I have to listen to Mae Kam Geow’s heart. If she doesn’t want to go anywhere, I don’t make her. She is old. That way she also listens to me.
Dahm, elephant mahout, northern Thailand
It’s up to you to listen to their demands, even when they are unspoken . . . and most of the time . . . they are.
Daniel Quagliozzi, cat behaviorist
Jokia is the only elephant I’ve ever met who reminds me of the cartoon version. Her legs are stocky, her head and trunk wide and chubby, as if she were a larger elephant stuffed into a smaller, tighter skin. She is also completely blind. Jokia once worked as a logging elephant in northern Thailand. As the story goes, she was pregnant and about to give birth, but her owners refused to give her time off from dragging logs. She birthed her calf while walking up a large mountain, and her baby, still in the amniotic sack, rolled to the bottom of the trail and died. Soon thereafter Jokia began refusing to work. Her mahout shot out one of her eyes with a slingshot, hoping to blind her into obedience. She worked for a few weeks and then refused again. The mahout stabbed her other eye with a knife, blinding her completely, hoping that in total darkness she would be more submissive, more dependent, and more likely to work. Jokia, stubborn and injured, still refused to do what was asked of her. A few years later a Karen woman named Lek Chailert, the founder of Elephant Nature Park, an ecotourism destination in the Mae Tang Valley outside Chiang Mai heard about the blind elephant, purchased her for $2,000, and brought her back to the park, a lush swath of land criss-crossed by a winding river.
For an entire year after she arrived, Jokia kept to herself. Then, slowly, she began to make friends with another elephant, a tall, thickly wrinkled, and inquisitive female named Mae Perm. Like Jokia, Mae Perm once worked as a logging elephant. Soon she and Jokia were inseparable, eating and bathing in the river together and grazing shoulder to shoulder through the long afternoons. Thirteen years later Jokia and Mae Perm still spend every waking moment side by side, a tight herd of two. The elephants are rarely out of trunk reach of each other, even during routine vet procedures. Mae Perm walks in front, leading the way, and Jokia follows, stepping slowly and sometimes hesitatingly, using her trunk to feel along the ground. But once a week she makes a two-hour trek to a forest camp, along a road with passing cars and trucks, and then takes a rutted, steep track alongside hikers and dogs through the forest, following Mae Perm every step of the route. When, every once in a while, Mae Perm strays a bit out of reach to graze, pulling long grasses out by the root with her trunk and whacking the dirt off against her knee, Jokia squeaks frantically until Mae Perm rushes back to her side and comforts her by stroking her with her trunk and rumbling deeply. Lek and the rest of the park staff are convinced that if they hadn’t found each other, the elephants would not have adapted as well to their new lives or advanced into their matronly old age as smoothly and joyfully as they have.
“Jokia has every right to want to kill people, but she doesn’t,” Jodi Thomas, a longtime resident and guide at Elephant Nature Park, told me as we stood in the shadow of the two elephants languidly chewing. “She’s an easygoing elephant. I think this is because she has so much of what she needs in Mae Perm. Their relationship gives Jokia confidence.”
Many of the foreheads of the elephants at Elephant Nature Park are deformed, evidence of past beatings with hooks so severe that they have left permanent grooves and trenches in their skulls. Some elephants arrive with fresh puncture wounds. Many of them have scarred and thickened ankles where spears have been repeatedly struck to urge them to walk faster or stay in line. These wounds are the physical tracings of the logging industry or the performing elephant trade. But there are emotional scars as well. Many of the elephants keep to themselves, as Jokia did, at least for a while, distrustful of new people and elephants. A lot of them have stereotypic behaviors like swaying, head bobbing, or rhythmically lifting their feet in a strange dance routine to which only they know the steps. Some have killed people. Others have killed elephants. In a few cases, like that of Rara, they arrive scared of other elephants. The most successful elephant rehabilitations are due, almost always, to the other elephants already living at the park, who often welcome newcomers into their makeshift herds.
Here the elephants don’t perform, although they do hew to a daily schedule of interactions with paying visitors, eating fruit at designated platforms and letting themselves be bathed in the shallow river. Lek, who has run the park for seventeen years and built its population of elephants from two to more than thirty-five at last count, told me that the only way she knows to help an elephant recover from a traumatic past is to offer them love, trust, and safety.
“It’s pretty simple,” she said, as a pack of rescued street dogs, who also live at the park, surged around her, panting and whining for attention. “The elephants also need the companionship of other elephants. Mae Perm and Jokia are a perfect example.”
Elephants are not the only animals to benefit from healing relationships with their own kind. The rabbit rescuer and rehabilitator Marinell Harriman has worked with hundreds of the creatures over the past twenty-five years. She is one of the founders of the House Rabbit Society and author of the House Rabbit Handbook: How to Live with an Urban Rabbit. “In caring for quite a few ‘sanctuary’ rabbits with long and short-term illnesses,” she writes, “we have seen some miracles of motivation. We are convinced that friendship therapy contributes to the recovery or at least stabilization of sick rabbits.”
Harriman tells the story of an eight-year-old rabbit named Jefty. After his mate died of cancer, Jefty began to chew his fur in earnest. He soon developed large bald patches, and a vet exam revealed that all the fur that had been once been on the outside of the rabbit was now inside him, in the form of a gigantic hairball lodged in his stomach. The vet thought it was unlikely that the mass would pass on its own and recommended surgery. Harriman started Jefty on a variety of hairball remedies to make him strong for surgery, but she decided to try something else too. She introduced Jefty to a ten-year-old rabbit who had also recently lost her partner. Almost immediately the pair began to treat each other with affection and rabbity care, to the point that Harriman postponed the surgery for a bit, hoping that the new relationship would cheer Jefty.
After a few days with his new rabbit companion Jefty was doing so much better that Harriman canceled the surgery in order to wait and see what happened. An X-ray showed that the fur mass was still in his stomach, but it was shrinking. “I won’t try to claim that getting happy cured a furball,” she wrote, “but I will claim that it gave Jefty a reason to eat the hay and greens in front of him. He had someone to dine with and to share his pineapple cocktails with.”
Over the next few weeks the skinny, bald rabbit regained all of his lost weight and stopped chewing his fur. The massive hairball continued to shrink in size.
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Rats too tend to be physically and emotionally healthiest in the company of other rats. American and British rat-fancier discussion forums and Facebook pages—vociferous communities like the National Fancy Rat Society, the Rat Fan Club, and the American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association—are full of dire warnings against keeping rats on their own and success stories of rodents who cheered significantly in the company of new rat and mouse friends. One member of the Rat Fan Club wrote, “Why on earth would anyone settle for just one rat when they could have two?! . . . A single rat lives for his daily freedom, but a pair of rats can entertain themselves for the odd day. . . . Please try to explain to pet stores and any prospective rat owners you know that rats need each other.”
My Rat and Me, an earnest, illustrated guide to raising pet rats, notes, “Rats definitely notice when a comrade disappears; they search for the missing rat, and they may grow lethargic and stop eating.” The authors suggest giving the survivor a new rat companion or, if that is not possible, extra attention. I often think of this when I’m waiting, late at night, on a New York City subway platform. The Norway rats dash between the tracks, avoiding electrical wires, angling their whiskers into empty potato chip bags and sniffing at crumpled, grease-stained napkins. They are rarely alone.
The parrot breeder and behaviorist Phoebe Greene Linden believes that companionship is extremely important for keeping parrots happy as well. One of her birds, a hawk-headed parrot named Hawkeye, has lived with Phoebe for more than thirty years. A dedicated feather plucker with a vivacious personality, Hawkeye and her sister, Stinker, were born to a wild-caught male and female pair who were themselves serious feather pluckers. The female actually plucked herself so severely that she died; the male died within a year. Phoebe believes he died of sadness, never having gotten over the loss of his mate. Years later Stinker died, too, leaving her mate, Henri, on his own.
Henri soon began to falter, becoming withdrawn and silent. Phoebe was extremely worried about him, so she put a little Xanax on walnuts and gave them to the parrot. But the dosed nuts didn’t work. He stayed quiet, refusing to eat and puffing up all of his feathers, and couldn’t be startled from his funk. “You know,” Phoebe said, “we feel a change in the whole orchestra when one voice leaves. It actually sounds different. Henri was quiet for two years after Stinker died. He didn’t make a single sound.”
Then, for reasons known only to them, Hawkeye started to talk to Henri from across the large room in which their cages were kept. This was something neither bird had done before. Phoebe heard their squawked conversations and started bringing the two birds closer together three or four times a week. Slowly Henri came back to life and is now a chatty bird again.
One afternoon while Phoebe and I spoke in her kitchen, a cozy room with baskets of fruit on the counters, overlooking her sunny Santa Barbara backyard, a parrot sat nearby tearing into a roll of credit card machine paper. “They love how it feels to dig into it with their beaks,” she said. “I always try to keep some around.” In the living room a flock of two watched a DVD of wild parrots in Brazil. According to Phoebe, they tend to like the segments on their own species best.
She used to raise parrots to sell to other people but decided years ago that they shouldn’t be kept in captivity. Parrots live a long time, though, and someone needs to take care of the ones that outlive their owners, or their owners’ desire for parrots. So Phoebe has an open-door policy for any of the birds she once sold, and many that she didn’t. Over the years she has accepted a number of birds who have been returned for emotional problems and the resulting behavioral issues. These parrots, like Henri, can be difficult to help.
Sometimes people ask Phoebe why she doesn’t just release these birds or send them back to their tropical homelands, particularly if they seem sad or upset. She thinks that sending a hand-raised parrot into the wild to cure their troubles is a recipe for disaster. “It would be like taking an anxious three-year-old orphan with freckles who was living in Chicago, and saying, ‘Hmm, I hear there are people with freckles in South Carolina, let’s send him there.’ These birds have different skills than wild parrots and a completely different culture.” Instead Phoebe does what she can, keeping them busy with activities they enjoy (like tearing into credit card paper), offering her friendship, and facilitating their relationships with one another. She also tries to build up their confidence; she’s convinced that parrots raised in the wild by their own parents are often more confident, and therefore more resilient, than parrots raised in captivity.
“Wild parrots,” Phoebe said, “are very good at different things, like yelling loudly, landing on whippy branches, foraging. The whole time I raised baby parrots I was trying to mimic their wild environment. Morphing those skills into ones that fit a captive environment is the goal.” If they master these skills they become more sure of their own abilities. This makes them both physically and emotionally healthier and resilient to the challenges they will face over the course of their lives.
Of all the surprisingly healing relationships I witnessed, Gigi’s, the elderly female gorilla at Franklin Park Zoo, was one of the most interesting. Her panic attacks, which reminded her psychiatrist, Michael Mufson, of PTSD, improved after Kit, the gorilla who harassed and antagonized her, was isolated from the rest of the troop. But the zoo staff, to their credit, didn’t like the idea of keeping a young male gorilla by himself.
“The gorillas are like your family,” said Jeannine Jackle. “You are with them all day almost every day. You wish you could build them a $20 million exhibit. You want to give them the best, but you can’t always give them the best. You can only give them what you have.”
Seeing Kit all alone haunted Jeannine. She wanted to find a solution. In 2009, twelve years after he was first separated from the troop, Jeannine hoped Kit would now be mature enough to handle himself among the other gorillas without resorting to violence. She had a hunch that Gigi would be more resilient now too. Jeannine pled her case to her supervisors at the zoo, and they agreed to let her try reuniting the gorillas during off hours.
On the day of the reintroduction the staff of the tropical forest and a group of longtime volunteers, curators, and the zoo director showed up early at the gorilla exhibit. The zoo wasn’t open yet, and the small crowd of observers thrummed with anticipation.
As the metal doors that separated Kit from the exhibit area slid open, he loped quickly into the enclosure on his knuckles. The rest of the troop was waiting there, and Gigi, catching sight of him, shrieked and ran. Kit made a move to chase after her, but suddenly, the three other females, Kiki, Kira, and Kimani, hurried to Gigi’s aid, forming a gorilla barrier between her and Kit. He backed off.
Shaken and scared, Gigi went to her favorite spot along the glass viewing wall, where she curled into a ball and lay down. In a complete reversal from his behavior more than a decade earlier, Kit continued to leave her alone, and Gigi spent the rest of the day looking imploringly at the keeper staff and signing “sex” in American Sign Language to human men as they passed by the exhibit, a vestigial word from her lessons with keeper Ann Southcombe more than thirty years earlier.
“That sign for Gigi means both ‘food’ and ‘sex,’ ” Jeannine said. “But I think that for Gigi that day it also meant ‘help.’ She was using sign to try and get our attention. It felt like she was saying ‘Get me out of here!’ ”
Despite Gigi’s gorilla SOS, Jeannine thought that the staff needed to let her get through the introduction on her own, provided she wasn’t being hurt. If the keepers removed Kit, Gigi would never learn that she could be safe in his presence, gaining the confidence and trust she would need to share the exhibit with him.
When I visited the next day, I found Gigi in her favorite spot along the glass of the exhibit wall, sleeping or pretending to, with a blanket over her head. She wasn’t moving around as much as usual, and she gave Kit an extremely wide berth, but she wasn’t a terrified mess. Jeannine’s plan was working.
Today, more than three years later, Gigi shares the exhibit with Kit every other day. She is still an easily agitated gorilla, but she and Kit now coexist largely without incident. Jeannine and the other zookeepers believe that Gigi’s newfound confidence came from learning that Kit no longer posed a danger to her (because of her strong bonds with her female troop members). During the years that Kit had been kept on his own, Gigi helped raise two young females. She groomed them, showered them with affection, played games with them, shared her food, and helped teach them how to behave, day after day, for years. These females had now grown up and defended her. Time and these powerful relationships with the other gorillas ensured Gigi’s emotional health. Jeannine noticed these bonds and placed her bets on them. Now all the gorillas are better off for it.
“I’m really proud of that introduction,” Jeannine told me, “because it’s based on knowing the gorillas individually and on twenty years of experience.”
For an entire week after he was reintroduced to the troop, Kit walked around the exhibit smiling, in his gorilla way. “He just looked happy,” Jeannine said. “It wasn’t a tight-lipped or teeth-baring expression, it’s totally different. Also his eyes were sparkling.” Now Kit plays with the young gorillas by throwing a sheet over his head and chasing them around. He also shares his celery. Gigi watches from a distance, alert but calm.
Sometimes the best therapist for a distraught animal isn’t a member of the same species or even a well-meaning human but another sort of animal entirely.
The practice of giving companions to racehorses in the hope that the animals soothe, comfort, and help the horses run faster is at least a century old. The rationale behind the practice is that horses are prey animals and many are easily startled. Racehorses in particular tend to be high-strung and nervous and prefer not to be alone. Odd collections of animals—goats, rabbits, donkeys, roosters, pigs, cats, and even an occasional monkey—have been used at racetracks and inside stables to calm horses down, a sort of living, breathing security blanket. The expression “getting your goat” may have come from precisely this sort of relationship. Stealing a racehorse’s goat companion the night before a big race could make a horse too upset to run well the next day.
Not all horses like goats, however. Before Seabiscuit was a champion racehorse—when he was a promising but pacing, underweight, tired, and fearful colt who broke into a sweat when he saw a saddle and tried to bite the grooms who came too near—his trainer Tom Smith put a nanny goat named Whiskers into his stall. Smith hoped the goat would calm and comfort Seabiscuit. Instead Seabiscuit attacked Whiskers, picking the goat up with his teeth and shaking her violently from side to side, ultimately dropping her outside of his stall. Smith, undaunted, offered Seabiscuit the companionship of a cowpony named Pumpkin. A calm, steady animal who had survived a goring by an angry bull, Pumpkin was, as the author Laura Hillenbrand describes him, “amiable to every horse he met and . . . a surrogate parent to the flighty ones.” Seabiscuit didn’t attack Pumpkin; they became fast friends and were stabled together for the rest of their lives. Smith was so encouraged by Pumpkin’s calming influence on the racehorse that he also adopted a stray little dog with huge ears named Pocatell and a spider monkey named Jo-Jo, all of whom traveled with Seabiscuit to his races. At night the horse slept with Jo-Jo curled on his neck, Pocatell on his belly, and Pumpkin a few feet away. He began to relax and would soon begin breaking records on the racetrack.
At Belmont in 1907 a racehorse named Miss Edna Jackson landed in the newspapers for her interesting transspecies friendships. She supposedly shared her stall with two rabbits and refused to eat unless they were present, until one day she crushed them by accident. Miss Edna then befriended a goat named William. A few years later, the champion of the Kentucky Derby was a horse named Exterminator. He had three successive Shetland pony companions, all of whom were named Peanuts. Exterminator and his ponies lived together for twenty-one years. When the last Peanuts died, Exterminator was said to have mourned.
Giving racehorses animal companions is still relatively common. John Veitch, an American Hall of Fame trainer who has worked with a number of champion horses, believes that since horses live very solitary lives in their stalls, the other animals offer them a great deal of comfort. Another Hall of Famer, Jack Van Berg, became the first trainer to win five thousand races, in 1987. He gives goats to “stall walkers,” horses who relentlessly pace whenever they’re stabled. “You take a real nervous horse, and sometimes it walks the stall like a damn airplane buzzing around in there,” he told a journalist for Sports Illustrated. “You get them with a goat, it settles them right down.”
Sometimes the horses get so attached to these goats that they have to travel everywhere together. If separated, the horses can pace anxiously in their stalls, refusing to rest. The goats too can become upset when their horse leaves them; one billy goat bellowed every time his horse went off to race. The goats even ride in trailers with the horses when they’re being driven from one racetrack to another. And when a horse is sold, their goat goes too. “It’s the only humane thing to do,” one Chicago trainer observed. “A horse that loses its goat is just bereft.”
Recently I visited the Chester Racecourse in England. It was Roman Day, and I watched the race amid a crowd of boozy fans, the men in improvised togas and running shoes and the women in short skirts, wobbly heels, and feathered hats. A man in charge of one of the Jumbotron screens offered me his pass to the course so I could be closer to the track. He attends dozens of races a year and regularly hangs out with the jockeys, so I asked him to corner a few of them and ask if any of the horses I’d watched that day had animal companions. He reported back, excitedly, that many of the stables used sheep and goats to calm the horses, especially when traveling and for horses who haven’t traveled much before. Sometimes they use chickens and pigs.
Potbellied pigs may indeed be useful for calming horses, but they can also grow big and stubborn and become too difficult to move around. One of trainer Betty Gabriel’s horse-calming pigs once got angry with her, trotted to a neighboring barn, and refused to come back. According to Gabriel, the pig’s desertion upset both the horse and a goat that the pig left behind. “The goats have better personalities,” she said.
Sometimes getting a pig for your anxious horse or another rat for your depressed rat is just not possible. The enrichment industry intends to help, catering to the minds and downtime of captive and domestic animals by providing things for them to do or play with. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums defines enrichment as “a process for improving or enhancing animal environments and care within the context of their inhabitants’ behavioral biology and natural history.” Nowhere in the definition does the AZA mention the word captivity or cage, but the only animals whose environments need to be enriched are captive ones. Wild animals are busy.
When enrichment is done right, it keeps animal minds engaged and stimulated. At the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., the life of the Giant Pacific octopus is a bit more unpredictable because of the various items he receives five days a week—sometimes it’s shrimp inside a plastic dog toy; at other times it’s a piece of PVC pipe he can stretch his arms through. At the Bronx Zoo cheetahs spend more time exploring their enclosure when it has been sprayed with Calvin Klein’s Obsession cologne. In Phoenix, tortoises bob for tasty cactus pads that keepers float in pools. Ocelots and other small cats at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston receive cardboard paper-towel tubes with frozen pink hairless mice stuffed inside like gory Christmas crackers. The gorillas have blankets, curtains, and towels that they use to make soft nests, or to cover their heads and run around looking like kids pretending to be ghosts pretending to be gorillas.
There are even consultants who specialize in helping zoos, sanctuaries, and laboratories become more playful places for animals and keep them from stereotypical behaviors. The Shape of Enrichment is one such company. Their website lists their library of instructional videos, such as Bungee Jumping Monkeys, The Bear Necessities, Fruit Bat Enrichment, and Tree Kangaroo Pouch Check Training. The latter could be to see if they’re hiding contraband, but more than likely it’s to teach the kangaroos to present their babies for veterinary checks on command.
Some of this animal brain teasing is actually legislated, a sort of sideways acknowledgment of the prevalence of animal mental illness in certain groups of captive creatures. In 1985 the USDA began to require enrichment for various laboratory animals. That year’s amendments to the Animal Welfare Act obligated labs to provide primates with perches, swings, mirrors, or other forms of environmental or social enrichment in their cages and to provide dogs with some form of exercise. Sadly, a single mirror does not ensure a happy primate, but it’s a start.
Enrichment isn’t new, even if the term, the regulations, and the industry are. Zookeepers have given their charges things to do for a long time. Sometimes these activities included ape tea parties, roller-skating or bicycling chimp shows, elephants water-skiing, or high-diving horses. At their best these activities occupied the animals’ time without causing them undue stress; at their worst they were fear-inducing and dangerous and may have caused the early deaths of the animal performers.
Today’s enrichment programs are, in a way, similar, even if they’re far less deadly or dangerous. Offering polar bears giant plastic puzzles or lions cardboard zebras to savage is still making the animals do things that the humans in charge think is good for them and their audiences. The keepers, trainers, and zoo directors who oversaw chimp tea parties and kangaroo boxing matches also believed that what they were doing was appropriate. It’s simply that what we think is good entertainment for the animals, and for us, has changed.
This isn’t to say that enrichment is bad. It’s not. It’s simply that enrichment programs, alongside an increased focus on zoos as biological banks that ensure the survival of endangered wildlife, are part of a long-standing effort to make watching caged animals palatable to a new generation of Americans who are uncomfortable seeing metal cages or seemingly neurotic animals. The plastic toys in the arms of the octopus or in the toothy grip of the aquarium seal are there not only to occupy the animals’ minds, but also to make us feel better about ourselves watching them.
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Jeannine Jackle says that for enrichment to really work it must be personalized. “Take Gigi, for example,” she told me. “She really likes to see human feet. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’s interesting for her when we take off our shoes and she sees that human feet are like hers. And yet I can’t exactly ask a zoo visitor to show Gigi their feet even if it would keep her entertained.” Occasionally, though, a zoo volunteer, Gail O’Malley, who has visited the Boston gorillas at least three times a week for twenty-seven years, will take off her shoes and wiggle her toes in front of the exhibit’s glass windows.
Gigi also enjoys watching the black-and-white films that keeper Paul Luther tapes for her off the American Movie Channel and plays behind the scenes from a TV/VCR on a rolling cart. The Franklin Park Zoo’s now-deceased mandrill Ushindi also liked to watch television, especially Disney feature films. His shelf of DVDs at the zoo included Free Willy and Free Willy II, 101 Dalmatians, and, oddly enough, National Geographic African Wildlife.
Recently, the Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, installed a flat-screen TV inside the bonobo exhibit. The apes can toggle between different channels streaming short clips of bonobo life (taken from a documentary originally produced for children in the Congo): bonobos eating and searching for food, a female being tender with infants, two males fighting, play scenes, and bonobos mating. Surprisingly, the apes have not seemed very interested in their custom porn channel. A zoo employee told the NBC evening news that “maybe they are not so interested as bonobo apes very often have sex anyway.”
Sometimes what stimulates captive animals the most are the humans staring back at them. James Breheny, the director of the Bronx Zoo, said, of the multimillion-dollar Congo gorilla forest exhibit, “We thought we were building this great exhibit for people to look at gorillas. We found we were building a great exhibit for gorillas to look at the people.”
Kate Brown has been a docent in this exhibit for more than ten years. She is convinced that the gorillas’ favorite time of year is Halloween, when children and adults come to the zoo on two different weekends in October dressed in costumes. “The gorillas get really interested in all the funny hats and colors,” Brown told me one day as we watched dozens of visitors filter past the viewing windows and tap on the glass near a small female picking her teeth with a twig. “The gorillas come right up to the glass and look. It’s something different for them.”
Unfortunately the rest of the year humans tend to be extremely boring. Great groups of us come into the observation areas and excitedly point to the gorillas closest to the glass. We say things like “Look—a gorilla!” or “Wow.” We pull out phones and digital cameras to take photos, squinting at the tiny screens. We wave—always a jaunty, open-palm human hello to the nonplussed gorillas. We comment to one another on how similar the apes are to us. And then we move on to the Asian monorail, the face-painting booth, the lemurs, or the gift shop to purchase plush giraffes or meerkat-shaped erasers. The gorillas have seen it all before, most of them for years.
Gail O’Malley says that there are some surefire ways to engage the apes on the other side of the glass but that few people do it. One of her favorite games is something she calls “playing purse.” “Every zoo I’ve gone to, it has worked,” she said. “Gorillas always want to know what’s in your bag. . . . But you have to make a game out of it, you can’t just dump everything onto the floor. Take one item out at a time—it doesn’t matter what it is, it could be your sunglasses or keys. But you have to do it slowly, with anticipation and a flourish.”
She demonstrated for me by pulling her wallet from her purse with a dramatic wrist twist. A burlesque routine came to mind, albeit a clothed, interspecies one. O’Malley also swears that most gorillas like human babies, something that has been confirmed for me by a number of keepers. She used to take her friends’ babies to the zoo to entertain the gorillas since she didn’t have children of her own. She says it worked every time. They always came up to the glass to get a good look, especially the females.
Kate Brown used to show one of the gorillas at the Bronx Zoo a picture book. “She really liked to look at the images,” Brown said. “She was actually somewhat bipedal too. That is, she would stand up on her hind legs and walk around like a human, which is not something they are supposed to be able to do for long. But she would see me, and I would come over to the glass and open a book so that she could see it. She would be standing up on her back legs and then cross her arms over her head and lean in against the glass. I would show her the book, and when she wanted me to turn the page, she would tap on the glass.”
Enrichment isn’t just for captive wildlife or lab animals. The American pet products industry is banking on the tendency of Americans to buy things for their pets—playing to our potential guilt, love of shopping, and interest in helping the creatures that we live with. As of 2010, the industry was the fastest growing retail sector in North America, with over $53 billion in sales per year. The majority of dog, cat, and parrot toys that are for sale at Petco, PetSmart, and independent pet shops—chewy puzzles that release morsels of kibble or elaborately knotted ropes around bits of birdseed and suet—are intended to stimulate pet minds, paws, jaws, and beaks. There are also the nontoy, nonpharmaceutical products intended to soothe animals that I was first introduced to during those early, anxious dog park conversations about Oliver. These include CDs like Music to a Dog’s Ear, liver-flavored Happy Traveler chews meant to ease travel anxiety, the health-food-store staple Bach Flower Rescue Remedy for pets, Tranquility Jerky, lavender-scented Chillout Biscuits, pheromone diffusers that plug into the wall like the oddest of air fresheners, chamomile- and lemon-scented Relaxation Gel to rub on paws, Serene Drops for rabbits, and a range of meal supplements like Avi-calm for birds and Grand Calm pellets, whose upbeat packaging promises to cure anxiety and give focus to scatterbrained equines.
One of the most popular mental health products for dogs is a snug doggie jacket with Velcro tabs called a ThunderShirt. Its manufacturer claims that the shirt eases thunder and firework phobias, separation anxiety, problem barking and jumping, and travel stress. Recently the company released the ThunderCap, an elasticized hood that goes over the eyes and around the muzzle, which, if it was white and a tad more pointed, would be uncomfortably Klanesque. Instead it looks more like a shower cap for the face.
There is also a ThunderLeash, a ThunderToy that dispenses treats, and a ThunderShirt for cats. The only studies of the ThunderShirts’ efficacy on treating anxiety have been done by the manufacturer itself. Still, Donna Haraway, the philosopher of science and technology who has written extensively about her own dogs, believes that the ThunderShirt helped her Australian shepherd named Cayenne cope, not with thunder (which didn’t bother her at all) but with gunshots and fireworks.
There is also the Anxiety Wrap, another tight doggie jacket created by trainer Susan Sharpe and her business partner, and their Quiet Dog Face Wrap, which looks like a soft rubber band for the snout. The most colorful option is the Storm Defender, a bright red cape-apron hybrid with a built-in metallic lining meant to shield dogs from static electricity.
When I asked the behaviorist E’lise Christensen if these things actually work, she said that if they don’t, they can’t do any harm. Unless, that is, a dog is deathly afraid of being clothed or handled. Most veterinary behaviorists can’t say definitively whether such products are effective because the animals who wind up as their patients didn’t respond to the over-the-counter pellets, botanical paw rubs, or canine straitjackets. If they had, they would be there.
It seems to me that there are as many pet owners who swear by these products as there are those who think they’re worthless. My suspicion is that their utility is as individual as the dog (or, unrealistically, cat) who is being shirted, capped, wrapped, or defended. I never tried to put Oliver into any of the calming outfits, though perhaps I should have. And I didn’t give him lavender biscuits or paw drops. I did try plenty of other products, spending a small fortune on Rescue Remedy drops, a slew of new puzzle toys, and music I put on the stereo when I left the house. None of it really helped him, but it made me feel as if I was doing something.
Mac, the twenty-three-year-old Sardinian miniature donkey who lives on the ranch where I grew up, is, as I mentioned in the introduction, adorable, ferocious, and unstable. In the wake of his mother’s death, when he was given to me to care for, I had excellent intentions but knew nothing about raising a baby donkey. I fed him bottles of formula, and, for a time anyway, Mac had the run of our house. The few rules he did have, like no biting, I didn’t always enforce. His long furry ears and soft nose obliterated my better judgment, and that of my parents’. I also weaned him too early. Mac moved to his corral having bonded only with people. He had no equine social skills, but he did have an attitude. In this way, he was a bit like my own personal hotel elephant, preferring the company of humans to that of his own kind and expressing his displeasure dramatically when things did not work out as he wished. Mac became a tiny but potent hazard to our other donkeys, the pony in the adjacent corral, and a pair of goats. He attacked all of them with a savagery that belied his small size. When he was isolated from the other animals, he turned on himself, biting his legs until they bled, pulling out his fur with his teeth, and gnawing on the metal bars of his corral. He stopped only when someone was with him or when there was some sort of human activity unfolding nearby: he watched all of our goings-on with interest.
As I grew up and developed more of a conscience, Mac’s behavior made me feel guilty and sad. To keep him from biting himself, I hung expensive banana- and cherry-flavored Lick-its in his corral (a horse popsicle that takes effort to lick), rubbed him with lavender-scented Equine Calm Balm that I tested on both of us, and gave him a horse ball covered in molasses that interested him for about thirty seconds—enough time for him to realize that it was just a plastic ball covered in molasses. What Mac actually relishes is chasing chickens out of his corral when they wander in, sussing out pomegranates that roll under the fence from a nearby tree, menacing the ranch dogs when they get too close, and occasionally escaping from his corral only to show up in our garage or to look balefully into the living-room window of a neighbor’s house. He also likes to eat avocado leaves and strip the bark from newly planted trees. More than anything, however, Mac enjoys being firmly massaged. His eyes roll back and he relaxes, swaying on his feet. This liquid state lasts for a long while, then he will suddenly change his mind, and you have to jerk your hand out of the way before he bites down hard.
When I began to talk to other people about how much Mac liked massage, I learned that plenty of other creatures enjoy a good rubdown. Many trainers I spoke to gave me suggestions for how to touch Mac more effectively—most involved patience and quick reflexes. Then they mentioned Linda Tellington-Jones.
Tellington-Jones is something of a horse-therapy rock star and a prophet for people who do things like massage their hoofstock. In 1994 she was named “Horsewoman of the Year” by the North American Horsemen’s Association. She has been inducted into the Massage Therapy Hall of Fame and has written fifteen books and many articles on what she calls the Tellington, or TTouch, method. She teaches massage for not only horses but also dogs, cats, and llamas, and the latest of her publications, TTouch for Healthcare, focuses on humans. Her inspiration came in the 1970s, when she was studying with Moshe Feldenkrais, whose technique for working with people uses nonhabitual movements like twisting, swiveling, and stretching the body in various ways to lessen physical pain, increase flexibility, and even, Feldenkrais devotees argue, enhance creativity. Tellington-Jones was curious to find out whether Feldenkrais-like movements might help other animals, and she began experimenting successfully with horses.
The cover of her 1995 book, Getting in TTouch: Understand and Influence Your Horse’s Personality, is reminiscent of a soft-focus cover on an ’80s Crystal Gale album, only Tellington-Jones, wearing a turquoise mohair sweater, is embracing a tall white horse. Her patented TTouches have names like the “clouded leopard,” the “python lift,” “tarantulas pulling the plow,” and the “flick of the bear’s paw.” According to her own promotional materials, TTouch helps dogs suffering from everything from nervousness and aggression to car sickness and much in between. Her tagline is “Change your mind & change your animal.”
The touches she uses are different from typical massage. They are nonintuitive, things I likely would not have thought to do with my own dog: sliding fingers lightly back and forth horizontally on their ears, for example, or gently tugging on the base of their tail.
As wacky as it sounds, people throng to her classes and workshops and talk about Tellington-Jones’s methods in reverent tones that sometimes veer into the cultish. She now works with all sorts of animals, from nervous camels to asthma-suffering people, but no one, including Tellington-Jones herself, can explain why her touches are successful. A variety of studies on humans have demonstrated the power of massage to enhance emotional well-being and lessen anxiety, but studies on other animals have concentrated solely on physiological benefits. Research on the effects of equine massage—not TTouch in particular—has documented how much it helps racehorses, for example, recovering from injuries. Massage has also been used on dressage horses and even pet ponies, and there is now a thriving community of therapists with their own membership organization, the Equine Sports Massage Association. The website features photos of men and women in barn jackets rubbing glossy equines to a high polish, alongside video clips of racehorses galloping on treadmills while women in velvet riding helmets look on encouragingly.
The California-based dog trainer and wildlife photographer Jodi Frediani discovered Tellington-Jones when her daughter’s horse started refusing to do what she was asked. “She’d lay her ears back,” said Frediani, “and threaten to bite. Her fight response was well-developed, though she was quite friendly and would come running to the gate when called. In retrospect, I believe she learned her bad habits in self-defense from the man who bred her. He kicked his horses and used other dominance tactics to get them to do his bidding.”
Frediani hired a local TTouch practitioner to help with the horse’s aggression and was so impressed by her progress that Jodi enrolled in TTouch training herself. When, during the course, she saw an anxious horse instantly melt into a calm and relaxed state as Tellington-Jones massaged his gums, Frediani decided to incorporate TTouch into her own work as a trainer. She believes it’s helpful because it surprises the animal but not in a frightening way. The touches are different from what the animal is used to and the disconnect between what he or she is expecting and what happens makes the animal “stop just using their fight-or-flight response,” Frediani said. Calm animals have an easier time learning what’s expected of them, and this leads to less fear, confusion, and stress. Based on observations with her clients and with her own dogs and horses, Frediani believes that TTouch eases muscle tension and may lower heart rate and blood pressure. She finds this especially helpful for animals with emotional problems, like the dogs she treats for separation anxiety.
If TTouch specifically, and massage in general, has significant effects on animal well-being, it may not be because of the “clouded leopard” or the “raccoon touch” but because of the calm, confident presence of a trustworthy human. I believe this was the case for Oliver. After he jumped out of our window he was so sore he could barely move. And when he wasn’t on Valium, he was a knot of anxiety. Our dog walker, a kind fellow named Kelly Marshall, was Oliver’s favorite person after Jude and me. One afternoon shortly after Oliver’s jump, Kelly stopped by to check on him and told us that he had just begun a course on dog massage. He wanted to know if he could practice on Oliver. Jude and I looked at the Beast splayed on his bed, his body uncomfortably folded in on itself, and said yes. The next afternoon Kelly came by to work on Oliver. The results were immediate. Oliver relaxed, and his stiffness began to ease. He began to walk again, for the first time, a few minutes after his second session with Kelly.
Unfortunately there is no single pill, calming balm, masseuse, or magical therapeutic product that works for all disturbed animals, just as there isn’t a single one for disturbed humans. Relief most often flows from an individualized cornucopia that may include exercise, behavior therapy, pharmaceuticals, and healthy new relationships. Sometimes these relationships are with people.
Tall, with wide cheeks and a skeptical manner that softens after a few glasses of Chang beer, Preecha Phuangkum is one of the most experienced and respected elephant veterinarians in Thailand. He started working with the animals thirty-two years ago; for fifteen of those years, he was in charge of the Thai government’s logging elephants. The two hundred elephants and their four hundred mahouts—one man riding the elephant’s neck and the other on the ground with the logs—lived in forest camps far from villages and towns. When they had finished logging an area, they would pack up and walk to a new site. Preecha went from camp to camp to oversee these elephants and their mahouts and make sure that the right elephant was matched with the right two men. If the match wasn’t successful, the team would not be good at logging—dangerous work that demands elephant and mahouts respect and listen to one another.
After logging was outlawed in the mid-1990s, Preecha became the director of the Thai government’s Mahout Training School. There, he trained hundreds of new mahouts and oversaw the health and well-being of the state-owned elephants, including the king of Thailand’s royal elephants, chosen for auspicious traits like perfect toenail shape, their skin color, and, oddly enough, the sound of their snores.
“Lots of people believe that being with an elephant is a one-way relationship, that the elephant is to be controlled,” Preecha told me. “But this is wrong. It should be a long-term relationship of love. If a mahout is cruel, the elephant will be cruel right back. If the keeper or mahout is upset or sad, the elephant will be concerned. They will get uncomfortable.”
In an echo of many of the other mahouts, veterinarians, and elephant dealers that I spent time with in Thailand, Preecha believes the match between man and elephant is the most important part of an elephant’s mental health: “When mahouts and elephants worked together for a long time in the camps, you would see the elephants taking care of the men. Like carrying their mahout back to camp after he got too drunk to walk. Now things have changed. Being a mahout is not a very respectable job in northern Thailand, and young men dream of buying things and moving to the cities. This has major effects on elephant emotional well-being.”
Today elephants tend to have the same mahout for only a few years before the man (it is almost always a man) moves on. This is hard on the elephants, who often think of their mahout as family. According to Preecha, continuity and the right relationship is especially important when an elephant is very young. Of the more than thirty calves whose training Preecha oversaw, only a few grew up to kill people. He says that now, looking back, he can see that they chose the wrong keeper or mahout for the young elephant.
And yet, some elephants, no matter how kind or compassionate their mahout or keepers are, may still be emotionally unstable, violent, or aggressive. Preecha remembers one wild elephant matriarch in particular who, he believes, was simply born angry. Since the matriarch guides the behavior of the entire herd, if she is not a good leader, there may be problems with the whole group. This elephant was very aggressive and a crop raider of nearby villages. Preecha is convinced that her example led the entire herd to be more aggressive and more likely to raid village gardens and orchards, even when there was plenty to eat in the forest.
Most captive working elephants kill for the first time by accident. Then, realizing their power, they may do it again. The most common explanation I heard for this had to do with the emotional bonds elephants have with one another and with humans. “When an elephant is in love, they are the most dangerous,” said Preecha. “They will stop at nothing to be with the elephant that they love.”
He believes that this accounts for 80 to 90 percent of human deaths caused by elephants, the dramatic tramplings or targeted gorings that tend to remind human onlookers of psychotic behavior. During the logging years more killings happened when the mahouts set up camp near villages. This wasn’t because there were more strangers around the elephants or because they didn’t like their new surroundings. Rather, it was because the mahouts found girlfriends. The elephants, used to being with their men around the clock in the forest camps, became jealous and sometimes violent.
Even today many mahouts told me that no matter how much they bathe after returning from visits to their girlfriends, their elephants can be sullen and standoffish, sometimes even aggressive. It can take days, and many proffered treats of sugarcane, bananas, pineapple tops, and affectionate ear scratches, to rouse them from their funks.
Preecha worked hard to instill in his students the belief that a good mahout isn’t intimidated by the vicissitudes of elephant emotional life, isn’t afraid of the elephant, is brave, and has self-control. He is convinced that elephants are generally quite reasonable and that the best way for a mahout to build a good relationship with his elephant is to expect the best of him or her. “If the mahout believes that the elephant is crazy for no reason, then the mahout will be much harder on the elephant and not treat them as well.”
In 2007 Preecha retired from the mahout training school and became the head veterinarian for the nonprofit Friends of the Asian Elephant Hospital. It’s a peaceful place. Unlike many other Thai elephant organizations, the FAE Hospital doesn’t exist to serve ecotourists. There are no shows or demonstrations, and you can’t interact with the elephants. Everything is quiet, and the only movements are the switching tails of the elephant patients and the hurried steps of the staff, in matching orange uniforms, as they change IV bags or rake out stalls.
Mosha, a nine-year-old female, is a permanent resident of the hospital. When she was seven months old, she was walking through the forest along the Burmese border behind her mother, a logging elephant. Mosha triggered a land mine, planted by the Myanmar Army against the Karen National Liberation Army and Shan rebels fighting for independence from the ruling military dictatorship. Mosha’s front left leg shattered in the blast. Her mother was uninjured. Both elephants arrived at the hospital nervous and frightened. The veterinarians amputated Mosha’s leg from the knee down. She stayed with her mother at the hospital for eight months, until the family who owned her mother demanded her back; they needed the income the older elephant generated from logging. Mosha, a newly weaned calf who would never be able to work, stayed behind. She was clearly upset by the loss of her mother, as well as the shock and pain caused by the land mine and her subsequent surgery. But she was still a curious, playful elephant calf, even with three legs, and she had a yawning, nearly bottomless need for affection. Preecha and Soraida Salwala, the founder of the hospital, were determined to find the right keeper for her.
His name was Paradee, Ladee to his friends. The first time I met him it was through the bars of Mosha’s corral. A shy, gentle Karen man in his mid-twenties, Ladee was arranging thick blue gym mats of the sort that pole-vaulters use. Mosha followed his every move like an elephant-shaped shadow, hopping along behind him on her three good legs, stroking his shoulder with her trunk, and squeaking to him. Finished with the mat arranging, Ladee moved on to oiling Mosha’s prosthetic leg, custom-built by a team of human-prostheses makers. Unfortunately for the young elephant, her problem isn’t merely that the land mine blasted away her lower leg; it also embedded shrapnel in what was left of it. Nine years later she can stand for only a few hours at a time. The staff try to make Mosha wear her prosthesis a bit every day to relieve pressure on her other legs. She hates it and struggles to undo the buckles as soon as they are latched.
During my first visit to the hospital the heat was unbearable—even the birds quieted in the hottest part of the afternoon—and Ladee announced it was naptime. He walked over to the mats and motioned for Mosha to lie down. She did so, and then, in one practiced motion, raised her trunk and her front right leg in invitation. Ladee crawled between her front legs, each as thick as his torso, and played idly with the tip of her trunk as she wrapped it around him. Mosha then laid her head down on the mats and lowered her eyelids halfway like a child pretending to sleep. “She won’t fall asleep if I’m not here,” Ladee called to my translator and me, as we stood alongside the corral, incredulous at the sight of the large elephant and the young man curled up together on gym mats as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “And she gets excited by visitors, so she may not sleep if you’re here.”
Mosha also won’t sleep at night if she thinks Ladee is gone. His room is only about twenty feet from her corral, but sometimes she has nightmares and wakes up in the middle of the night agitated and scared and throws her mats around. “She will scream and scream until I wake up,” said Ladee. “And then, if I come to the door and call to her, she’ll calm down and go back to sleep.”
She also hates it when he goes home to his village to see his family, 185 miles away, a trip he makes only two or three times per a year for a few days at a time. “The staff tell me that she calls for me the entire time I’m gone. And then, when she hears my motorbike on the road, she gets really excited. She knows I’m coming back.”
Ladee used to go out and see friends nearby, but he doesn’t do that anymore. It was too hard on Mosha. Before they found him, Preecha and Soraida tried three different keepers with the young elephant. Ladee began to work with her when she was two years old, and from the first days, it was obvious to hospital staff that he was the one. “The other keepers worked for themselves first, not Mosha. Ladee is different. He’s kind. And he’s also single. Mosha is the most important thing to him,” said Preecha.
They tested Ladee for three months before they agreed to let him be a mahout, and then Preecha tested him out for another two years before he gave him to Mosha. Ladee had arrived at FAE as a nineteen-year-old assistant mahout to a sick elephant who had come from an elephant circus camp outside Chiang Mai. The hospital accepts and treats elephants without charge, as long as the owners provide transportation and send along the elephant’s mahout. The hospital pays the mahout for the duration of his stay. FAE adopted this policy in the hope that visiting mahouts would learn more about basic elephant health care and take the knowledge with them when they left.
Soon after Ladee arrived, Preecha noticed that he liked feeding and washing the elephants and offered him a job on the condition that he live at the hospital and refrain from drinking alcohol. In exchange, Ladee would earn double what his salary would be in a camp, plus three meals a day and free housing. Ladee sends all his earnings home and is saving to buy land. Because he works so well with Mosha, Ladee got a raise in 2011. He now earns 10,000 baht a month (roughly $325). He’s a wealthy man in his village.
A year and a half after Ladee and I first met, I returned to the hospital to see him and Mosha. They had moved to a slightly bigger enclosure. Mosha had grown feet taller. She was filling out, too, but she still squeaked like a young elephant and flapped her ears contentedly while nibbling on sugarcane stalks. Ladee greeted me with a smile and a ring woven from elephant tail hair. “Not Mosha’s,” he said, “I would never cut her tail hair.” The two of them no longer slept together in the afternoon since Mosha was now so heavy she could have crushed him by accident. Ladee still put her to sleep at naptime and at night, with a sort of elephantine-tucking-in ritual that involved stroking the young elephant until she dozed off. Only when he was sure she was asleep did he move to his own bed.
As Ladee swept the corral, Mosha hopped along behind him, taking occasional breaks to come over to me and extend her trunk through the bars to touch my hands, my camera, the tops of my shoes, and to sniff my head. When Ladee had accumulated a big pile of sweepings and left to get a dustpan, Mosha plunked her entire body down on top of the pile, covering it entirely, so that when Ladee returned with the pan, there was no way he could finish. “Mosha, Mosha, Mosha,” Ladee cooed, laughing along with me and, it seemed, Mosha. She flopped onto her side and he came over and stroked her flank, smiling. When she’d had enough of his attention, she rolled off the pile so that he could finish cleaning.
The next day I asked Preecha if he thought Mosha was traumatized at all by her experience with the land mine or her odd life at the hospital without her mother and the other older females who would have been her aunties and helped raise her. “Especially with female elephants,” Preecha said, “the mahout is like family. I am sure that Ladee thinks about getting married and leaving one day, of having his own human family. But Mosha does not think about him leaving. She does not think about him having another family. I think she thinks about him as another elephant, just like her.” For now, this is enough for both of them.
One afternoon, in a lull between patients, Harry Prosen, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin, received a call from the college president, who asked Prosen if he would consider treating Brian, a young male bonobo at the Milwaukee County Zoo. Prosen offered the ape a three o’clock appointment for the following Wednesday at his office. Prosen was only partly kidding. He had more than fifty years of experience with human patients, treating everything from paranoid schizophrenia to severe depression and psychosis, but he had never met a bonobo.
If there were such a thing as an undercover great ape, bonobos would be it. Pan paniscus have the long limbs of pro basketball players and brows so furrowed they seem to be perpetually struggling to remember something. The apes have never had the kind of famous human champion that chimps have in Jane Goodall, gorillas in Dian Fossey, or orangs in Biruté Galdikas. The most recognized bonobo researcher is the Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal, whose work is primarily about empathy and morality in the primates, but no Hollywood hunk has ever played him in a film.
If bonobos are known for anything, it’s sex. The apes use frequent and hearty sexual activity to express affection, settle or avoid disagreements, and ease all manner of other social interactions. Their repertoire of sexual behavior is extensive and gender-nonspecific, including oral sex and tongue kissing, females rubbing their genitals together until they orgasm, and males penis fencing while hanging from trees, which is just what it sounds like. They are the only other apes, besides humans, to have sex in the missionary position. All of this sex is part of the reason that bonobos tend to be absent from American zoos, lest parents should find themselves awkwardly explaining bonoboning to their children.
Bonobos have their aggressive moments too, but in general they are peaceable apes. De Waal believes that we owe them some recognition for their equanimity. “Everything we [humans] do negatively,” he told a PBS interviewer, “is associated with our biology. . . . And everything we do that is nice, or when we’re altruistic and empathetic, and so on . . . we claim that as our own unique human nature. So the stories out of Gombe on the chimpanzees [who waged war on one another] confirmed that negative biological view that we have of ourselves as purely competitive, purely aggressive. And when the bonobos came along later, they didn’t fit that view.”
Brian, the young male bonobo at the Milwaukee Zoo, was a special case, however. He was neither sexually fluent nor peaceable. “He was my first patient,” said Prosen, “who tried to throw feces [and] spit and urinate on me.”
Brian arrived in Milwaukee in July 1997, and the staff quickly realized that his psychological needs were beyond anything they had seen before. Barbara Bell, the head bonobo keeper at the zoo, has worked with bonobos for more than twenty years. Brian “would vomit thirty, forty, fifty times a day, pace in circles all day long,” she said. “I never saw him sleep. He was not able to eat a meal in the group. He had no social culture to blend in. He lived in fear of having the snot kicked out of him by all the other animals because they did not see him as worthy of being in their troop.”
He also tore off his own fingernails, repeatedly thrust his fist into his rectum so hard that it bled, rubbed his genitals on sharp objects, stared blankly at the walls, and was extremely aggressive toward the keepers. He was also scared of objects that he hadn’t seen before, so giving him toys or puzzles to distract him from mutilating himself only served to make Brian more upset. Undaunted, the zoo staff tried to reward him anytime he wasn’t hurting himself. But after six weeks they felt completely defeated. Brian still couldn’t eat in the presence of other bonobos; he didn’t know how to play or how to relate to the adult females, and he was scared of the adult males. When he became even slightly stressed, he curled into the fetal position and screamed. “When an animal is self-destructing to this extent,” Bell said, “it has to be stopped or that animal won’t survive at all.”
On Prosen’s first visit to the zoo, he was overwhelmed by the sad state of Brian, who was constantly clapping his hands and spinning in circles in a holding area behind the scenes, by himself. “I have had some difficult interview situations,” said Prosen, “but establishing communication looked at first glance to be very difficult indeed.”
As he does with his human patients, the psychiatrist’s first step was to put together a complete history for the bonobo. He called the first of many case conferences with the keepers and zoo veterinarians in the basement kitchen of the primate building and tried to gather as much information as he could on Brian and his experiences before he arrived in Milwaukee. While keepers chopped bananas and watermelons for bonobo meals, Prosen and the staff discussed the ape’s history.
Brian’s past, they discovered, was as abnormal as his behavior. Brian was born at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, and lived there alone, except for his father, who sodomized and intimidated him, for the first seven years of his life. Sodomy may be the one sexual act that bonobos don’t engage in and sexual violence is rare. Brian’s father, a research subject, doubtlessly had his own emotional problems.
Bonobo society is matriarchal. Mothers and older females are extremely important to the development of young bonobos. There is group mothering, and male infants stay with their mothers twice as long as females do, learning how to communicate, share food, resolve disputes, and express themselves sexually. In the wild, the males stay in close contact with their mothers for fourteen or fifteen years. As a baby, Brian was taken from his mother and housed alone with his father inside the laboratory. He didn’t receive any mothering and had no opportunities to bond with older females who would have taught him how to trust others, or relate to bonobos in general. His environment was entirely unnatural and his early sexual experiences—of his father violently attempting to mount him—were likely traumatizing.
Brian’s fisting habit developed sometime during his stint at Yerkes, where, by the end of his tenure there, he was doing it so often and so intensely that he was losing large amounts of blood. At this point, Yerkes researchers feared for his survival, so they removed him from his father and kept him on his own for eight months. MRIs showed no physical problems, except thickened rectal and colonic tissue due to the chronic fisting, so Brian was given Prozac and Valium. His fisting continued though, so the researchers decided to send him away for help.
The Milwaukee County Zoo has a reputation for healing distressed bonobos. This is due in part to Barbara Bell’s decades of experience with the apes, but also because of the kind and stable pair of bonobos who led the zoo’s troop for many years, Lody and Maringa. Captured in Congo, the young male and female were sold to sailors bound for Amsterdam when they were two years old. They arrived at the Milwaukee zoo in 1986 and, for more than twenty-five years, they, together with Bell, helped manage the largest group of captive bonobos in the United States. Because of Bell’s and the troop’s reputation for healing disturbed apes, troubled bonobos like Brian continue to arrive.
Not all of the bonobos get along with one another, and managing their interpersonal dramas can be difficult. Sometimes the bonobos have their own ideas about what should happen. The zoo’s troop is so large and the apes’ personalities and preferences are so various that they are not all kept together on exhibit. Some of them stay behind the scenes in a play area while others go into the public viewing area, depending on the day. If the bonobos do not like the groupings the keepers choose for them, they form their own and refuse to go anywhere until they are allowed to stay with their friends. Companions change frequently. Bell says that this part of her job is a bit like “mixing volatile chemicals.”
The only bonobos who would put up with Brian’s volatility were a forty-nine-year-old blind and deaf female named Kitty and a twenty-seven-year-old male from Congo, Lody. Brian often allowed Kitty to groom him, and then he would help the elderly female find her way to the outdoor area. Lody took Brian by the hand when he was too panicked to move and led him around, to their playroom or outdoors. Lody would even postpone eating his own meals to sit with Brian and comfort him. Once, when a younger male stole a mailing tube of treats the keepers had prepared for Brian, Lody put his own treats back in his tube and gave it to the anxious ape.
These small kindnesses weren’t enough to make Brian feel better, however. He still made himself vomit for hours on end and continued his fisting. He was also very attached to his OCD rituals and refused to eat a meal until he’d gone through a whole sequence of them.
“I began to see Brian’s self-destructive behavior as an attempt to soothe himself in extreme anxiety situations,” Prosen said. By touching himself, even in a hurtful way, Brian was trying to make himself feel better in a world in which he had no other means of comfort and no control over his own life. “He had what in humans would be called a social phobia of mass proportions, as well as a complete inability to understand his environment or to accurately interpret attempts to relate to him as helpful, not dangerous.”
Prosen’s first course of action was to prescribe a low dose of antidepressants for Brian to help him deal with his fear and anxiety, as well as his obsessions. Since Prozac had not worked in the past, he prescribed Paxil, but only in the hope that Brian might relax long enough for a therapeutic program to begin. Occasionally the keeper staff supplemented Brian’s Paxil with Valium, but only for short periods of time, on bad days when his panic and anxiety were dire. The Paxil took away his underlying anxiety and “once that was gone,” Bell said, “he was able to stop some of the obsessive compulsive behaviors he had,” like the long rituals before mealtimes.
“But the beauty of the drug therapy was that the other bonobos could start to see him for who he really was, which was really a cool little dude. Once you got rid of all the clutter in his world and he started to learn a few social behaviors, then ever so slowly his life started to pick up.”
Brian’s therapy began in earnest. Prosen, Bell, and the keeper staff set to work making Brian’s world safe and predictable. All his meals were served at the same time, in the same place. He was given quiet time every day after lunch. The keepers also kept their voices low and tried their best to use consistent mannerisms and words of praise. Every new object was introduced to his environment slowly so that he could look at it, touch it, smell it, and get used to it at his own pace. Daily training sessions were short, and the keepers made sure to end them on a positive note. Prosen said that because Brian was a captive animal, therapy was in some ways easier than treating his human patients because he and the keepers could control Brian’s environment and his daily life so completely. Brian’s daily schedule of activities, for example, never deviated because he was so fearful of change. The other bonobos at the zoo were quite flexible, easygoing, and open to all sorts of new experiences. For Brian that was unthinkable.
“One thing we did,” Bell said, “was team him up with other bonobo kids who were much younger than him and could teach him play behavior. We paired him with two- and three-year-olds so he could learn. We all know that’s why you go to kindergarten. You are learning social skills. Brian had to go all the way back and learn proper play behaviors in order to grow.”
Watching over Brian’s therapy, Prosen became fascinated with the similarity between the bonobo and his human patients, especially those who suffered from developmental deficits.
“A very successful businessman I once worked with lost his father when he was twelve,” said Prosen, “and literally grew up from twelve to twenty overnight. This occurred not through a normal kind of developmental process, as being patiently taught, but rather a mimicking behavior. Very rapidly, the man appeared to be effectively doing things that he really had not learned in the usual way of growing up—that is, from a mentoring father. The results of this only appeared later, when, as he developed his own business, he began to have great difficulty with employees as they reached the adolescence of their employment, and with his own children when they reached their own adolescence. He had what I’d describe as an acute developmental deficit.”
In Brian, Prosen saw a hairy mirror of this man. He was convinced that Brian had serious developmental deficits and that this was why he was acting at any one time as if he were three or four different ages. Brian did quite well in certain training situations, but as soon as he found himself in a new and different environment that required more mature behavior, he fell to pieces. Interacting with adult females, to whom he’d had no exposure as a youngster, caused him all sorts of anxiety. This was confusing to the rest of the troop because Brian looked like an eight- or nine-year-old young male, but developmentally he acted like a five- or six-year-old. And even this wasn’t stable. One minute Brian was a confident young fellow, and the next he’d suddenly try to nurse from one of the females, which annoyed and confused them. He often had his toes bitten in retaliation. Only Lody reliably came to his rescue.
Prosen believes that the older male’s kindness and encouragement were the reason Brian survived his own self-defeating behavior. But he also thinks that bonobos may be more resilient than people when it comes to overcoming developmental deficits. Another psychiatrist, who works with chimpanzees, believes he knows why.
Dr. Martin Brüne treated ten traumatized chimps who had once been used for research and then retired to a Dutch sanctuary. He was impressed by their ability to recover from years of mistreatment, abandoning their rocking, self-mutilation, and R-and-R-ing habits relatively quickly by spending time with other chimps, eating healthier food, throwing themselves into enrichment activities, and being given antidepressants. Brüne believes that a human who grew up in an environment as abnormal as a laboratory wouldn’t be able to recover as quickly as chimps do. He posits that the human ability to adapt easily and fluidly to new situations, social groups, and environments may not always be a good thing. “That’s why we populated the globe, not chimps,” he said. “But on the other hand, this could perhaps come at a cost. And the cost is perhaps increased susceptibility to psychological disturbances.”
Bell and Prosen share a slightly different belief about bonobos: that they’re flexible in their way and that humans might be able to learn something from them. In a joint paper about the process of helping Brian, they wrote, “Brian, who was initially a very ‘weird’ bonobo, began to view the world more calmly. . . . He grins and glows. I think we have to recognize that perhaps in contrast to humans, development can be opened up and restarted in bonobos and other primates. If this is the case, then the study of the treatment of developmental deficits in bonobos might contribute to the literature of working with human primates as well.”
By 2001, four years after Brian arrived as an uncertain, self-destructive, and undeveloped creature, he was correctly reading social cues in a group overseen by two dominant females and politely following bonobo custom. A new mother in the troop even trusted him to gently stroke her ten-day-old infant with his finger. A year later, he was comfortable with much larger groups of bonobos. Lody even let him take charge of the troop from time to time. By Brian’s sixteenth birthday, in 2006, he was finally acting closer to his age. In a remarkable reversal of power, as Lody aged and grew more frail, Brian became a troop leader.
“They still get along fine,” says Bell, “but their roles are reversed. Brian eats first and Lody second. Frankly, I think Lody just doesn’t want to be the leader anymore.”
Brian now also enjoys the interest and affection of the ruling females. Bell says that what makes him the happiest is when he’s allowed to carry the troop’s babies, and in the last few years he has even fathered a few of his own. She doesn’t remember how many years ago he was taken off Paxil but she knows that they stopped giving it to him when he started to share it with the other bonobos (a phenomenon Prosen has observed among other great apes he’s written prescriptions for). “When he became a drug runner we had to stop,” Bell said with a laugh. “Periodicially he regresses, but rarely. He’s social and wonderful with females and babies.”
The staff continues to carefully manage Brian’s social groupings, making sure that he is always with the calmest members of the troop. His days remain predictable, and he is given a lot of time to adapt to new situations. Prosen occasionally wonders whether Brian feels true empathy for the apes around him or has simply learned to artfully mimic Lody. “Brian really may have an empathy deficit due to his extremely abnormal upbringing,” he told me, “and he could be somewhat of a psychopath. Only bonobo psychopaths apparently aren’t violent like human ones can be.”
In the meantime, Brian has grown up, and is now a well-muscled young male. The females have noticed and the same ones who used to violently rebuff him now show interest in him. After Lody died of an enlarged heart in 2012, Brian’s role as troop leader was cemented. Brian has also formed new alliances in the troop and Bell says that he has “abandoned the road rage approach.”
Over the last fifteen years both Prosen and Bell have received many requests for psychiatric consultations from other zoos. “I will get calls from other keepers saying that they want to get rid of their eleven- or twelve-year-old male because ‘he’s ripping girls to shreds or doing this or that . . . he’s crazy!’ That’s the time you need to hang on to them. Those are the young males that need nurturing, and more guidance, not less. We’ve been really blessed by Brian. In a weird way he was a gift to our zoo. He and I have a loving relationship that’s very guarded. He is still a pistol, and I think he could hurt me, but we are still learning from Brian, we will always be learning from him.”
Brian’s therapy seems to have been a resounding success, and yet Prosen refuses to take credit for the bonobo’s recovery. He believes that Bell’s and the other keepers’ efforts were heroic and that it is actually the zoo’s bonobo troop that is responsible for Brian’s transformation, that Lody and Kitty were Brian’s real therapists.
“Empathy knows no country, no species, is universal and has always been available,” Prosen said. “I discovered after arriving at the zoo that it belonged to the bonobos long before us.”
Occasionally what helps another animal the most is a form of common sense. Sometimes, however, we need to travel to the unlikeliest of places in order to be reminded.
I met Pi Sarote while drenched in sweat, heaving buckets of water across a clotted field alongside a small group of foreign volunteers, in the northeastern Thai province of Surin. We were planting bamboo seedlings that, we were told, would eventually feed the hundreds of hungry elephants who lived in the village of Baan Ta Klang. I was doubtful, though, that anyone was going to irrigate these pathetic little plants after the foreigners left. The irrigation project had the feeling of make-work. It was hot, and I was beginning to doubt why I was there. I wanted to learn about elephants, not bamboo plants. Specifically I wanted to learn about problem elephants, creatures who were difficult or killed people, and how the men and women of Baan Ta Klang, who were famous for their skills with the animals, made them more peaceable and content. When Pi Sarote appeared as one of the mahouts assigned to look after our group, I noticed that he carried no elephant hook or stick. I had not seen this before. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and stared at him, silhouetted against the sun as he made his way toward us across the field.
Two elephants walked languidly alongside him, pausing every once in a while to tear a tuft of grass from the hard ground or snatch a mouthful of leaves from an overhanging branch. One of the elephants, a seventy-eight-year-old female named Mae Bua, had soft eyes and powerful ears that snapped like flags. Later, I would learn that she was born outside of Pi Sarote’s grandfather’s house in 1932. When he died, Sarote’s father inherited Mae Bua, and when he eventually died, too, Mae Bua passed to Sarote. If she lives long enough, the elephant will go to his sons, whom she already knows well. Sarote refers to her as “Grandmother” and hasn’t lived a day of his life without her nearby, just like his father. Mae Bua has never been hit or trained to do tricks, and she has given birth to six calves, all of whom stayed in Sarote’s family and were raised by her, together with five or six elephant nannies in their village.
The other elephant with Sarote that day, a six-year-old female named Noon Nying, was as rambunctious and loud as the older elephant was calm, observant, and measured. She repeatedly tried to unscrew the top of my water bottle until I showed her it was empty, and clambered upstairs into a makeshift vet clinic to steal unattended bananas. Noon Nying was also wildly protective of Sarote. If you wanted to walk with him, you had to be careful to walk on the side opposite from Noon Nying; otherwise she would push her large head, then her entire body, between you and him until she had reasserted herself at his side. Sarote’s wife is the only person he can embrace in front of the elephant without making her upset.
At forty-three, Sarote has deep lines around his eyes from squinting into the sun after his elephants. He cracks jokes constantly, often about the animals, and when he talks, he rests his weight idly against one of his elephants, as another man might lean on a bar. The elephants respond by curling their trunks into his hands or lightly leaning their weight into him. The day that I met Pi Sarote, Noon Nying had been with him only four months. They communicated in a mostly wordless manner that made it seem as if they had always known each other. The elephant followed him everywhere, squeaking at him constantly, a sort of elephant sonar, pinging back his attention and affection.
When Noon Nying and Sarote made their way to a muddy pond for her daily swim, he would turn to face her and in a barely audible whisper say, “Noon Nying, go ahead, swim.” Then she would calmly head off into the water. When it came time to leave the pond, the other mahouts called, cajoled, and sometimes waded into the water to retrieve their elephants, a few of them waving metal hooks in the air. Sarote stayed onshore and cocked his head at Noon Nying, or whispered her name, and she came trotting out of the water to his side.
As we all worked together, planting, or filling water buckets, through those bright afternoons I was in Surin, I would look over from time to time and catch sight of Sarote. He’d be relaxing in the only shade that existed in the open field, the rectangle of earth directly below Noon Nying’s belly, between her four legs. She grazed in place while he sat cross-legged beneath her, the top of his hat brushing against her stomach.
Four months earlier no one would have dared to get this close to Noon Nying, let alone sit directly beneath her. Noon Nying was so aggressive that her last mahout was terrified she would kill or badly injure him. Born in the district of Cha’am in southeastern Thailand to an elephant owned by Sarote’s cousin, Noon Nying spent her first year with her mother. As is customary, she chose her own name by picking one of three different pieces of sugarcane that each signified a different name proffered by the elephant monk. Sarote lived nearby, and though he wasn’t her mahout, he visited the calf and her mother often. When she was a year old, her training began. Noon Nying was taught to paint, holding the paintbrush in the tip of her trunk, and to hula-hoop with a giant plastic circle. She was being groomed to be a circus elephant, and learning the tricks was a grueling process. For a while she performed in a local show, painting pictures or kicking a soccer ball in a dusty, dilapidated circus ring in the center of the village; then, when she was four years old, Sarote’s cousin rented her to an elephant camp in the North, just outside the city of Chiang Mai, not far from Elephant Nature Park, where Jokia and Mae Perm live.
Noon Nying worked at the camp for two years with a mahout hired by the camp staff. It did not go well. By the time she was six, the family back in Surin was receiving reports that Noon Nying was dangerous and becoming a liability to both her mahout and the tourists who came through the camp. She didn’t like doing the tricks she was trained for and often flat-out refused to do the show. In frustration, the camp called Sarote’s cousin, who was ill, and demanded that she be picked up. Knowing Sarote’s skill with elephants, he asked him to go north to retrieve Noon Nying and see if anything could be done to make her more tractable and less upset. Sarote remembered her as a playful baby and had a feeling that she wasn’t a killer, just miserable and lonely. When he arrived at the camp, he found an elephant who was thin and small for her age but happy to see him. He made the long trip back to Surin with the young elephant, hoping he would be able to afford to feed her without making her work in the circus.
When they arrived back home, the first thing Sarote did was introduce Noon Nying to Mae Bua, trusting that the companionship of the older elephant would be good for her. Not long before, Mae Bua had helped another anxious elephant. A female in the village gave birth to her first calf and not only refused to nurse but tried to kill the baby. The night she was born, it took forty mahouts carrying sharp sticks to keep the mother from hurting the calf. As soon as they had chained her, she would break the chains and rush toward her baby, trying to crush the small, terrified creature. After hours of this, the men tried putting the baby back with the mother, but she swung at the calf again, knocking her unconscious, and the men had to resuscitate the tiny elephant. The owner of the elephants, an experienced mahout named Pi Pong, asked Pi Sarote if they could use Mae Bua, who was known for her mothering skills and calm presence.
The men chained the mother elephant to a tree and gave the baby to Mae Bua, who stood just beyond the mother’s reach. The men stepped back and watched Mae Bua stroke the calf and then slowly lead the baby in a circle around her mother. Guiding the calf with her trunk, Mae Bua then brought the baby to her mother’s breast, heavy with milk, and urged her to drink. She did. Mae Bua stayed nearby, guarding the baby and comforting both elephants until the baby could drink on her own. Eventually Pi Pong unchained the mother. For two weeks Mae Bua stayed with the pair day and night, and from then on, she was never far from the mother and calf. Two years later, when Pi Pong sold the two elephants to the government in another province, Mae Bua broke her own chains trying to go to them. For days after they left, she would dash to where she last saw them, calling and calling.
“When a mother and calf are separated they get sad,” Pi Pong said. “Aunties too. You need to find them new elephant friends or you won’t be able to sleep through all the crying.”
In the days after Noon Nying arrived back in the village, she, Pi Sarote, and Mae Bua walked together to the water and grazed in the dry forest. In the afternoon, Sarote bathed Noon Nying and led her around the village. At sunset he chained her next to Mae Bua and gave them both piles of grass or pineapple tops to eat. On cold nights he lit a fire to warm them; on buggy nights he lit a fire to smoke away the insects. Every day Pi Sarote stroked Noon Nying, encouraged her, fed her treats, shared his own snacks, laughed when she did something funny, and teased her gently. His children visited her and did the same. So did his friends and cousins. He spoke to her warmly and sometimes sternly, but always with affection. Soon Noon Nying began to put on weight and the squeaking started, her way of expressing her affection. She never quite bonded with Mae Bua, but she settled happily into her new life and routine.
“Now she knows she’s important,” said Sarote. “She loves me and I love her.”
She also trusts him. Sarote believes that after affection, developing trust is the most important aspect of helping a disturbed and unhappy elephant become a happy one. “She doesn’t like being chained, for example, but she knows this is what I have to do at night so I can sleep and see the rest of my family. She understands that every morning I will always be there to unchain her.”
One night, as we sat around a fire drinking the local rice wine, a milky, fiery liquid called satoh, out of tin cups, Sarote’s daughter lay sleeping at the edge of the fire. “When I was a child my daughter’s age,” Sarote said, “this was an entirely different place.” As he spoke, I could hear the soft crunching of Mae Bua and Noon Nying behind him in the darkness.
Sarote and the other inhabitants of Baan Ta Klang are Guey, an ethnic group that has lived in this part of Southeast Asia for centuries. Elephants are the center of Guey culture—as family members, sources of income, and sacred beings whose births and deaths are important community events. For thousands of years Guey elephant shamans rode captive elephants into the forest and, using lassoes made from boar skin, captured between thirty and forty wild elephants per year. These multiday expeditions were tightly controlled and the men chosen carefully; all members of the party were forbidden to speak Guey during the expedition, communicating instead with a secret language known only to them that took years to learn and could only be spoken in the forest. The captured elephants were used by the Guey as transportation or were sold as war elephants to the kings of Siam. Later the Thai government and British companies bought the animals for use in logging.
The region’s vast forests were home to not only large herds of wild elephants but also two species of rhinoceros (Javan and Sumatran), water buffalo, wild cattle (banteng, guar, and kouprey), tigers, leopards, Asian wild dogs, and many small herbivores. There were so many animals that the Guey built elevated houses to protect their rice harvests from hungry wildlife.
Until the last wild elephant was captured in 1961, Surin had supported healthy herds of the animals. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the forest, along with the animals it supported, was gone. Gigantic rice paddies came to dominate the landscape, dotted only with the occasional surviving tree. When Pi Sarote was a teenager, for the first time in Guey history the community had to buy food to feed their elephants, who had always grazed in the forest. Many people sold their elephants; those who remained had to be chained in place because there was no longer any forest to let them loose in.
The Guey’s cultural shifts were as dramatic as the changes to the landscape that surrounded them. Generations of men had captured and trained wild elephants; now they farmed small-scale rice paddies and hunted game, found work on the large rice farms, or applied their immense skill with elephants to training the animals for trekking or circus shows. Some of these men took to the streets with their animals, begging in the nation’s cities, where urban Thais pay to touch the elephants or to feed them sugarcane. That was the route that Sarote took with his large-tusked male Jan Jou, an elephant he’d been working with since he was eleven years old. The only other option available to Sarote would have been to sell or rent Jan Jou to a tourist camp, but he refused to do this. So for ten years he traversed the entirety of Thailand on foot with Jan Jou, sleeping under a tarp with other men from his village at night, the elephants asleep on their feet nearby. As he walked, Sarote learned to speak four languages fluently. He doesn’t say so, but elephant is a fifth. He also traveled with his father and Mae Bua, offering rides on her back to paying customers. Sarote talks of these years sorrowfully. He stopped street-begging entirely after Jan Jou fell ill and died when they were far from home.
Few of these Guey men, descended from long lines of elephant capturers and shamans, want to take their elephants to the city to beg. The work is demeaning, dangerous, and uncomfortable for both the men and the elephants. They’re far from their families and it’s often difficult to find food and clean water for the elephants. Sarote returned to Baan Ta Klang as soon as he could, but he laments the lack of jobs and the kind of life this entails for the elephants. “Men stop begging in the cities and then they come home, but here the elephants must be chained all the time so the man can get a job in the rice paddies. This is not good for the elephant.”
It occurred to me that the different lives of Pi Sarote’s elephants mirrored the drastic changes that had unfolded around them. Mae Bua came of age at a time when she worked only occasionally. When needed, she helped the people who treated her and her babies like family. When she wasn’t working she was let loose in the nearby forest, raising her calves as she saw fit and socializing with other elephants.
Despite being born to the same human family, Noon Nying entered a drastically different world. And yet, regardless of the many challenges that Sarote and his elephants faced, he was able to help her. He brought the young elephant back from the emotional and physical brink and restored her to health, saving her from becoming aggressive and isolated, encouraging her instead to be affectionate and sociable.
* * *
Almost two years after I first visited the village, I returned to see Sarote and his elephants. I arrived in a pickup truck full of pineapple tops, bananas, and cucumbers, and the elephants chained on either side of the road lifted their trunks, sniffing the air as we passed. Sarote met me with a big grin, teasing that I had finally come back to take over as Noon Nying’s mahout. He explained that he’d sent Mae Bua south to stay with friends in Pattaya, an area thick with pineapple fields. She was ready to retire and he felt she would have a good retirement in a place where the elephants are given the run of the fields after the harvest, free to eat as many discarded pineapples as they chose.
Noon Nying had grown at least a foot since I’d last seen her and gained so much weight that she looked like she had been inflated. She was taut, round, and strong, just like a seven-year-old elephant should be. She rumbled happily, standing inches from Sarote, still refusing to let anyone between them. We’d been chatting a few minutes when she let out a sudden sharp squeak and another elephant began running from across the road. He was the same size as Noon Nying, healthy and fat with a wide head and a thunderous gait. He headed straight for us and fast. I could feel the ground shaking.
Pi Sarote saw me flinch and laughed. “That,” he said, “is Teng Mo. Thai for ‘watermelon.’ Don’t tell me that you’re scared of a watermelon.”
As he spoke, I realized that the elephant wasn’t barreling toward us at all but toward Noon Nying. They met with an explosion of trumpets.
The reticent, skinny elephant who, less than two years earlier, was largely indifferent to other elephants had made an elephant friend. For the last six months, Sarote told me, Teng Mo and Noon Nying had been inseparable. Teng Mo was five years old, sweet, and slightly impetuous but extremely affectionate with Noon Nying. He had been trained to sit and raise his leg on command, but his owners didn’t want him to work in a circus, so they hadn’t taught him to paint, play soccer, or hula-hoop.
Instead of leaving Sarote for her new elephant companion, Noon Nying now goes everywhere with her two males. She squeaks for both of them and doesn’t like being separated from either one. When Sarote turned and walked toward a nearby pond, the two elephants fell into step on either side of him, extending their trunks to each other over his head and rumbling with contentment. The pachyderm-man sandwich moved slowly into the eucalyptus forest, Sarote invisible except for his feet, flashing between the eight others as they walked.
I remembered a conversation I’d had with Sarote on my last visit. We sat cross-legged in the shade next to a three-week-old elephant calf, her mother standing over her watchfully as she slept. The mother’s stance reminded me of the way Noon Nying stood over Sarote as he rested in the field. Occasionally the calf squeaked in a dream or moved her feet as if she were running, and the mother reached her trunk down to stroke her sleeping baby.
“The elephant is very important here,” Sarote said. “Like family. If we didn’t have elephants this town wouldn’t exist. I would not exist. It is how it’s always been. And we help each other. Like when the river flooded last year. The water was so deep that people couldn’t cross the rice paddies to bring the rice back. The elephants helped us. It was like it was before we had trucks. We worked together.”
I wondered if there was something beneficial in this odd partnership, and if that something had helped Noon Nying. Was being in a relationship with both humans and her own kind therapeutic? Once, I asked Sarote what enabled him to heal a troubled elephant like Noon Nying. He said, “Jai dee,” and placed a hand on his chest. Literally translated, this means “good heart,” but it means more than that, too. It signifies good intentions, wholeheartedness, and something else more mysterious that I was never quite able to pin down.
“If you have jai dee,” he said, “the animals will know it, and they will have jai dee too.”
The reverse is also true. Many people in Surin believe that if you do not have jai dee, then your elephant may not be happy or loving. And if an elephant is mean and unkind for no good reason, if he or she is not goodhearted, this makes the mahout mean, unkind, and unhappy too. Sarote and the rest of the Guey elephant men, along with many other mahouts, veterinarians, and trainers I spent time with in other parts of Thailand believe that the border between humans and elephants is a porous one, at least in the context of mental health. They assume that feelings, intentions, and empathy can be transferred in ways that may heal or harm. This belief in shared emotional experiences suffuses daily life for Sarote, his colleagues, and family members, affecting practical decisions such as whether a mahout gets a job with a particular elephant or whether he keeps that job if he and the elephant seem emotionally incompatible.
The elephant monk had told me, “In order to understand other animals, first you have to understand yourself.” What I didn’t know when I sat on the monastery steps hoping for some sort of grand pronouncement about animal minds, was that this also works the other way around. For centuries, humans have observed, worked with, befriended, poked, caged, trapped, fed, celebrated, prodded, denigrated, feared, identified with, suspected, hassled, petted, studied, dosed, and healed other animals—often with the aim of better understanding ourselves, our brain chemistry, behavior, thought processes, emotions, and struggles for sanity.
Perhaps, as the Guey elephant men convinced me, the divisions between humans and other animals are far more permeable than we think, at least when it comes to mental health and how we make sense of it. This is, in a way, not so unlike the dog trainer Ian Dunbar’s assertion that the unhealthy lives we often lead as contemporary Americans are reflected back to us in the unhealthy lives of our cats and dogs. It’s also reminiscent of the nineteenth-century idea of insanity as something that could be passed freely between humans and other animals. Jai dee is the other, brighter side of this coin. As Pi Sarote told me, “Anyone can have jai dee.” Wholehearted happiness might be just as contagious as its opposite. Thank dog.