopuses played with a floating pill bottle, chasing it around the tank by jetting water at it, or grabbing it and then pushing it away, for a quarter hour at a time, as if playing with a ball.
Social play
Baby animals playing together are an engaging sight. We are enchanted as the black kitten pretends to disembowel the orange kitten with mighty kicks of its hind legs, the lop-eared puppy gnaws on the ear of the stump-tailed puppy, or the lambs race around the field leaping over imaginary obstacles. The news that the 16-month-old orangutan Chantek loved to play peekaboo is beguiling. Obviously it’s fun, but that’s not all play achieves.
Psychologist Samuel Wasser writes of tiger play that it is “organized to maximize social interaction in a given time period, enhance precision and behavioral flexibility of participants, facilitate assessment of one�
�s own competitive abilities as well as those of particular play partners, and enhance ability to assess others during nonplay interactions as an adult.”
Tiger cubs have two principal kinds of games they play together: “I’m going to get you, my enemy,” and “I’m going to get you, my dinner.” Siberian tiger cubs studied in the Milwaukee County Zoo from 9 to 13 months old did not lose their taste for these games, but they got sneakier, increasing their use of rocks and stumps as cover when stalking family members. They learned that other tigers do not always feel like playing. A tiger who notes another tiger sneaking up has three choices: stay put and be pounced on; run away and be chased; or stop what you’re doing and stare at the tiger stalking you, a hint that you do not wish to be bothered. Using signals like these, tigers play reciprocally, taking turns being predator and prey.
They learn to bite softly. When a tiger bites another tiger too hard, and the bitten tiger reacts with outrage, the tiger that committed the offense at once begins licking the spot it was previously biting. “Although the licks appear to appease the recipients, biting often commences again.”
When social animals like adult wolves play together, they may also learn what kind of condition the other wolves are in. While this may not be the motivation for play, we may imagine that a wolf who learns that another wolf is stronger and faster might put off its attempts at a coup, and live longer as a result.
As Marc Bekoff puts it, play is the ideal time to learn social ground rules. “What could be a better atmosphere in which to learn social skills than during social play, where there are few penalties for transgressions?” You learn how hard it is acceptable to bite or hit or peck, and you learn to play fair.
Of keas, Diamond and Bond write, “Young keas appear to emerge from the nest fully prepared to attack other birds indiscriminately, and only after receiving repeated drubbings and continuous harassment do they begin to learn discretion.”
Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff note that human children begin to play with other kids before they have “a developed theory of mind,” before they understand, for example, that not everyone knows what they know. Allen and Bekoff suggest that play is one way that baby animals—including children—may “learn to discriminate between [their] perceptions of a given situation and reality (learning, for example to differentiate a true threat from a pretend threat). From this perspective it would be perhaps more surprising if cognitively sophisticated creatures could get to this point without the experiences afforded by play.”
Wild howler monkey children often initiate play by pulling each other’s tails. Sometimes the big kids play too roughly, and the little monkeys try to leave, and the older ones hold them by the tails. Then the infants squeak and either the bigger monkeys let go or somebody’s mother shows up and then the bigger monkeys let go.
Using tools is cheating
The young chimpanzee Lucy, raised in the Temerlin home, was delighted when they got a chow puppy, Nanuq. Lucy’s aggressive play frightened Nanuq, who at first thought Lucy was genuinely hostile. Soon they learned to understand each other’s signals. Lucy would chase Nanuq through the house, and then Nanuq would spring out and chase Lucy. Or Lucy would stick her arm in Nanuq’s jaws, Nanuq would bite gently, and Lucy would laugh hysterically and run away. Often the games ended when Lucy escalated to unfair use of her primate powers. She’d pick up a chair and hold it over her head, advancing on Nanuq. The first few times this happened, Lucy either threw the chair at Nanuq or, like a lion tamer, backed her into a corner. The Temerlins felt that Lucy would have hurt the dog if they had not intervened, but soon this was unnecessary, because the minute Lucy picked up a chair, Nanuq refused to play.
Animals learn about individuals through play. If little coyotes cheat, the other pups won’t play with them. On the other hand, the dingo Hercules was raised by humans, an only child, and didn’t get to play with other puppies. Dingo puppies learn through play fighting with other puppies when to back down. Hercules had a full repertoire of aggressive behaviors but no submissive behaviors. When he was three months old, researchers released Hercules into the wild, where he could play with a litter of five wild dingoes of the same age. The wild pups were baffled by Hercules and his apparent belief that he was invincible. No matter how badly he was losing, he persisted in aggression. “After two days, Hercules displayed no submissive behaviour (essentially because he did not know how to), and became the leader of the group; the wild pups followed his movements and usually submitted passively whenever they made direct contact.”
Turnabout is fair play
It’s no fun if you always lose, and young animals take turns, more or less. Self-handicapping, so that a weaker playmate has a chance to triumph or at least to play a different role, is found in species as unexpected as rats. However, Marc Bekoff, who studies play in coyotes and other canids, writes, “At a meeting in Chicago in August 2000 dealing with social organization and social complexity, it was hinted to me that while my ideas about social morality are interesting, there really is no way that social carnivores could be said to be so decent—to behave (play) fairly—because it was unlikely that even nonhuman primates were this virtuous.”
Baby squirrel monkeys love to play with others, and one small monkey who was the only child in his group treated his tail as a companion, emitting play peeps as he wrestled bravely with it. Adult squirrel monkeys don’t usually play with kids, but if an infant has no one else to play with, they cooperate. Maxeen Biben writes that “it is quite amusing to see a fully adult male weighing over 1 kg going to outrageous lengths in assuming the subordinate role, lying supine, flailing his limbs, exposing his fully adult canines in an enormous open mouth grin, while a 300 gram youngster repeatedly leaps upon and attacks him.”
Playing veterinarian
Sexual behaviors aren’t used very often in the lives of many animals (who may have well-defined breeding seasons), and play is a chance to practice them. Wild pandas grow up alone with no other cubs to play with. Instead, they play with their mothers, and David Powell, conservation biologist at the National Zoo, says that the mother initiates most of the play. Playing, the young panda learns panda postures and vocalizations. As Lori Tarou, another panda researcher, points out, “In play we see what look like future reproductive postures like mounting and biting at the nape of the neck,” so some of the problems captive pandas have had with mating could be related to the lack of chances to play with another panda.
Games
It is possible to recognize the outlines of many children’s games in animal play, although no animal to my knowledge has been spotted playing a board game. King of the castle, keep-away, and follow the leader are easy to spot. Any time you have a hillock and two muskox calves, you have a game of king of the castle. Two young white-necked ravens played king of the castle on a mound. One stood on top and flaunted some random object, like a stick or a lump of manure, and the other would charge up and try to take it away.
Young white-winged choughs play keep-away with stones. Budgies play keep-away. An adolescent spinner dolphin in a Hawaiian oceanarium was trained to swim into a plastic lei and then stand on her tail and “hula.” The dolphin, coincidentally named Lei, was happy to do this (the other dolphins found the plastic lei offensively prickly and refused to wear it). But she wouldn’t give it back and swam all over the tank, flirting it under the beaks of the other dolphins and the hands of the trainers, then whisking it away. When not furnished with leis, dolphins play keep-away with seaweed.
Wild North American otters played hide and seek in several feet of fresh snow in a streamside meadow. One otter burrowed beneath the snow and tunneled about below the surface, while the other jumped around on top, jabbing its nose down into the snow, looking for the hiding otter, who would periodically stick its head up, chirp, and vanish again, while the seeker raced to the spot. My turn—the seeker would disappear into the snow itself, and when the other otter stuck its head up to chirp, it would start looking for the one that h
ad been the seeker.
Juvenile magnificent frigate birds at Ascension Island play follow the leader over the rocky shore, swooping down low over the water. Hamadryas baboons in the Zurich Zoo sometimes play what Hans Kummer calls the “carrying dance.” Teenaged male baboons place a small baboon across their forearms, rise to stand on two legs, and twirl around with the little one in their arms.*
Dolls and action figures
Wild chimpanzees play with dolls. Neglected by the big toy marketers, these young chimps use a stick or, in one case, a dead hyrax, as a doll. (Hyraxes are about the size of guinea pigs.) A young chimp may carry the doll tenderly, caress it, groom it, and curl up with it at night.
A six-year-old male wild chimpanzee, Kakama, began carrying a small log as if it were a newborn chimp. He cradled it tenderly for hours, and at one point built a small nest and put the log in the nest. Kakama’s mother was pregnant, and primatologist Richard Wrangham wrote, “My intuition suggested a possibility that I was reluctant, as a professional skeptical scientist, to accept on the basis of a single observation: that I had just watched a young male chimpanzee invent and then play with a doll in possible anticipation of his mother giving birth.”
Tamuli, a young bonobo at a primate center, liked to play with dolls. One day her older brother, Kanzi, killed a squirrel. Tamuli took the squirrel for a doll. She carried it everywhere, carefully positioning its head upright and wrapping its feet around her waist as if it were clinging to her as baby bonobos do. Her mother had a baby just a few months old, Neema. Tamuli followed her mother, doing everything with her doll that her mother did with Neema. Cruel humans took the unsanitary dead squirrel away, and Tamuli moped all day.
Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Page 7