Abnormal is the new normal.
Jon Ronson
Mel Richardson mentioned orangutan masturbation within fifteen minutes of our first meeting. We were standing in the dusty gravel parking lot of the Performing Animal Welfare Society sanctuary. Mel told me that if I ever saw an orangutan sitting cross-legged and rocking back and forth on her heels, she was probably pleasuring herself. He would know.
PAWS, as the sanctuary is known to the people who work there or visit for the occasional fund-raising dinner alongside the elephant corrals, is a refuge and retirement center in a particularly lush part of the Sierra Nevada foothills of California for tigers, bears, elephants, and other animal actors once used in film or television and for those rescued from circuses and zoos. Mel, a tall man with a neat gray goatee and a cell phone clipped to his belt, was the sanctuary’s consulting veterinarian. He is one of the most experienced exotic animal vets in the world, having spent more than thirty years tending to hundreds of different species, from free-living gorillas in Congo and Rwanda to Pablo Escobar’s hippos, zebras, and ostriches at the Colombian drug lord’s private zoo in Medellín, along with the dogs, cats, and birds that came through Mel’s private practice in Chico, California. He treated all of these animals not only for physical problems like infections and broken bones but also for emotional ones. He’s seen almost every conceivable abnormal behavior: from phobia-addled dogs and traumatized horses to depressed lions and compulsively self-pleasuring apes and walruses. He frequently serves as an expert witness in abuse cases. I’d contacted Mel because I wanted to know how he goes about diagnosing an animal with a mental disorder.
“Well,” he said as we wandered past the sanctuary’s elephant Jacuzzi, “it’s not exactly like mental illness in humans, but I believe other animals experience similar things all the time.” To make a diagnosis, Mel first looks at the animal’s environment; he says that a creature living in bad conditions or one that is being abused will often have both physical and mental problems. He also talks to people. “With pets, I depend on a detailed interview with my human client. Zoo animals are actually easier to diagnose because you don’t have to depend on a pet owner to describe the problem or worry about what they might not be telling you. In the zoo, there’s no intermediary.”
For humans with psychiatric troubles, the diagnostic process is usually verbal. As I mentioned earlier, there are exceptions for children and adults who can’t or won’t speak, but most often a person explains her symptoms to a therapist, social worker, or psychiatrist. These self-reported symptoms, combined with a mental health professional’s own observations of the patient, lead to a diagnosis. Today’s diagnoses correspond to more than thirteen thousand codes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the atlas of recognized human mental problems first published in 1952. The DSM codes are used as a guide for practitioners and required by insurance companies, though very rarely does a person fit neatly into a single category. The DSM is also a historical document that is constantly reinterpreted to fit the times, with new disorders being included and others removed. Post-traumatic stress disorder was added in 1980, for example, while homosexuality was taken out, but sadly not completely until 1982. Premenstrual syndrome, once known as “menstrual insanity,” is another disorder that has gone through many classificatory changes over the years. It wasn’t included in the DSM in 1980, but in 1999 the USDA accepted premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a slightly different term for PMS, as a legitimate reason to prescribe Prozac. And so, like many other psychiatric conditions, the disorder was defined by the pyschopharmaceuticals used to treat it.
What this means for an animal who can’t speak to us and thus falls outside of the most common mode of human diagnosis is that the diagnostic process relies almost entirely on observation, and sometimes, as with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, on how the animals respond to drug treatment.
* * *
Unfortunately there is no DSM for animals. The closest thing I could find was Mel Richardson. After touring the grassy fields at PAWS, where a few female elephants dozed beneath oak trees, one snoring audibly, he led me to what looked like a large dog run surrounded by a tall, chain-link fence. It contained a pacing and restless blur of stripes, a small female tiger named Sunita. She looked at Mel with what seemed like annoyance, boredom, and a deep, abiding suspicion.
Sunita was born in a residential house in the southern California town of Glen Avon, in San Bernardino County. The home belonged to a man named John Weinhart, who lived there with his wife, his young son, and his collection of tigers. When animal control agents raided Weinhart’s home in 2003, they found fifty-eight dead tiger cubs stuffed into freezers, dozens of rotting and desiccated tiger carcasses spread about the property, a few alligators swimming in a bathtub, and ten live tigers, one of whom was on the back patio swiping at the door to the kitchen. Weinhart’s son’s Easter candy was inside the refrigerator next to tiger tranquilizers. He also kept dozens of tigers at a former sewage plant in the city of Colton, about ten miles away. He called his ragged menagerie a “rescue operation.”
“I live with them,” Weinhart told a newspaper reporter three years before his property was raided. “The pores of my skin smell like a tiger. So when I go around one . . . they accept me as a tiger.”
After their rescue from San Bernardino, the tigers were sent to PAWS. The cats now live in ample cages and outdoor enclosures with pools, completely inaccessible to the public. The sanctuary makes sure the tigers receive enough exercise by moving them from a large sunny yard to smaller enclosures with their own dens every two hours. They are enticed to move with treats of chicken necks and drumsticks, beef hearts, ground turkey, and paper bags. The meat they eat; the paper bags they relish tearing to bits. This new life is the opposite of the cramped, dark quarters they were used to in Riverside. But unlike many of the other tigers who quickly assimilated to the sanctuary, Sunita took a much longer time to relax. She enjoyed her gory meals and treats, but she wouldn’t touch her food in the presence of people or other tigers. She also howled and whined and refused to lie down when certain people were present. Because she’s smaller than many of the other tigers, the PAWS keepers believe she may have been picked on by the larger cats back at Weinhart’s house.
Mel brought me to see Sunita because of a disorder that she shares with roughly 10 percent of American schoolchildren. Sunita blinks her eyes and twitches her muzzle, repeatedly, like a human with an extreme facial twitch. Mel is convinced that she has a stress-related tic disorder. In humans, tic disorders are divided by type: chronic, transient, Tourette’s syndrome, and “not otherwise specified.” They can be vocal or motor or both and affect children and adults, often worsening when someone is feeling stressed. Sunita’s facial twitch seems to grow more intense and frequent when she’s stressed—particularly around veterinarians like Mel, who have given her vaccinations, or a few keepers she just doesn’t like. When Sunita first arrived at the sanctuary she would throw her body at the chain-link walls of her enclosure anytime a human walked past, her face twitching all the while. Mel diagnosed a tic disorder and he hoped that she would grow out of it, like many human children whose tics often lessen and disappear as they age.
Two years later Sunita is calmer and more confident. She only occasionally paces along the fenced far wall of her enclosure and she’s put on weight. Her coat is thick and full, and she no longer waits until she’s alone to eat. The tics, though, haven’t gone away entirely, and Mel believes that Sunita’s may be with her forever, a response to stressful situations that she can’t seem to leave behind. As we stood alongside her enclosure, watching the keepers prepare the next meal of chicken and beef parts, Mel asked me why I was so interested in Sunita. I told him about my feelings of guilt over what happened to Oliver and how powerless I’d felt in the face of his compulsions and phobias.
“It sounds like Oliver was disturbed,” Mel said, “and you did everything you could. Sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes it is.”
Since he retired from the sanctuary and his small animal practice, Mel works primarily as a consulting veterinarian in animal rescue operations and as an advisor in facilities like PAWS that care for these animals long-term. Because of these animals’ past experiences, the problems he sees are drastic: depressed elephants kept for years in cramped and isolated corrals, mutilated horses inside Canadian slaughterhouses, and traumatized chimps previously used as test subjects for hepatitis and other infectious disease research. He believes that most of the psychological problems in these animals are a function of their lives in captivity. Mel’s work with companion animals, however, has convinced him that creatures whose natural environments are our homes, barns, and yards and who are accustomed to living with humans can still develop obsessive-compulsive disorders, weirdly specific fears, extreme anxiety, pica (eating inedible objects), self-mutilating habits, and depression, even if they haven’t been mistreated.
“Your dog,” he said, “may prove the point. You and Jude offered him kindness, love, stability, exercise, and still his problems got worse.”
After Oliver’s jump I was scared to leave him alone in the apartment. We couldn’t ignore what he was capable of. Before going to work in the mornings, Jude and I dragged our wooden kitchen chairs in front of the windows and pulled the shades down. I knew this was illogical. Oliver clearly understood where the windows were and could have easily pushed the chairs aside. But even a solely visual barrier seemed important at the time. I also started calling veterinary behavior clinics in earnest, begging the receptionists for an appointment. I imagined these men and women lording over waiting rooms full of recently well-adjusted dogs who no longer gave a damn that they were sometimes left alone, the kind of carefree retrievers that trot across beaches in television commercials for human arthritis drugs. The receptionists were the professional gatekeepers to a mental peace I hadn’t had in months, or at least I hoped they were. Most behaviorists had long waiting lists for new clients, but I eventually found a woman with a practice in rural Maryland who agreed to see us. Before the appointment I filled out a detailed questionnaire, answering questions about Oliver’s snack preferences and whether he’d bitten anyone before.
On the day of the meeting I paid $350 and waited patiently for a diagnosis, a plan, and salvation while I sat flipping through copies of Dog Fancy in the waiting room. The first thing I noticed about the vet was that she spoke softly and warmly and wore pants without any dog hair on them. She offered Oliver a treat as soon as we entered her office. He immediately curled up at my feet and closed his eyes, the picture of canine calm, while I described his panic and anxiety. I felt as if I’d taken a car to the mechanic to complain about a strange noise only to have it hum along perfectly. The only noise Oliver was making was his snores, pleasant and regular. The vet, to her credit, still seemed interested and asked me questions about his behavior: what he did when Jude and I came home, the specifics of his diet, how long his walks were and where we took him, the layout of our apartment and how he used it, the long list of the things he’d destroyed, his responses to certain people and other animals. I rattled off the depth and breadth of his behavioral quirks, and eventually she stopped asking me questions. Instead she looked at Oliver and sighed. “You are going to have to do a lot of work.”
“So it’s possible to help him?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “it should be.”
It occurred to me then that animal behaviorists may do a brisker business selling hope rather than advice. Could the behavioral training portion of veterinary school actually be a course in human psychology? Was this woman my therapist too? As if in answer to my silent questions, she pulled out a prescription pad from her desk and wrote two, one for Prozac and one for Valium, and then she printed out a sheaf of papers and handed them to me.
“I believe your dog has a severe case of separation anxiety,” she said, “and a thunderstorm phobia. And also perhaps, acral lick dermatitis, which is another way of saying he compulsively licks himself, like people with OCD wash their hands.” The papers contained a variety of exercises that Jude and I were to do with Oliver in order to help him dissociate certain cues from his fears of our leaving him alone and also of thunderstorms. The vet also wrote down the name of a website where I could buy a CD of thunderstorm sounds to use to desensitize him to the booming thunder that sent him panicking. I woke Oliver up and we left the office. I felt better, more encouraged, than I had been when we went in and I could swear Oliver did too.
Receiving his diagnoses of separation anxiety, thunderstorm phobia, and a strain of canine OCD also gave me something to Google. I discovered that, like attention deficit disorder, separation anxiety has not always been an applicable diagnosis. Dogs can be diagnosed with the disorder today because it’s a recognizable human affliction, currently defined in the DSM as “developmentally inappropriate and excessive anxiety concerning separation from home or from those to whom the individual is attached” for at least a month. It became a viable diagnosis in 1978; before that, children overly anxious about attending school, being left alone at home, or their parents dying were either not diagnosed or were simply considered sensitive. A similar process happened with dogs.
* * *
Many people, at least those who could afford it, became more distanced from livestock and working animals in the late nineteenth century and closer to animals who didn’t have to work, like pet dogs and birds. By the early twentieth century dogs were beginning to be considered, at least a bit, like children. The historian Katherine Grier argues that Victorian prints, small decorative statues, cards, and other widely circulated products started to portray animals as friends. Illustrations of babies and puppies playing together as equals, or nursing cats and their kittens alongside nursing human mothers, helped encourage people to use the same kind of endearments to describe their pets that they used for their own children. This shift laid the foundation for the idea of shared emotional problems, evidence that many people were comfortable equating certain animals (pet dogs, for example, as opposed to foxes or coyotes) with humans, not merely as friendly companions but as beings with similar emotional lives, and eventually, similar brain chemistry.
* * *
The night after my veterinary behavior appointment, I spent the first of many hours inside virtual dog parks like bernertalk.com, reading other people’s tales of canine woe. The diagnoses also gave me something to tell my mom when she asked why all of our kitchen chairs were piled up against the living-room windows. It was a sanctioned excuse I could give my coworkers when I left the office at 5:30 p.m. sharp. “My dog has a disorder,” I would say, while heading toward the door. “A few of them. I have to go home on a schedule or he is going to fall to pieces.” Perhaps literally.
Despite my enthusiastic defense of Oliver’s diagnoses, I was still a bit conflicted. I felt that they were a bit too one-size-fits-all, a horse blanket tossed over him in a manner that didn’t account for his individual responses and behavior, all of which, I was convinced, stemmed from one thing: fear and anxiety over being abandoned. His repetitive behaviors, such as his incessant licking, were a self-destructive way of calming himself and an outlet for his anxiety. Since his base level of agitation was already so high, his fear of thunderstorms was perhaps more extreme than it would have been otherwise. Indeed, Oliver’s fears and anxieties were so severe that they colored his entire life and, by extension, mine and Jude’s too.
* * *
I quickly realized I wasn’t alone in my late-night Internet searches or in my hope that with Oliver’s diagnoses would come peace of mind in the form of clinical intervention and acknowledgment from someone who knew more than I did. The reason it took me a while to secure an appointment with a behaviorist was that their practices are so busy. The American College of Veterinary Behaviorists currently certifies fifty-seven vets specializing in behavioral and emotional issues, all of whom churn out diagnoses for drastic self-destructive behaviors like Oliver’s but also for annoying or annoyingly consistent activities—not just a single episode of pooping on the couch, for example, but regular pooping on the couch, perhaps combined with eating the poop. This small number of behaviorists is somewhat misleading, however, because the ability to make diagnoses like coprophagy (the poop eating), separation anxiety, thunderstorm phobia, or pica isn’t limited to behaviorists; any veterinarian can diagnose mental illness or behavioral disorders and prescribe psychopharmaceuticals. The actual number of vets diagnosing emotional problems is probably closer to 90,200, the number of certified and actively practicing veterinarians in the United States.
The director of one of the busiest clinics specializing in behavioral problems, the Animal Behavior Clinic at Tufts University’s Veterinary School, is the veterinarian Nicholas Dodman. He is the author of books such as The Dog Who Loved Too Much and The Cat Who Cried for Help and has written dozens of scholarly papers about nonhuman disorders, from compulsive licking in canines to equine self-mutilation syndrome, which is similar, he says, to Tourette’s syndrome in humans. Dodman primarily treats pet dogs, cats, and occasionally, horses and parrots. Most of these animals have not been abused or abandoned; after all, their human companions are paying quite handsomely for help.
The first time I visited the Tufts Animal Behavior Clinic it was to meet with Dodman’s colleague, Nicole Cottam. The waiting room smelled animally and was full of people and their creatures on leashes, in carriers, or, in the case of one cat, a plastic laundry basket covered with a dishtowel. The room was divided down the middle by a four-foot-high partition, one side for dogs and the other for cats, each with its own television set. The dog side was watching QVC, the cat side, a talk show. With no animal myself, I didn’t know where to sit. I spotted a man holding a Tupperware container with a chinchilla inside, and sat down next to him.
After Cottam retrieved me, she took me on a tour through the hospital. There were the cages of blood-donor cats, strays who now live at Tufts to supply blood to felines who need it; the orthopedic wing, where dozens of animals in brightly colored casts lean up against the walls of their cages waiting, long-eyed and droopy, to go home; and the main office of the behavioral clinic.
The first thing I noticed was the sheer volume of VHS tapes. Walls of shelves were lined with black plastic tapes in cardboard sleeves. The labels down their spines were handwritten, all in different script, some in pen, some in pencil, some neat, some scrawled. There was “Roxie” and “Chip” and “Snooker” and “Bill” and “Ralphie.” It looked like a video rental shop from the 1980s, but instead of John Candy movies these were documentary features starring Poodles, Labs, Rottweilers, and cats.
Cottam saw me staring at the shelves. “For those people who don’t live close enough to the clinic, we do a remote consulting service over the phone,” she said. “We ask people to document the problems they’re seeing at home. Now everyone sends pictures and video to us via email, but before, you had to set up a camera when you left the house and then send us a tape.” I was looking at an immense visual archive of animal emotional problems.
Cottam and Dodman both see hundreds of behavioral cases a year. They are also busy with their own research projects, focusing on many of the more common disorders they treat at the clinic. Cottam is currently investigating thunderstorm phobias in dogs, but she’s seen all manner of other emotional issues too. After 9/11 she treated a few of the search and rescue dogs who had worked at the World Trade Center site for fear and anxiety problems that turned them into hesitant and unstable versions of their former selves. She believes that the dogs’ extreme anxiety and fear was triggered by the sights, sounds, and long hours they spent working in the rubble. Later she treated canine survivors of Hurricane Katrina who had been adopted after the storm and then brought into the clinic when they started reacting fearfully to sounds or sights that reminded them of the flooding or the experience of being left by their previous families. She has also seen many strange animal fixations, from cats bent on eating only small shiny things to her own dog, who runs, shaking, from billowing fabric. “He freaks out when he sees sheets blowing on the line,” she said, “or flags, or my neighbor’s tarp in the wind.”
Like the military’s canine behaviorist, Cottam is convinced that dogs can suffer from a canine version of PTSD and mentioned the 9/11 search and rescue dogs, as well as canine survivors of Hurricane Katrina as examples. “It’s possible that it’s just extreme shyness that keeps them cowering under tables, beds, couches, too afraid to come out,” she told me, “but I believe it’s something closer to PTSD. When they do come out, they hug the wall. They appear traumatized.”
At Tufts they treat these dogs by decreasing their stress levels and putting them on medication. “We also try and get to the bottom of their specific fears and try and treat those,” she said. One dog’s fear response may be triggered by loud sounds, for example, while another may react to men in uniform.
Like Mel Richardson, Cottam believes that other animals exhibit their own versions of almost every human psychiatric problem, but she’s careful about how she says so.
“Take obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example,” she said. “Now, I think that animals are having obsessive thoughts when they lick the leg of a chair without pause for hours on end. But I can’t prove that they’re thinking obsessively, so when Nick and I publish on the topic, we use the term compulsive disorder. We leave out the obsessive because using that term would imply that we know what the animal is thinking. A human obsessive hand-washer can describe his obsession to us, but an obsessively licking Doberman cannot.”
I thought about Oliver’s compulsive paw-licking and his weirdly vacant fly snapping and asked if she thought that our behaviorist had been right when she said that Oliver had a form of canine OCD.
“It’s possible. Compulsions are a major problem. You should see the crop circles in some people’s yards. They happen because a dog just won’t stop chasing its tail.”
Cottam and Dodman help their patients with their obsessions and fears, some of which are extremely specific. “I’ve seen dogs that are scared of all kinds of strange things, like shadows, bright sunlight, even contrails in the sky, or beeping noises from alarms or microwaves. The beeps can be really scary because the dogs don’t understand where they’re coming from. Another time we treated an older dog for his fear of flies. He had been swarmed when he was a puppy.”
Treating phobias, especially a thunderstorm one like Oliver had, is especially tough since the dogs are reacting not only to noise but also to changes in atmospheric pressure or flashes of lightning. Desensitizing dogs by simulating all of these at once is nearly impossible.
The most common problem they see at the Tufts clinic, however, is extreme aggression. “I think it may be similar to impulse control disorders in humans, and it’s usually related to jealousy,” Cottam told me. “Certain dogs will see two of their humans hugging and just lose it. Or they will be jealous of another dog.”
As Cottam walked me back to the waiting room I paused in front of a gigantic scale (“We had a giraffe in last week”) and asked why she thought Oliver might have had the mental troubles he did. I tried to cover the whine in my voice with an earnest researcher tone, but she still looked at me pityingly.
“I wouldn’t be that upset if pure-bred dogs disappeared,” she said. “Look up the Carolina swamp dog. It’s a forty-pound tan dog. It’s what dogs would look like if we gave up on breeds. Eventually they’d all look a lot more like dingoes and coyotes.”
I asked why this was better.
“If you’re breeding a dog like a Bernese Mountain Dog, you are breeding for very particular physical traits, such as coat color, body shape, and more, and you end up with whatever behavioral traits are associated with the physical ones.”
I thought about the perfect white stripe down Oliver’s nose, the white tip of his tail, the identical brown eyebrows, the black coat like a lush tablecloth, and the lineages of award-winning show Berners with names that call to mind Viking kings (Igor Vom Eck-Manns-Hof) or yachts (Glory V Legacy). Almost every Berner has these exact markings, and their lineages are celebrated as if they were four-legged Daughters of the American Revolution. The dogs look so much alike, in fact, that ever since Oliver’s death, whenever I run into one on the street I feel as if I’ve seen a panting, tricolored ghost.
A parallel in human breeding would be deeply disturbing. What would happen, for example, if a small group of people were made to have children with another small group solely based on the length of their forearms, the color of their leg hair, the shape of their ears, the shade of their palms or backside, or the size of their feet? It would be reminiscent of the misguided, racist, and often terrifying eugenics programs of the early twentieth century in the United States and later in Nazi Germany. Now imagine this group’s children were forced to make the same mating decisions, and their children’s children, maybe even their children’s children’s children. Pretty soon you would have a human version of a Bernese Mountain Dog.
Many breeders will tell you that they don’t breed for solely physical traits, that they raise family dogs with good personalities, who are easygoing and as sane as possible. But to simply meet a breed standard (the precise requirements designated by the American Kennel Club), a dog must have specific markings and proportions. As Cottam suggested, some of these markings may be connected to other traits that don’t make for a well-adjusted creature, traits like anxiety, fearfulness, or aggression. The AKC’s breed standard for Bernese Mountain Dogs has descriptive subsections for “forequarters” and a thick paragraph on markings but only two sentences on the dogs’ temperament, which, according to the AKC, should be “self-confident, alert and good-natured but never sharp or shy.”
Certain breeds are notoriously prone to specific disorders. Mel Richardson has encountered so many Bull Terriers with tail-chasing compulsions that he believes the behavior is in some way genetic. Dodman has treated Terriers and Border Collies and many other breeds for tail chasing too, as well as dogs unhealthily fixated on following shadows, chewing rocks, and licking all sorts of surfaces that shouldn’t taste good. Chasing patches of light is reportedly most common in Old English Sheepdogs, Wirehaired Fox Terriers, and Rottweilers. Snapping at flies that don’t exist is prevalent in German Shepherds, Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, and Norwich Terriers—though I can attest to its presence in Berners. As for cats, Siamese, Burmese, Tonkinese, Singapura, exotic breeds like the Ocicat, a domestic cat spotted a bit like an ocelot, and Munchkins, bred for disproportionately short legs, a sort of feline version of a Dachshund, have each been known for their compulsive tendencies.
In Oliver’s case I believe his particular distress cocktail derived from a mix of his constricted gene pool, his past experiences, and his neurophysiology. I was never able to discover the exact trigger that set him on his path to madness, but I have a few guesses. Figuring out what was wrong with Oliver was a process of determining exactly what was bothering him and attempting to understand where and when his anxiety might have begun in the first place.
After visiting the veterinary behaviorist, I wrote to the breeder who introduced Jude and me to Oliver’s previous family. I asked him if he knew anything about our dog’s quirks and he told us, for the first time, a bit of Oliver’s life story.
From the time Oliver left the breeder’s house, where he rolled around as a playful pup with his brothers and sisters, throughout his first four years with his new family, he was adored and received loads of affection. He went on lots of walks and liked to lie in the living room alongside the family’s other dog, an Old English Sheepdog. Life was easy and peaceful, the dogs spent their days gazing out the glass sliding door into the yard. When the family’s youngest daughter, a high school student, became pregnant and decided to keep the baby, everything changed. Suddenly Oliver was no longer the fuzzy sun of his family’s solar system. He was unseated by the teenage pregnancy and then a new baby, and he didn’t like it one bit. He reacted by trying to wend his way back into the center of family life, doing so as a dog does. He pooped where he wasn’t supposed to, he bit the neighbor after going after her dog, he broke through an electric fence. He also started gnawing on things he knew he wasn’t supposed to gnaw on. Throughout it all he probably only wanted the affection he had grown used to. But no matter what he did, he wasn’t getting it.
I’m convinced that his family meant well. They loved Oliver, but they were overwhelmed. Their daughter and the new baby came first. The more attention Oliver demanded, the more frustrated they became and the more often they locked him away. First they put him in the garage, but he chewed the moldings off the windows in his attempts to break out. Then they tried putting him in a crate. But they didn’t first teach him first that the crate was a nice, safe place to be. Being locked up in a small space without any of his people around probably just made Oliver more upset. He destroyed the plastic and wire of the crate in his efforts to break free and rejoin the family. This, I believe, is when they started looking for someone to take him off their hands.
* * *
A glossy, wry brunette with a taste for sparkly earrings, Dr. E’lise Christensen is New York City’s only certified veterinary behaviorist. As such, I expected her to be older. Instead she looks like she’s in her mid- to late thirties and is the kind of self-aware vet with whom you want to get drunk and then beg to tell you stories about animal psychopaths. Or maybe that’s just me.
The first time I saw Christensen in person she was sharing a stage with Dr. Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the Psychopharmacology Clinic at Cornell’s Weill Medical College. She was giving a talk about anxiety in dogs and Friedman was discussing panic and anxiety disorders in his human patients. They were speaking at Rockefeller University in New York, as part of a conference on the overlaps between human and non-human medicine. “It’s shocking how similar anxiety disorders are in humans and in dogs,” Friedman said. “[My patients] walk around in a state of constant semi-dread, as if the world is a very dangerous place.” Christensen nodded in agreement. “Anxiety disorders,” he continued, “are far and away the most common disorders in the United States today. There’s a ten to twenty percent risk that someone will suffer from extreme anxiety or panic attacks over the course of their lifetime.”
Christensen countered, somewhat wistfully, that unlike psychiatrists, veterinary behaviorists seem to see fewer cases of extreme anxiety than they once did. This is because general veterinarians have learned, in the last decade or so, to treat panicked and anxious pets with medication and behavioral therapy, therefore sending fewer of their clients on to specialists. She believes that around 40 percent of the behavioral issues propeling pet owners into these vet clinics are due to separation anxiety. “But I only see the toughest cases, the dogs who don’t respond to the first line of treatment.” These animals are so distressed, their suffering so extreme, that Christensen is sure that if the dogs were humans, they would be hospitalized in psychiatric wards. “By the time they see me, these animals can be on five different meds, at really high dosages, and they’re still panicking,” she said.
Many of Christensen’s separation anxiety patients come in with underlying issues related to what she considers impulse control, a phenomenon that’s common at the Tufts Animal Behavior Clinic as well. When I asked Christensen how a dog with an impulse control disorder is different from a normal dog, she said that it comes down to reactivity. That is, a dog who used to growl before biting but was punished for the growling and now bites without warning isn’t a dog with an impulse control disorder. He’s a dog that has learned not to growl. A dog who has no warning behaviors of any kind, who never snaps or growls but just bites, is a dog with an impulse control problem. “It’s like a person who shoots first and asks questions later,” Christensen told me. “If they’re more anxious than the average bear and don’t stop to think and consider the consquences before biting, this is an issue.” She says that, for a dog or a person, choosing aggression is a risk. You can be injured or your social world can be disrupted when you lash out. “Dogs make choices. They don’t always make good choices, however, and sometimes their choices are too fast.” These animals will struggle with impulse control and anxiety for the rest of their lives. “You can’t guarantee a cure and if anyone does, they’re lying.”
Another veterinary behaviorist interested in the causes and treatment of separation anxiety is Dr. Karen Overall, the former director of the Behavior Clinic at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine. Overall has spent years researching mental disorders in companion animals and believes that no animal disorder is a perfect mirror of a human condition, but like so many veterinarians I spoke to, she’s convinced that dogs develop issues similar to many human psychiatric disorders. These include generalized anxiety disorder, attachment disorders, social phobias, OCD, PTSD, panic disorder, the aggressive impulse-control disorders, and, like Alf the Australian Shepherd, Alzheimer’s disease. She makes diagnoses just as E’lise Christensen, Mel Richardson, Nick Dodman, and Nicole Cottam do, by interviewing pet owners in detail, compiling a history of the animal in question, and observing their behavior.
* * *
Richard Friedman believes that the experiences of his human patients with generalized panic and anxiety disorders are similar to Christensen’s anxious dogs because the overwhelming impulse for people with panic disorders is to flee. Friedman treats his patients with pharmaceuticals and cognitive behavior therapy to help them overcome their impulses to bolt. “The treatment outcome for my patients is really good,” he said, “but it’s a chronic disease. The recurrence rate over a twelve-year period is really high.”
Unlike these generalized panic and anxiety disorders that Friedman sees in his patients at Cornell, the human form of separation anxiety is somewhat different from the dog version. In people the disorder tends to manifest before the age of eighteen and is usually triggered by being away from a parent or loved one. In the dogs that Christensen, Overall, and the other vets treat, the affliction seems to appear at any age and tend to come from being left alone, not by being separated from a specific person. The presence of a human, any human, often helps. Some canines, like Oliver, react when they are left all alone in the house, while others become distressed if they’re locked in one particular room or a crate. Most express their anxiety by trying to escape. This is what canine separation anxiety has in common with, as Friedman said, human panic disorders and generalized anxiety disorders, diagnosed in people who feel excessively anxious and worried for more than six months, can’t control their worrying, are restless or tense, can’t sleep, are grouchier than normal, have trouble concentrating, or are, occasionally, overcome with a desire to run away.
Separation anxiety in dogs probably feels like a life-or-death predicament, their bodies coursing with flat-out panic; this could explain their extreme actions. When Oliver was left alone, for example, he may have felt that it was forever, that no one he cared for was ever coming back for him. It didn’t matter that Jude and I always came home eventually. Oliver’s fear was a tsunami gathering on the horizon, threatening to crush him, and it activated every impulse within him to fight his way to safety. I suspect that he tried to escape so mightily not because he wanted to find us per se but because he was trying to run from the terrible discomfort he felt at being left alone. When Oliver was busily reducing a door to sawdust or digging up a hardwood floor to try and burrow his way outside, I don’t think he was engaged in a specific, Lassie-like effort to locate me and Jude. Instead he was mad with his own anxiety, and dogs in extremis do what dogs are capable of. Chewing, digging, pacing, and frothing are a few of the things in their repertoire.
During her residency in upstate New York, E’lise Christensen treated a German Shepherd whose anxiety compelled him to destroy a kitchen window anytime he was left alone. Once he’d gone through the window, his panic subsided and he curled up and waited in the yard for his humans to come home. After replacing the window multiple times, the family decided to simply leave it open. “Since he was a German Shepherd,” said Christensen, “they didn’t have to worry about burglars.” She’s also treated dogs who jump out of apartment buildings in panic like Oliver did; one survived by landing on the air-conditioning unit of an apartment a few floors below.
Oliver didn’t just jump from great heights, however, he also whined and barked for help; he clawed and gnawed on furniture, floors, doors, sheets, towels, pillows, and anything else within reach; he panted and salivated, licked himself raw, and tried to bolt. Other dogs poop and pee where they’re not supposed to. A few others express their anxiety by withdrawing deeply into themselves and growing less active; these are the drooly, quiet martyrs. Sometimes they stop eating. Christensen believes that anorexia—when a dog won’t eat or drink when she is alone—can be a sign of separation anxiety. “Emotional eating in dogs,” she said, “usually means not eating.”
One of the largest animal shelters in the United States, the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SFSPCA) houses between 230 and 300 cats and almost as many dogs. The cats live in tile-floored, glass-walled “condominiums” with fuzzy cat trees, chairs for potential adopters to sit in and visit with the cats, and televisions playing videos of squirrels dashing across green lawns or birds preening in birdbaths. From his post in the Cat Behavior Office, Daniel Quagliozzi helps diagnose problems in cats when they first arrive at the shelter. He also acts like an extended warranty for the shelter cats, answering questions from people about their newly adopted felines once they take them home.
Daniel has two sleeves of swirling tattoos, his forearm features an angel cat and his right, a devilish one. His knuckles spell out CAT’S MEOW in red and black ink. Daniel has treated everything from fear aggression that makes cats into snarling whiskered weapons to pica. On top of his desk in the Cat Behavior Office is a small Mexican folk-art box with the name Diablito written on it in glitter. Inside are the ashes of a shelter cat who used to hang out in their office. He was prone to explosive diarrhea.
“A large part of what makes a cat happy,” Daniel told me, “is routine. They like having their expectations met and knowing how the day will unfold. They’re well behaved when nothing is different. When things change they often go haywire.” I couldn’t help but think of so many humans I know with the same problem.
The biggest challenge for cats new to the shelter, Daniel believes, is that most of them come from comfortable homes and are then thrust into a strange environment with different smells, people, food, and routines.
“We like to say here that we manage a three-lane highway,” Daniel said. “There are the fast-lane cats that come into the shelter and are unfazed by all of the new and strange things around them. They eat anything and are sociable from the beginning. Then there are the slow-lane cats. These cats come in and will literally hide under a blanket for two months. It takes a lot of work to get them to come out, and because it’s a shelter, we may have to move them to a new room, and the whole process starts over. The middle-lane cats are, you know, somewhere in the middle.”
To identify whether a given cat is depressed, Daniel asks himself a series of questions while carefully observing their behavior: Is the cat eating? Has she used the litter box? Has she moved at all? After three days, if the cat still hasn’t touched her food but is otherwise healthy, Daniel says that it may be a sign of depression.
“I’ll approach them and see what they do. Do they nuzzle into my hand, or do they not even move their chin? A depressed cat simply won’t respond. The fearful cats are very responsive. . . . They hiss, swat. . . . The depressed cats are really just these little lifeless lumps.”
Outside of his work at the SFSPCA Daniel also runs a behavior consultancy called Go, Cat, Go. He makes house visits to people with cat problems throughout the San Francisco Bay area. Every week Daniel receives dozens of messages on his cell phone from frustrated and desperate people who want deliverance or simply insight into their cat’s mind. When I last visited him at the office, Daniel had just finished speaking to a distraught woman who was convinced her cat had a split personality disorder. The once sweet and cuddly cat was attacking their French exchange student for no apparent reason and had scratched the young man’s leg so badly that he had to be taken to the emergency room.
“Usually,” Daniel said, “people call and want to know, Why does my cat hate me? Why is he scratching me? Or crapping in my shoe? Or eating my dress shirts? Part of my work is making them realize that it isn’t about them.”
In the case of the anti-Francophone feline, Daniel felt that the cat may have been reacting to the presence of a stranger in the house. The exchange student was sleeping in the recently vacated bedroom of his favorite human, a teenage boy who had just left for college. Perhaps the cat felt the exchange student was some sort of invader who had done away with his loved one.
Daniel sees himself as an interpreter of these sorts of interspecies mysteries. He asks lots of questions, as nonjudgmentally as possible, and pays careful attention to the way a client’s house is set up, the dynamics between the people who live there, and how a cat spends his time.
“They will tell me everything that I need to know,” he says. “For example, how do the cats like to use their environment, and are they being provided for in a way that makes them feel at ease? Do they have their own little areas that feel safe and controlled? Do they have the food and the cat litter they like? These things may sound small, but they have a huge impact on their mental health.”
To create an environment that encourages cat sanity, Daniel suggests his clients reserve places that are cat-only, such as cat trees. “They’re ugly, but cats like having things that are just theirs. This makes them feel protected. It’s best if these places are also tall, like the top of a bookcase or refrigerator, because being able to look down on people and other animals in the house makes them feel secure.” This was not particularly surprising.
“Also, these additions to their territory should not be tucked away from the action. They want to be part of everything that’s going on.” Daniel also encourages his clients to engage in play therapy with their cats, which is really just play. One of the most recommended cat toys for this is something called “Da Bird,” a miniature fishing pole dangling a garishly colored feather clump. You’re meant to wave Da Bird in the air like a demented conductor or someone who’s smoked too much of da herb as your cat chases it to and fro. If the original lure becomes boring, you can swap it out for an even more sparkly option that looks like it’s been plucked from a Vegas showgirl.
Still, no matter how many Da Birds a cat receives or how many scenic vistas they have to look down upon humans and dogs, they can still develop odd behaviors. Daniel’s own cat, a Seal Point Siamese Munchkin named Cubby, has his own issues. He also has the watercolored face of a Siamese and the stubby paws of a Munchkin. Because of his short legs, Cubby can’t swat, but he hisses, usually at other cats. To Daniel’s dismay, Cubby suffers from feline hyperesthesia, a disorder defined by a sudden, intermittent desire to savagely attack his own tail. Cats with hyperesthesia stalk their twitching tails as if they are menacing objects or invaders and then they pounce so hard that they sometimes rip their own flesh.
Daniel didn’t know why Cubby was attacking himself. Their house, where Cubby rules the bedroom and sometimes the hallway and kitchen, has multiple cat trees, a tunnel for running back and forth, and private sleeping quarters in a closet. It is, in short, an ideal cat habitat, and Cubby could not find a human more attuned to his needs. Daniel decided to medicate Cubby. After thirty days on Prozac, the cat stopped acting as if he was possessed. A few years later, Cubby has recovered. He continues to take a small maintenance dose of Prozac, which limits his self-mutilating episodes to a mere thirty seconds or so per week. The rest of the time he sleeps in a sunny window, waiting for Daniel to come home and play Da Bird, or to watch him as he runs on his short little legs through his cat tunnel.
Daniel discovered with Cubby and the other cats he’s helped that careful observation is necessary to diagnose them correctly and begin the healing process. But there’s something else that’s often key to understanding why a creature is disturbed: the animal’s individual history. Oliver’s experiences with his first family, for example, affected the ways he related to us. This is especially the case for animals who have lived through big changes, such as the shelter cats who were removed from their family homes, or animals who were raised under odd circumstances, like Sunita the tiger, or Rara, an elephant who grew up at a Sheraton Hotel.
When Rara was a year-old calf, she was taken from her mother and sold to a Sheraton hotel in Krabi, a luxurious beachfront resort in southern Thailand. She spent most of every day chained inside a cement-floored, open-air pavilion near the thatch-roofed house of her mahout and his family on the hotel grounds. Once or twice a day Rara was brought to the hotel lobby or grassy lawn to pose for photos with guests, to be stroked and cooed over, and to be hand-fed bananas. In the heat of the afternoon her mahout walked her to the hotel beach for a swim and to play in the warm water with the tourists, many of whom splashed around with her in the shallows and took photos of her while she sprayed seawater out of her trunk or dug wet holes in the sand. In those first few years Rara was goofy and charismatic and bonded easily and often with the hotel guests. She liked to use her trunk to play the harmonica and would dash to the hotel’s outdoor showers, where she knew how to turn on the taps. She drank and played under the spout until her mahout made her stop.
Rara was a growing elephant though, and over time becoming more of a liability than a photo-op. By her sixth birthday she weighed thousands of pounds and, because of her size, was too dangerous for the tourists to swim with. Her enthusiastic trunk grabs on guests’ forearms, charming when she was small, were now so strong that even though she was only being playful she could easily knock people down or accidentally trample them. She was also becoming more opinionated about how she wanted to spend her time and was more difficult to control when she didn’t feel like doing something her mahout asked of her. As a result, Rara was chained more often and for longer periods. A few concerned hotel guests, some of whom came back to the Sheraton year after year to visit Rara, called themselves “Rara’s Fan Club” and shared photos and videos of her on Facebook and YouTube, began to worry for her future.
One guest in particular, a generous German banker named Silke Preussker, who visited Rara regularly, started a fund-raising campaign to buy her from the Sheraton and bring her to an elephant ecotourism park in the north of the country, where she would be around other elephants and chained only at night. Soon Rara was successfully transferred to Elephant Nature Park, a lush verdant valley outside of Chiang Mai, where the elephants are not made to perform and often forge lasting friendships with one another.
I met Rara shortly after her arrival and immediately understood why she had so many fans. She was mischievous, affectionate, silly, constantly getting in the way of construction crews, tasting the landscaping plants, and causing her mahout, a slight Burmese man named Gawn, to chase after her ceaselessly. “She reminds me of my four-year-old son,” he said one morning, watching nervously as Rara tried to balance on top of a pile of logs using only two of her feet. She continually glanced over at us, as though to make sure that we were paying attention to her antics.
Having been separated from her mother and all other elephants at such a young age, Rara was scared of the park herd. She had no basic elephant culture; she was at a loss when it came to approaching new elephants and didn’t know how to show affection or express herself in a nonthreatening way. Because of this, the other elephants were skeptical of her. Rara preferred to spend time with the park’s human guests, particularly white women, who had been the font of bananas and affection at the Sheraton. She disliked Thai men, except Gawn, whom she loved fiercely. The rest of the park’s male staff gave her a wide berth. Once, when Gawn was unable to come to work and Rara was given a new mahout for the day, she terrified the park employees by throwing an elephant-size tantrum that resulted in a smashed car and overturned baskets of produce.
This behavior isn’t particularly surprising if Rara’s life history is taken into account. Elephants learn from their mothers, aunties, and other herd members how to be elephants: how to show joy and anger, what to eat and how to eat it, the best ways to stroke a companion, and how to physically protect themselves. Like humans, they’re not born knowing how to behave. In the herd Rara also would have been disciplined when she acted inappropriately. After she was taken from her mother, the only teachers she had were humans. She spent most of her time confined, and when she was free it was only to be stroked by tourists and given treats. She interacted with new humans all the time, and each of these people responded to her differently—some with affection and others with fear. The most important relationships, those that would have taught her how to be an elephant, were taken from her. As a result, Rara grew into a sort of human-elephant hybrid, an outsider in both worlds.
And yet she was lovely. I learned to rumble like she did, a sort of rolled-R throaty hum, and she would respond in kind. If I was gone for just a few hours and then ran into her and Gawn in the park, she treated me like a long-lost friend, running her trunk over my head and face, blowing air onto my crotch, rumbling and squeaking, ready to begin whatever game we’d last played. I hoped that she would learn to be an elephant among elephants, but I admit I also enjoyed the fact that she liked me. It’s wonderful to make a new human friend, but it’s even better to be friends with an elephant. It was also a bit depressing. Didn’t human-elephant friendships usually end poorly, with the elephants winding up in circuses or as crop raiders? Shouldn’t Rara be less fond of the species that took her from her mother and kept her chained for years? Why on earth did she still like people?
It may have been because she didn’t have much of a choice. Elephants like Rara exist in a complex emotional world where they must balance their own needs with the humans who attempt to control them—a tightrope walk of interspecies expectations that can be both harmful and healing. In order to learn more about these relationships I left the park for the city of Chiang Mai to meet someone I’d been told could teach me about the emotional health of captive, working elephants.
Pi Som Sak is Karen, an ethnic group from northern Thailand and southern Burma with a long history of working with Asian elephants. He is also an elephant trader who buys and sells pachyderms of various ages and abilities, a bit like a used car dealer who specializes in different makes and models of the same brand. His family has had elephants for as long as anyone can remember. Until relatively recently their elephants lived in forests that the Karen protected for this purpose. They were captives, but weren’t severely constrained. When they weren’t busy doing heavy labor in the village the elephants lived more or less as they chose. Adults dragged a heavy, unsecured leg chain that, as it trailed behind them through the undergrowth, left a path that showed their mahouts where they’d gone when it was time to round them up again. Many of these elephants were born to mothers who had been part of Karen communities for generations. They gave birth, had sex, and basically made their own choices during most of the year. They were trained to respond to only a few commands, such as Stop, Go, Open your mouth, and Lift your foot.
Before World War II, roughly two-thirds of Thailand was covered in thick forests that were home to wild elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, wild cattle, leopards, wild dogs, and monkeys. But by the 1950s these forests were being cut at an increasing pace. The Thai government began granting large-scale logging concessions to foreign companies. Many Karen men found jobs in the logging industry working as mahouts. Since many of the prime logging regions had no roads, elephants were used in place of trucks to transport logs, men, and supplies. They also stacked the harvested logs, dragged them to rivers to be floated elsewhere, and helped pull stumps from the ground.
Today there is very little forest left in Thailand, and what remains is protected. Logging is illegal; this means that the roughly 2,500 elephants who still live there are now out of work, finding themselves in the sad position of having been forced to log their own habitat out of existence. There is still a thriving elephant market, however, and it exists to serve tourists willing to pay for elephant rides and treks or to see the animals paint pictures of flowers or the word “Love” in English with their trunks, play soccer or basketball, twirl a hula hoop, and throw darts.
I visited Pi Som Sak at the Chiang Mai Zoo, where he lives in a small house on a forested hill overlooking the city and the flat dirt spots where his elephants are chained at night. He is a wealthy man who could live in a nice house in town, but he chooses to stay here with his family and his elephants, some of whom give rides at the zoo. “I like the view,” he told me, motioning to three female elephants staked in front of his house, calmly eating the wet tubular hearts of banana trees.
Pi Som Sak is often on his cell phone, talking in hushed tones about prices, and then driving off to a small village to visit a calf or adult whose owners want to sell. It is his job to determine how resilient an elephant is. Emotionally distraught elephants are cheap; aggressive elephants are even cheaper. Cheapest of all is an elephant who has killed one or more people. Som Sak wants to buy well-adjusted elephants because they’re the best investments, so he has spent his entire life figuring out how to judge their emotional health as quickly as possible.
Certain behaviors signal a disturbed elephant. “I look for particular movements,” he said. “If they ‘pound the rice’ ”—meaning that they nod their head up and down without stopping—“that is bad luck and not an elephant you should buy. Also if their ears are not flapping in unison, but one at a time, that means they could be very dangerous. And their tail should look beautiful, like a lion’s tail. If the end is missing, it is bad luck. Maybe they fight with others and had it bitten off. Also when they look at you, they should blink. If they just stare at you blankly, that is bad.”
When Som Sak buys a new elephant and brings him or her back to Chiang Mai, a long truck ride is often involved. This can be stressful for the elephants, especially if they have never ridden in the back of a truck before. Som Sak’s process is in a way similar to those early flood experiments on emotional resiliency. An elephant road trip is his version of Pavlov’s fake flood.
When a new elephant arrives at Som Sak’s house, he takes her off into the forest, gives her plenty of food, and leaves her alone. “Later, I sneak back and hide behind a tree where I can see the elephant but she can’t see me. If she is flapping her ears and breaking off tree branches to scratch herself or use as flyswatters, then I know the elephant is okay. If she is just standing there, she is not.”
Pi Som Sak believes that the emotional stability of an adult elephant is largely due to what his or her life was like as a calf. “It has to do with the mother,” he told me. “If they have a good mother, they will usually be good because she will treat them well.”
I asked Som Sak about Rara, telling him a bit about her early years. He agreed that living in a hotel is no way for an elephant to grow up, but he also pointed out that she must have had a good mahout or she would have already become violent. Som Sak is also convinced that base temperament can be inherited. A kind and gentle mother is more likely to give birth to a kind and gentle calf, and an aggressive mother is more likely to have an aggressive calf. But when it comes to the emotional health of captive elephants who have to interact with humans, the most important thing is how they are treated by these humans, and their mahout in particular. This is not as easy as simply treating one’s own elephant well, however, because an elephant’s relationships with other elephants are so important that they can become upset if they see another elephant being beaten or ignored or harassed by their mahout.
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Unfortunately, despite Gawn’s careful, loving attention and the possibilities of her new life at the park, Rara died a few months after she arrived. One morning, after a night of refusing food, she had a heart attack and collapsed. Her autopsy showed that she had herpes, a disease that, in elephants, causes heart problems instead of sores. Her heart was so enlarged that the park veterinarian, Dr. Grishda Langka, couldn’t believe that she had lived as long as she did. Her fans and friends were devastated. Silke Preussker, who had worked so hard to bring her to Elephant Nature Park, flew in from Hong Kong to pay her respects. We stood next to Rara’s grave, a giant mound of earth, and made a pile of young coconuts, Rara’s favorite snack.
For a long time after I returned from Thailand I thought of Rara every day. I carried with me, and still do, a small wooden carving of her that Gawn made while she grazed nearby. The fact that Rara stood still long enough for him to carve her likeness amazes me. And when I turn the tiny, smiling wooden elephant over in my hands I always think about other conflicted, difficult, and charming animals. Oliver had been fragile when he came to Jude and me because, perhaps, that was simply the sort of canine he was, but he was also a collection of his experiences as a young dog. Rara was the same. Now we would never know if she would have eventually gotten over her fear of other elephants. I wanted to understand more about the role of animals’ early life experience on their long-term mental health. And so I turned to the creatures that generations of scientists have used to unravel the mysteries of the mind: rats, mice, and children.
Bruce Perry is a child psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and the former chief of psychiatry at the Texas Children’s Hospital. He specializes in helping traumatized kids, treating the survivors of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco, Texas, for example, and many others who have survived genocide, rape, neglect, and abandonment. He has also helped various organizations plan trauma responses in the wake of tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina, the Columbine school shootings, and September 11. In his book (with coauthor Maia Szalavitz), The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Perry describes a few children he treated who grew up in highly abnormal environments, many of whom suffered early life traumas that affected them well into adulthood. There was the boy who was left alone all day as an infant while his mother took long walks around the city, whose cries brought no help and who grew up to be a rapist with an inability to feel emotions as others do. Another boy was raised in a kennel like a dog, among other dogs, by a well-meaning but completely incapable male guardian.
Perry has also done research on rats. Part of his doctoral work focused on understanding the role of neurotransmitters like norepinephrine (noradrenaline) and epinephrine (adrenaline) in the fight or flight response. Rats in his neuropharmacology lab were exposed to stressful stimuli, such as shocks or sharp sounds, as they tried to negotiate a maze. Some of the rats were still able to solve the maze easily, while others fell apart when exposed to even the tiniest stressor, forgetting everything that they already knew. The researchers determined that the rats most sensitive to stress had extremely overactive adrenaline and noradrenaline systems (that is, a more sensitive fight-or-flight response). The overabundance of these stress hormones caused an avalanche of changes in other parts of their brain, hampering the rats’ ability to respond to stress. The developmental stage during which these rats were exposed to stressors also affected the extent of their neurological changes. Earlier studies demonstrated that if rat pups were handled for even a few minutes by a human in the lab, something they found especially stressful, the resulting changes in their stress hormone levels and their behavior would last into adulthood.
Human stress response systems, like those of rats, can become too easily triggered by potentially disturbing things: plane turbulence, heights, people who resemble a person who hurt them, insects, or the millions of other sights, sounds, or experiences people can find worrisome. There may also be lasting effects on the function of the brainstem, limbic system, and cortex—the parts of the brain responsible for everything from controlling heart rate and blood pressure to the capacity for abstract thinking and decision making—and, tellingly, emotional states such as sadness, love, and happiness. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a report, “Understanding the Effects of Maltreatment on Brain Development.” They didn’t have nonhuman animals in mind, but the processes the report describes are similar. During fetal development, neurons in the animal brain are created and migrate to the various parts of the brain where they will stay. The development of synapses between these neurons, the neuronal pathways that give rise to memories, decisions, emotions, and other mental experiences, happens a bit in the womb and then takes off after birth in response to a young animal’s experience in the world. If some synapses and neuronal pathways are not used, or if they are bathed in high levels of stress hormones, they can atrophy; this can result in serious emotional problems as the animal grows. Research on both human and other animal brains has shown that they may be more susceptible to damage at certain times than others, as in Perry’s rat pups, and this damage may lead to emotional problems later.
Perry’s very first patient, a seven-year-old girl named Tina, reminded him of his earlier work on the stressed young rodents. Tina was sexually abused between the ages of four and six by the teenage son of her babysitter. At least once a week for two years, the boy tied Tina and her younger brother up while he raped and sodomized them with foreign objects. He threatened to kill both children if they told anyone. When Tina appeared in Perry’s office a year after the abuse ended, she was having trouble sleeping and paying attention, difficulty with fine motor control, coordination, and aspects of her speech, and sometimes she misunderstood social cues from people around her. Like the baby rats exposed to stressors that affected the function and development of different brain regions, Tina’s sustained abuse affected her neurological development during a key period in her growth. Perry was convinced that the years of stress caused a string of changes in Tina: altered stress hormone receptors and increased sensitivity and dysfunction, which were responsible for her developmental difficulties. This, along with her memories of the abuse, made learning and paying attention harder. She also acted aggressively in school. Perry believed that Tina was more apt to be on the alert for danger, even where it didn’t exist. In the classroom she saw the smallest slights by her teachers and classmates as challenges and often got into fights or acted out sexually.
Almost all of the significant recent research on stress, neglect, and mental health has looked at people like Tina, though it’s likely that the effects are similar in many different species. Imagine that an infant girl starts to cry, and instead of tending to her, her mother locks the door of the room and turns out the lights. If this happens once or twice, it will probably not have lasting effects on her development. If it happens every time the baby cries, the parts of the girl’s brain that help her attach to people around her, those that release chemicals triggering pleasing feelings when she sees her mother or is held closely and teach her that attachment to other humans is beneficial, will not be activated. It’s possible that when this baby grows up, she will not understand how to have her physical and emotional needs met by other people in a healthy way. This is why comforting crying babies matters; they are learning that crying means help will come. As an older child, adolescent, and adult, she may not trust people to provide for her, and she may wind up with an attachment disorder that causes her to attach too strongly and too soon to the wrong people, or not enough to the people who treat her well. Now imagine this infant girl is a gorilla.
Gorilla physiological and emotional development is similar to ours in that it occurs over a long period and bonding with one’s mother teaches a young gorilla how to trust others. A gorilla who is ignored as an infant may have problems connecting to troop members as an adult in a society that is extremely social. The same may be true for elephants, who also develop over long periods of time and form close relationships with family and herd members. This may, in fact, be the case for any creature whose emotional needs are not met when their brains are developing, or for those animals who are hurt by the ones they are supposed to trust.
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Dr. Cynthia Zarling is a psychologist who has worked with troubled children for more than twenty-five years. She also rehabilitates aggressive German Shepherds who have been given up by their families. I told her about Rara the elephant, what I was learning from Perry’s research, and what Som Sok had told me about judging animal emotions in Thailand. She didn’t seem surprised. Instead she told me it made her think of the children she treats. “For kids, the most important relationship is the first relationship,” Zarling said, “the mother-infant relationship. This is the base that every single one of the child’s future relationships rests on. You get your identity by the mirror that is your mother, and you can end up with a fragmented sense of self if your mother doesn’t reflect you well.”
Zarling believes something similar happens with the German Shepherds she rehabilitates. Pups who are abused or neglected often fail to become confident adult dogs, and without good dog behavior modeled for them early on—by other dogs or their human companions—they’re much more difficult to work with and can be more aggressive, and thus are more likely to end up at shelters. After these dogs are adopted, they’re returned when their difficult behaviors surface. E’lise Christensen calls these canines “recycled dogs” and says that trying to understand why they behave the way they do feels like watching a dog chase his own tail. “Are they problem dogs because they’re products of the shelter system, having been adopted only to be returned for their difficult behaviors, often more than once?” she said. “Or are they in the shelter system because they were born difficult dogs?”
Where you live and whether your burrow, nest, house, or den stimulates, excites, or calms you matters for your mental health. It’s so obvious that it hardly needs stating. Yet many people are still surprised when an animal living in poor conditions or simply in the wrong sort of environment veers into the territory of mental illness and does something spectacular. Whenever an orca at SeaWorld lashes out and kills a trainer, or an elephant like Tyke tramples her handler, there’s a media explosion of surprised accounts by other trainers, park staff, and people in the audience. Of course, PETA and other animal rights groups are never surprised and have press releases ready and waiting for these sorts of events.
Captive animals suffer disproportionately because in many cases their environment has almost nothing to do with the sort of place they would choose to live themselves. These creatures have hours of empty time every day and often a lack of activity to occupy their minds, hands, paws, or jaws. In response, many develop behaviors that are eerily similar to those of emotionally distraught humans. Champions of the animal display industry wave away such criticism, arguing that zoo animals often live longer than their free counterparts and that wildernesses come with their own stressors like hungry predators, no access to veterinary care, and certainly no prearranged meal times. It is also the case that many animals currently living in captivity were born there and may not be able to survive on their own. These points are all trotted out like show ponies anytime the animal display industry comes under attack. But a tally of years lived and calorically balanced meals eaten doesn’t account for quality of life or the pleasure that can come from making one’s own decisions. It doesn’t even account for the kind of suffering that isn’t lethal but nonetheless may make an animal unhappy and drive him to gnaw on his toes or swim in endless circles. Just because an animal is born into a certain world doesn’t mean that she can’t have an opinion about it.
A few creatures, like a few individual people, might prefer life inside of a gilded cage. Somewhere in Kenya or Zimbabwe there may be a lazy giraffe who likes snacking on cut leaves more than stretching his neck out to break them off for himself. I do have a few friends who would jump at the chance to hole up at the Ritz-Carlton and order room service for years on end. But personally, I would get bored of the mimosas, the turn-down service, and the late-night French fries under their silver dome and I’d wonder what lay beyond the carpeted hallway. Unfortunately for most display animals, there’s no way to know which giraffe, wallaby, or orangutan might relish hotel life until they’ve checked in. If they don’t enjoy it, if it drives them to distraction and madness, there’s no way to check out.
Advocates for zoos and aquariums assert that “good” institutions, meaning well-funded ones, make sure that the animals’ needs are met: that they have enough to eat, access to veterinary care, somewhere to sleep, and freedom from predators. As a result, they often choose to reproduce. Many of these animals even have social lives with their exhibit mates or their keepers. But the prevalence of their odd behaviors, obvious to anyone who visits a zoo or aquarium knowing what to look for, is one clue that life in captivity—whether it’s a prison or a luxury hotel—isn’t the same as being free. Over the past few years I developed a sort of animal mental illness field guide that I share in the form of running commentary before the pacing lions or the compulsively masturbating walruses. I’ve become a bit depressing to be with at the zoo, and my friends with kids have stopped asking me along. This is just as well.
When I look at a gorilla perched on a fiberglass tree, lovingly hand-painted to look like the most perfect version of itself, inside a faux habitat carefully designed to remind viewers of the environment that she has evolved to live in, I don’t marvel at the gorilla in front of me, but instead at the mastery of the exhibit itself. If I were a contemporary zoo animal in America, the exhibit would not remind me of, say, equatorial Africa, because I have probably only ever lived in the United States. And yet the desire to run fast, swing wildly, roar, fly, or tear another animal limb from limb would exist in me still, just as powerfully, despite having been born in Denver, Cleveland, or Los Angeles.
Admittedly, this is heavy projection. Perhaps the gorilla sitting on the handcrafted stump prefers the feel of fiberglass to bark since that is all she knows. But then why is she rhythmically throwing up inside her mouth, only to swallow it down again, to the exclusion of other activities? Why does she continue to pluck the hair from her shins and forearms and then eat it? Why, of all things, has the zoo called in a human psychiatrist to help? Possibly the fiberglass tree bores her. Or she discovered that the lush plants along the moat are electrified so that the exhibit looks lovely for visitors but cannot be torn off and eaten. Or her favorite young male has been sent elsewhere in order to mate with someone more genetically appropriate. Or possibly the bossiest female in the troop has hoarded the day’s grapes. Then again, it could be that her favorite keeper has quit or is out sick, and another, who does not know how she likes her oatmeal, has replaced him. Perhaps one of the troop’s babies has died and the body was taken away too soon.
Environment matters. It is the backdrop upon which our lives are lived; we both form and are formed by it. When you are a captive animal living within a circumscribed space, it takes on even more importance. Because of this, understanding animals’ responses to their surroundings is fundamental when you attempt to make sense of their behavior.
Some abnormal behaviors are easier to spot than others. The most common are known as stereotypic behaviors or stereotypies. These activities are repetitive, always the same, and seemingly pointless. There are as many types of stereotypies as there are animals busily engaging in them. Certain species have their own preferred types. Human stereotypies include ritualized and repetitive movements that tend to get worse with stress, anxiety, or exhaustion, such as rocking, crossing and uncrossing one’s legs, certain sequences of touching oneself, or marching in place. In all animals they tend to be funhouse-mirror versions of normal activities.
Horses may take small, rhythmic gulps of air or endlessly chew on inedible objects like fences or water troughs. Pigs gnaw on one another’s tails; caged minks spin in circles like furry dervishes; walruses repeatedly regurgitate and reingest their fish; wombats lie on their backs and wave their paws in the air as if they’re doing an odd little back paddle to nowhere. Dogs like Oliver compulsively lick a spot on their paws or flanks, even if there is no irritation or if the irritation that first caused the desire to lick has long disappeared. Whales, seals, otters, or any other creature that swims can develop a pattern swimming stereotypy that is just what it sounds like—swimming in a particular pattern to the exclusion of all other activities. Dolphin stereotypies often include masturbation using their own body or open pipes or hoses in their tanks. Bears and the big cats endlessly pace, wearing dusty trails in their enclosures that read like topographic maps of the compulsive mind. Elephants weave or sway or lift their legs up and down rhythmically, often in a ritualized sequence.
While plenty of domestic creatures develop stereotypic behaviors, they are particularly common in zoos, aquariums, circuses, and large pig, fur, and poultry farms.
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In the United States and Europe more than 16 billion farm and lab animals are raised every year, and millions of them exhibit abnormal behaviors. This includes 91.5 percent of pigs, 82.6 percent of poultry, 50 percent of lab mice, 80 percent of minks living on fur farms, and 18.4 percent of horses. A large percentage of the roughly 100 million laboratory mice, rats, monkeys, birds, dogs, and cats used in American labs every year also engage in self-destructive and self-soothing behaviors, from rocking and compulsive masturbation to self-biting and skin picking.
A study published in 2008 found a strong correlation between lab, zoo, and farm animals who were separated from their mothers early and the development of stereotypic behaviors. Early weaning is commonplace on large-scale pig, poultry, dairy, and mink farms. Dairy calves, for example, are often separated from their mothers only a few hours after being born, although cattle do not normally wean their calves until they are nine to eleven months old. Piglets on many hog farms are taken from their mothers at two to six weeks but would otherwise suckle until three or four months, and minks are separated from their mothers at seven weeks, although wild minks stay with their mothers for ten or eleven months. Separating babies from their mothers too early is perhaps most dramatic in the poultry industry. Chicks who would naturally remain with their mothers for five to twelve weeks never even see them; instead the eggs are sent to hatcheries. Those early weaned pigs are more aggressive and more prone to “belly nosing” (rooting at the flanks of other piglets); minks pace and bite their own tails more frequently; foals spend more time eating the wood of their corrals; dairy calves suck on whatever is available to them; mice are more likely to repetitively bite the bars of their cages; and hens born in hatcheries peck one another’s feathers out more often and more intensely.
Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, a gifted advisor on many things animal, from slaughterhouse design to behavioral training and modification, and the subject of an HBO biopic. She is also autistic and wrote in her book, Animals Make Us Human, with coauthor Catherine Johnson, that “really intense stereotypies, stereotypies an animal spends hours a day doing—almost never occur in the wild, and they almost always do occur in humans with disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.”
Intense stereotypies can also occur in institutionalized children, like those that Spitz and Bowlby wrote about in the 1950s. Grandin and Johnson point to a study of Romanian orphans adopted in Canada showing that 84 percent of them engaged in stereotypical behaviors when they were in their cribs, repetitively rocking back and forth on their hands and knees; shifting their weight from one foot to another, a bit like circus elephants; and hitting their head against a wall or the bars of their crib like head-banging monkeys and dolphins.
These animal activities remind Grandin of autistic children who sometimes bite their own hands, bang their heads on walls, or slap themselves. She argues that 10 to 15 percent of captive rhesus monkeys housed alone do the exact same thing. She may be right, but Grandin’s comparison of autistic children to abnormally behaving animals is controversial. She has categorized autism “as a way station on the road from animals to humans,” implying that autistic children may be closer to animals than the rest of us, an assertion that uncomfortably echoes the Victorian idea that certain groups of humans are closer to animals than others. Even if they rock back and forth like upset monkeys do, autistic children aren’t more closely related to other animals than nonautistic children.
There is, however, the possibility that other animals can be autistic. And if so, autistic humans and autistic nonhumans may have some things in common. The ethologist Marc Bekoff once observed a wild coyote pup he called Harry. Harry’s littermates rolled and tumbled, snarling at one another joyfully, but Harry didn’t understand their invitations to tussle and didn’t seem to know how to play at all. Despite his best efforts, the pup couldn’t read coyote social cues. “For a long time I simply chalked it up to individual variation,” wrote Bekoff, “figuring that since behavior among members of the same species can vary, Harry wasn’t all that surprising.” But a few years later, someone asked him if he thought other animals could be autistic and Bekoff remembered the odd little pup. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “Harry suffered from coyote autism.”
In 2013, biologists at Caltech took a group of anxious lab mice with poor social skills and stereotypic behaviors and dosed them with a gut microbe, Bacteroides fragilis. Their anxiety seemed to lessen, they appeared to communicate better with one another, and they spent less time engaging in odd behaviors. The researchers concluded that the bacteria might help more than mice and suggested that people with developmental disorders like autism should try taking probiotics. This study built on earlier research, also at Caltech, that linked autism spectrum disorders to intestinal problems in both mice and humans. Mice who squeaked at other mice in strange ways, for example, had less Bacteroides fragilis in their intestines. So did humans with autism. The lack of this bacteria may not cause autism but adding it back in may help animals with their symptoms.
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Boredom, a bullying or aggressive exhibit mate, or a disliked keeper or staff member can each send an animal down the road to compulsion. Perhaps the lights are too bright, the darkness too dark; perhaps it is too loud or too quiet, too smelly or not smelly enough.
Many captive gorillas regurgitate their food and eat it again in an endless cycle. This is so common that there is a term for it, R and R, for reingestion and regurgitation. Jeannine Jackle, the assistant curator of the tropical forest exhibit at Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, oversees the zoo’s troop of eight gorillas and their team of keepers. She has worked with these gorillas for more than twenty years, and her office at the zoo is covered with photos of each of them at various stages of their lives, along with their colorful finger paintings, a sort of inter-ape craft project that involves the keepers sliding paper into the cages and coating the gorillas’ fingers in paint. In a yellow tackle box behind Jeannine’s desk there is a “primate bite kit” that she has never had to use.
“Each of the gorillas has a particular way of R-and-R-ing,” Jeannine told me. “Kiki, a female, keeps it in her mouth or puts it on the glass of the exhibit. She’ll also blow it out of her nose and let it dribble down her chin before licking it back up again.” Another female, Gigi, who is the eldest in the troop, has perhaps the grossest technique. She spits up all over the floor and then plays with it before eating it.
“They do it more often when they’ve eaten something sweet,” Jeannine said. “I think they may like tasting it again, and it gives them something to do. We have a joke among the keepers that if humans did this we’d have ‘5 R’ restaurants.”
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The behaviorist and wildlife biologist Toni Frohoff specializes in cetacean sociality and communication, has evaluated “swim with dolphin” programs, and served as a consultant on various advocacy campaigns for better treatment of captive dolphins. Toni has seen pattern swimming, masturbation stereotypies, and many instances of what she calls head-ramming, when dolphins repeatedly ram their heads against the sides of pools or tanks.
“Once I was paid to go up to Edmonton, Canada, because there was a shopping mall there with a live dolphin in it,” she said. “I had to testify that keeping a lone dolphin in a mall was bad. I got there and saw this dolphin who was obviously exhibiting all sorts of stress behaviors and asked, ‘Did you really need a dolphin expert to come up here and tell you that this is a terrible idea?’ ”
Seals and sea lions also develop weird habits in captivity. In addition to pattern swimming there is “pup sucking,” when pups try to nurse from other pups instead of adult females. Captive dolphins and walruses will also throw up and reingest what they’ve spit up repeatedly, a lot like gorillas. “In the wild it’s a normal behavior that marine mammals can use to get rid of squid beaks or rocks they’ve ingested,” the marine mammal veterinarian Bill Van Bonn told me, “but in captivity we see it happen with their actual food and we consider it a displacement behavior. People in the captivity industry don’t like to talk about it.”
They may not want to talk about it because the institutions that depend on captive animals to entertain visitors sell family-friendly experiences or purportedly educational ones, not animal compulsion sideshows. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) is a nonprofit accreditation and membership organization made up of animal display facilities invested in convincing the American public that zoos are a series of arklike institutions busily ensuring the planet’s biodiversity. According to the AZA, the average zoo and aquarium visitor in the United States is a female between twenty-five and thirty-five years old with children. For the most part, zoos do not want to emphasize the disturbed or disturbing animals in their collections to these visitors, lest they mar the carefully calibrated experience in which everything from the sound track of hissing insects playing from hidden speakers to the hand-painted backdrops inside the exhibits has been designed to promote the zoo’s vision of nonhuman nature and family fun.
The differences between display facilities are sometimes as distinct as zebra stripes and sometimes less so. Take, for example, SeaWorld and the Bronx Zoo. The latter is a nonprofit zoo run by an international conservation organization, the Wilderness Conservation Society, while SeaWorld is a for-profit theme park owned and operated until 2009 by the Anheuser-Busch Corporation, and now by the private equity firm Blackstone Group. Many keepers, staff, and veterinarians who work at institutions like the Bronx Zoo have gone to great lengths to convince me that what they do is very different from what goes on in places like SeaWorld. They argue that they educate instead of entertain, or at least while they entertain. This debate may not seem to have much to do with mental illness in animals, but it does. These institutions justify keeping their animals on display, and the ensuing mental trouble that the animals may face, with the claim that the creatures inspire visitors to learn about animals and return home more educated about their world and more committed to protecting it. In theory this is a great idea, and if the claim were valid, then perhaps a few compulsive animals would, on balance, be fair collateral. But it simply hasn’t worked out that way.
Forty years ago, as the environmental movement began to coalesce into a force that influenced how Americans spent their money and their Saturday afternoons, the country’s zoos consisted of barren concrete pit-style enclosures and faced a crisis of diminishing visitorship. They had to become places that no longer depressed people, or they would have to close. The zoos that survived now justify their existence as educational but also as repositories of endangered species and guardians of threatened wildlife. This justification is at best promissory and at worst a smokescreen that allows institutions to remain profitable while the wild counterparts of the animals in their collections go quietly extinct.
In 2007 the AZA published the results of a three-year survey on the educational impact of zoos in an attempt to shore up their argument for their role as environmental stewards and educators. The report argued that zoo visits made people more likely to care about animals and more aware of conservation needs. A follow-up report, however, published by a group of research scientists at Emory University, questioned the validity of the AZA’s research methods and argued that the study’s educational claims were vastly exaggerated.
Surely some zoo visitors are changed by their experiences watching animals, chatting with the docents, and reading the signage. Facilities like the Bronx Zoo, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and the San Diego Zoo have environmental education programs, engage in research efforts concerning wild animal populations, and often make significant contributions to conservation. Applying for jobs at these insitutions is a highly competitive process and many new recruits arrive more educated than ever. Yet despite staff education and training, healthy research and outreach budgets, and new exhibits in which the animals are free to munch on native plants or walk on grass instead of concrete, many creatures still wind up with the variety of behaviors that prompt zoo-going children to ask their parents’ why, for example, the dolphin won’t stop putting his erect penis inside the nozzle of the tank’s water filtration system.
When visitors notice and complain about such behaviors, certain display facilities are up front in their efforts to ameliorate them. The Franklin Park Zoo in Boston posts informational signage on the glass of exhibits about why the animals are given things to play with, just in case people wonder why there are blankets or plastic tubs inside the gorilla exhibit. Other zoos and aquariums attempt to deal with the behaviors by removing the most disturbed animals from view.
Ultimately, whether visitors leave motivated, to recycle or donate to conservation causes is not up to the zoo or aquarium but to the visitors themselves.
Contemporary Americans need opportunities to see and interact with other animals, but I do not think zoos are the answer, since the animals are rarely interactive with visitors in the first place. It seems petty, but I also don’t like how they smell—a mixture of urine, cleaning solvent, and something else, perhaps the tang of despair, or a bored sort of waiting. The more naturalistic the cages, the more depressing they can be because they are that much more deceptive. To the mandrill on the other side of the glass, the realistic foliage that frames his favorite perch doesn’t help him one bit if it has been hot-wired so that he doesn’t destroy it. It was conflicts like these that Pavlov so clearly showed cause disordered behavior in dogs. Some of the new natural-looking exhibits may be even worse for their inhabitants than the old cement ones, as the new plants and other features can shrink the animals’ usable space. These environments can have drastic effects on the psychological well-being of the animals who spend their entire lives in them.
At the same time, I have met many bighearted, empathetic, and intelligent zookeepers who care about the animals they work with and have made great sacrifices to do what is almost always a thankless job. Keepers work long hours, make little money, are highly replaceable, may frequently find themselves in situations of real danger, perform tasks that are physically demanding, and, perhaps most stressful of all, are not in charge.
A keeper may recognize, for example, that a few of the wild dogs she takes care of are growing compulsive, circling their enclosure in ritualized patterns and no longer stop to play with the pups or curl up to rest. But most keepers don’t have the institutional clout to produce the big changes—such as building bigger exhibits or ordering more expensive and varied diets—that ensure the well-being of their charges. These decisions are made by zoo management, who may or may not have firsthand experience working with animals. Their first priority is keeping the zoo profitable and visitorship up, something that can be at odds with animal welfare. It sounds basic, but to be a good exhibit animal a creature must be visible. Panda and gorilla births, for example, make for great surges of visitors and lots of Awwws on local news programs, but how many mammalian mothers want their newborns on full display under bright lights, often for many hours at a time?
For the zookeepers and trainers, even at amusement parks like SeaWorld or Six Flags, the animals they work with every day become family. These men and women spend more time with whales, dolphins, or wildebeests than their human family members and love them just as much. I have never met a keeper or trainer who doesn’t want the best for their charges. Sometimes, when they realize that they can’t protect the animals they care for, there’s no going back.
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Jennifer Hemmett now owns a posh dog boutique, but she used to be a primate keeper who loved working with great apes. After ten years at an East Coast zoo, she reached her breaking point. He was a lowland gorilla named Tom. Because Tom’s genetic material would be a good match for another zoo’s female gorillas, the AZA ordered him to a zoo hundreds of miles away where he knew no one. He was abused and neglected by the other gorillas, stopped eating, and lost more than a third of his body weight. The transfer was deemed a failure and Tom was sent back home, where Jennifer and the other keepers spent months nursing him back to health. They felt that Tom was in no shape to be moved again. He was emotionally sensitive and didn’t do well among other gorillas and human staff that he didn’t know. But Tom was sent away again anyway. A few months later, when Jennifer and a few of his other keepers visited him at the new zoo, Tom caught sight of them through the fence of his exhibit and started to cry. This was no quiet whimpering. Tom howled and sobbed and ran toward his old keepers. He continued to follow Jennifer and the others from his side of the fence, step for step, as they circled the exhibit, bawling the whole time. The other zoo visitors complained and told the keepers to “stop hogging the gorilla.” Jennifer returned home and gave her notice to the zoo two days later. Administrators at Tom’s new zoo informed the keepers that they were barred from visiting the gorilla exhibit again; it was too upsetting for Tom.
Repetitive hair plucking is known as trichotillomania. The disorder affects roughly 1.5 percent of men and 3.5 percent of women in the United States, though this doesn’t account for those people who are so embarrassed by the resulting bald spots that they’ve become quite good at covering them up and may never be diagnosed. Most men and women pluck hairs from their scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes, beards, or pubic area. It’s fairly common for someone to start plucking one area, such as their eyebrows, but then over time switch to pulling from another spot. Sufferers say that the plucking is usually preceded by some sort of tension that the pull itself releases, but it can also happen when people are relaxed or distracted, reading a book or watching television. That being said, feeling anxious, angry, or sad often increases the urgency and frequency with which people pluck.
There is a good deal of confusion about how the disorder should be classified. Until 2013 the DSM situated hair plucking under impulse-control disorders not elsewhere classified and counseled that it should not be considered a compulsion. Unless plucking is associated with obsessive thoughts, the DSM stressed that it was not an obsessive-compulsive disorder, since the plucking isn’t usually performed along a rigid framework in the way that obsessive-compuisve hand-washing or lock-checking generally is. The fifth edition of the DSM shifted the disorder around and now considers it a form of OCD along with skin-picking.
Whatever its etiology, trichotillomania is in the DSM because most people don’t do it. We need our hair for all sorts of reasons, some physiological, most not. Bald patches and missing eyebrows can be unattractive and time spent plucking can interfere with daily life. The habit might be a symptom of anxiety or depression, but mostly it makes the sufferer look odd, and this is when it tends to be diagnosed. Some people with trichotillomania, particularly children, may pull hair from other people, or even pets. And it’s common for people to play with or sometimes eat their plucked hairs.
In this, like so many of our neuroses, we are not alone. Hair pulling has been reported in six primate species (not including humans), as well as among mice, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, sheep, musk oxen, dogs, and cats. Rodents who pluck are called “barbers” because they remove the fur or whiskers of other mice. Like human pluckers, they tend to be female. And these mice, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, are found only among captive mouse populations. The online message boards for mouse-rearing humans who raise them as pets or for “fancy” mouse shows are full of hair-removal stories. The owners share photos of mice and rats with little bald spots on their heads, reverse mohawks, or hairless facial patches shaped like tiny Phantom of the Opera masks. Perplexed, the rodents’ owners look for answers: “Tache seems unable to go more than two weeks in a cage with other mice without beginning to barber again. . . . Today I returned her to the big tank with Pu Manchu and Mrs. Beach . . . but I expect by the end of two weeks she’ll be barbering again. How to solve this problem?”
Some fanciers and breeders claim the behavior is about displaying dominance. Others say it happens because of overcrowding or lack of stimulation; a lab mouse, even if he is born and bred to be one, still has sensory, social, and environmental needs that a cage, even a pleasant one filled with exercise wheels and colorful plastic tunnels, doesn’t provide. Barbering, like many forms of OCD, including the human varieties, is a normal grooming behavior gone awry. Usually mice groom by scratching themselves with their hind feet, washing their face or fur with their front paws using their own saliva, or smoothing or cleaning their hair with their teeth. Barber mice take these behaviors to an extreme by removing hair on others. These mice don’t usually injure the mice whose fur or whiskers they nibble or pluck. In fact it seems that their clients may enjoy it. Mice will sometimes follow the barber mouse around until she plucks them, even when the results are the complete loss of whiskers or an unironic mouse mullet.
Because mice are such lab stalwarts, a few researchers have suggested that the barbering rodents might help us better understand overzealous hair-removal in humans. Studies using mice as stand-ins for human pluckers have tried various techniques to make the mice start barbering in the first place (that is, if they haven’t already started doing it themselves), then investigated the effects of antidepressants on the behavior.
Barbering may also have a genetic component. An experiment conducted in 2002 demonstrated that mice bred without a group of genes that included the Hoxb8 gene, fundamental in the development of immune cells called microglia found in the brain, became severe self-barbers. The mutant mice not only trimmed hair and plucked their whiskers but also used their paws to scratch bald spots and sores on their rumps. In a later study, published in the journal Cell, scientists transplanted bone marrow containing healthy microglia cells from a group of control mice into the population of barbers. A month after the transfer, when the microglia had made it to the mutant mouse brains, many of the barber mice stopped overgrooming. Three months later, their hair had grown back. While no one is suggesting that human trichotillomania sufferers sign up for bone marrow transplants, researchers are now studying the links between the brain’s immune system, trichotillomania, and other mental disorders such as OCD, autism, and depression.
Furry animals aren’t the only ones to pluck themselves. Avian veterinarians diagnose feather-picking disorder if it is unrelated to other medical conditions like allergies. Parrot owners, avian vets, and breeders claim that birds pluck when bored, frustrated, and stressed. It can also be related to sexual behavior or premature weaning, a way of seeking attention, a reaction to overcrowding, a sign of separation anxiety, or a reaction to a change in the bird’s routine—virtually anything potentially upsetting to parrots.
Phoebe Greene Linden has lived with parrots for more than twenty-five years and is an expert on captive parrot behavior. She told me that the solutions for stopping feather pickers are as individual as strategies tailored for human pluckers. Everyone plucks for different reasons. Phoebe feels that, overall, enriching parrots’ environments and helping them learn new behaviors is best. “Making sure that they have opportunities to fly, forage, and socialize is key,” she says. And in chronic cases, the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs, such as Prozac can be useful, as well as Xanax and Valium.
At the San Francisco Zoo the lowest-ranking female mandrill started plucking after a male in the troop died. In the wake of his death, leadership in the troop shifted to a mandrill that one docent referred to as “a dictator.” The lowest-ranking mandrill, stressed by the new leader, began to pluck so intensely on both sides of her head that she gave herself a mohawk. The zoo put her on Paxil and she stopped plucking as much.
For captive gorillas, the most common sites for hair plucking are forearms and shins, but I’ve seen plucked patches wherever the apes can reach. Since gorillas have more and thicker body hair than we do, they can pluck it from almost anywhere.
Little Joe, a member of the gorilla troop in Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, is a sixteen-year-old male with ropey muscles and long arms. In 2003 he used those arms to climb out of the tropical forest exhibit and escape the zoo. (“He’s like the Michael Jordan of gorillas. His arms are so long and he’s so athletic that he challenged the limits of the exhibit in a way that no gorilla had before,” said Jeannine Jackle.) Joe roamed around the neighborhood for two hours. When he took a break at a public bus stop, a woman who spotted him there said that at first she thought he was “a guy with a big black jacket and a snorkel on.”
When Little Joe isn’t planning his next escape, he’s often plucking his hair. He pulls out strands on his arms and sometimes eats them, just like a person with trichotillomania. He also picks at his scabs, over and over, leaving tiny wounds on his arms. Jeannine thinks that it gets worse when he’s anxious. The keepers haven’t been able to stop him from plucking entirely, but they try to keep him busy doing other things, like eating flavored popcorn or taking part in training sessions to present different parts of his body for medical checks.
At the Bronx Zoo in New York a female gorilla named Kiojasha plucked herself so intensely that visitors asked about her. One of the docents said, “They couldn’t tell if she was a gorilla or not, she was so hairless. She honestly looked like a wizened old human woman. It was disturbing. After a week of this, the zoo took her off exhibit, and now I think she’s in Calgary.”
Sufi Bettina, a Bronx gorilla named for the mother of Glenn Close, a zoo supporter, likes to sit on one of the artfully rendered mud banks and stare into the middle distance plucking the hair from her forearms until small bloody scabs form. Then she picks at the scabs.
Primatologists like Frans de Waal and Jane Goodall have observed that nonhuman animals can and do have culture—that is, knowledge passed down from one generation to another or from one group to another. When I heard of the Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) who teach one another to wash and season their yams in the ocean because the salted yams taste better, I wondered if the same might be true with plucking. The babies of gorillas who pull their hair often turn out to be pluckers themselves, and it’s possible they learned this from the apes around them.
Trichotillomania is easy to diagnose because bald spots are often visible even to the untrained eye. But what about other signs of mental unrest that are harder to spot and a bit more subjective to name? Even understanding the causes of certain stereotypic behaviors can be confusing. Temple Grandin has pointed out that just because an animal isn’t compulsively pacing, chewing, or repeatedly gnawing someone else’s tail doesn’t mean that the animal is happy. In the same way that some dogs’ separation anxiety can make them more withdrawn than destructive, the catatonic bear in the corner of the exhibit who doesn’t trace figure eights in the snow may simply lack the energy to express his frustration. These animals are less likely to be diagnosed even if they’re suffering as much as or more than their seemingly more compulsive counterparts.
Even when behaviors are clearly stress-related, they can be difficult to interpret. Mel Richardson was once asked to examine a tree kangaroo at the San Antonio Zoo that the keepers said was acting bizarrely. With the ears of a teddy bear, the rounded chub of a koala, and the tail of a fuzzy monkey, tree kangaroos are very cute. But this female was acting vicious. She was attacking her babies, and the keepers had no idea why. Mel went to check on her. Sure enough, as soon as he approached, the kangaroo ran to her babies and started hitting and clawing at them with her paws. He stepped back, and she stopped. He walked forward, and she ran at the babies again.
“I realized,” said Mel, “that she wasn’t viciously attacking her babies at all. She was trying to pick them up off the floor, but her little paws weren’t meant for that. In her native Australia and Papua New Guinea her babies never would have been on the ground. Her whole family would have been up in the trees.” The mother kangaroo wanted to move the babies away from the humans. What looked like abnormal attacks on her young were actually her way of trying to protect them. Her behavior wasn’t mental illness at all but a response to the stress of being a mother in an unnatural environment.
After the keepers redesigned the kangaroos’ cage so that more of it was elevated and farther from the door, she relaxed and stopped hitting her babies.
Mel explained, “As flippant as it might sound, the truth is that in order to know what’s abnormal, you must first know what’s normal. In this case in order to determine pathology, I had to understand the animal’s psychology. It’s pretty easy for people to get this wrong.”
Years later, Mel was running his own veterinary practice in Chico, California. One of the vet techs came to work complaining about her German Shepherd’s anxiety. She said that it started when she had a fight with her boyfriend; he threw something at the wall in anger and knocked a framed picture onto the floor. Ever since, when the German Shepherd entered that room she skulked around the edges, looking fearfully at the walls.
“What do you do when she does that?” Richardson asked the tech.
“I go over and stroke her and talk to her until she calms down,” she said.
“Well, you are making this problem worse. You’re rewarding her anxious behavior. Ignore her.”
The tech started ignoring her dog in their living room, and after two weeks the German Shepherd stopped acting fearful and hugging the walls. Mel believes this sort of thing is common—that expressions of fear and anxiety, or even, perhaps, compulsive behaviors, can be reinforced by well-meaning people who simply don’t understand their own role in their animals’ seeming madness.
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The Buddhist “elephant monk” Pra Ahjan Harn Panyataro lives in Baan Ta Klang, a village in Thailand’s northeastern province of Surin, where women weave silk made by worms raised on mulberry branches that grow in their yards. The community owns more than two hundred elephants, parked like soft gray cars alongside the village houses.
Panyataro, one of the few monks who conducts elephant funerals, built an elephant cemetery where human families leave offerings of fruit, incense, and bottles of water for their deceased elephants at the base of handmade headstones. He also compiles statistics on Asian elephant populations throughout the region and oversees a forest temple in which elephants and mahouts are welcome to traverse the paths among the trees in quiet contemplation. If an elephant kills a man—something that happens a few times per year or so in his community—he leads a discussion between the survivor’s family, the elephant’s owner, the elephant’s mahout, and anyone else affected by the killing. He has been doing this for twenty years.
The morning I met Panyataro he was about to leave for India (“For Buddhism, not elephants,” he said). A purring motorbike waited to take him to the airport. He sat down on the front steps of the temple and gestured for me to sit a few steps below him. I wanted to find out if he saw emotional troubles in the many elephants he knows and works with, and if so, how he recognizes their distress.
Nervous, I tripped over my words. “Will you ask him how he knows what the elephants are feeling?” I said to Ann, my friend and translator.
Panyataro looked directly at me and said, “In order to understand other animals, first you have to understand yourself.” This seemed both profound and also so commonsensical I wondered if I had needed to come all the way to Thailand to hear it. Then he continued: “Elephants can have mental problems. They are like us. They feel happiness, sadness, hunger, fullness.”
I asked how someone should go about making a sad elephant happy.
“First you have to find out what is wrong,” he said. “Sometimes this takes a long time. And it is always different.”
With that, he gathered up his robes, tucked our donations into the folds, slipped onto the back of the motorbike, and sped off through the holy forest.