There cannot be one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one.
Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto
One of the most encouraging aspects of animal mental illness is that, against all odds, many creatures thrive, or at the very least, exhibit the kind of behavior that looks a lot like resilience. Brian the bonobo improved with the help of Lody, Kitty, and the keeper staff, a lift from pharmaceuticals, and a tightly controlled environment. Gigi became more resilient with the support of other female gorillas and the hard work of the humans who care for her. Mosha continues to hop around after Ladee, squeaking her delight throughout the quiet afternoons, while farther south Teng Mo and Noon Nying wrestle together in the mud, tangling with their affection for each other and for Pi Sarote. Recently, Mac the donkey has improved a bit as well. He’s not biting himself or the metal bars of his corral as much, and he seems more relaxed. This is because my mom and her partner enlarged his enclosure, giving him a wider area in which to graze that keeps him busy eating thistles. They’ve also taken to drinking happy-hour beers at the top of the hill at the edge of Mac’s range. He stands there, at dusk, just out of reach of the picnic table but a part of the human activity he’s so curious about.
Some of these creatures have given their human caretakers a second chance, or a fourth one. I know Oliver did this for Jude and me. His first family disappointed him but he gave us his affection anyway. If dogs can hope, then perhaps that was what he was doing, or maybe his personality was simply one of desperate friendliness. Whatever anxieties, compulsions, or fears plagued him, they didn’t keep him from expressing his dogged version of love.
A few years after Oliver died I went to Baja, Mexico, with the behavioral and wildlife biologist Toni Frohoff to dangle my hands over the side of a small fiberglass boat called a panga. I was hoping to meet a whale. Frohoff, the same researcher who consulted on the disturbed dolphin in a shopping mall, focuses on marine mammal behavior and communication, particularly among “solitary sociable cetaceans.” These dolphins and whales choose not live with a pod of their own species but to be on their own, often socializing with humans more than their own kind. Frohoff has been all over the world studying these oddly behaving cetaceans, such as the orphaned baby beluga named Q in eastern Canada who preferred to sing and play with people. I went to Baja with Frohoff not to see solitary sociable cetaceans like Q but to see a whole group of them, the ballenas amistosas, or friendly gray whales. She promised me that if I splashed my hands in the water over the side of our little blue and white boat in the calving lagoons, the whales would come to check us out, and if we were lucky, perhaps even offer themselves up to be touched.
California gray whales summer in the Arctic, feeding on small invertebrates. In the late fall and early winter female whales of calving age and males old enough to breed travel five thousand miles to the warm, shallow lagoons on Baja’s Pacific Coast to give birth, nurse their calves, and mate. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century and again in the first half of the twentieth, this seasonal congregation of whales was a target. Whaling captains like Charles Melville Scammon, who used the latest in whaling technology, studied the animals exhaustively, and wrote detailed accounts of their natural history. He used this to his advantage, going to the lagoons to harpoon the calves, a ploy to attract the real oil prizes, the mothers, who rushed the boats in an attempt to rescue their babies from the whalers.
The grays fought back so intensely that whaling captains and crews called them “devil fish.” The animals killed men, splintered their boats into shards, and prompted one San Francisco reporter to write in 1863, “As many men are lost catching them as in all the other whaling grounds put together.”
The whales’ ferocity couldn’t save them. By the early 1900s there were fewer than two thousand California gray whales left. Protections were put in place in the 1930s and 1940s, and slowly the population began to recover. Then one winter morning in 1972, something puzzling happened.
The Mexican fisherman Francisco Mayoral, known to his friends as Pachico, was in the middle of Laguna San Ignacio fishing from a panga. Suddenly, he and the friend he was with felt their boat stop moving. It was as if they had beached themselves on land, only the boat was still in the middle of the lagoon. The fishermen realized that they had actually beached themselves on the back of an immense female whale. She slid farther beneath their boat and lifted them a terrifying few inches in the air and gently set them back down again. She raised her head to the surface right alongside Pachico, eyeing him. He waited a moment, then reached out to touch her, first with his finger and then his whole hand. After a few seconds, she slowly sank back down.
Soon fishermen all over the lagoon began sharing similar accounts. The whales seemed curious, as if they wanted to communicate. And they were playful. Reports of whales acting the same way in the other Baja calving lagoon, Ojo de Liebre, filtered in.
Pachico’s son Ranulfo, now a seasonal whale-watching guide like most fishermen in the area, told the journalist Charles Siebert that before his father was approached, “everyone went out of [their] way to avoid the whales.” After that first meeting with an amistosa, though, everything changed. The fishermen started putting their hands in the water all over the lagoon, and the whales swam up to them, placing their giant heads underneath the men’s hands. The whales swiveled to make eye contact, they blew misty breath out of their blowholes onto the boats, they lifted the pangas up gently and set them back down again. Forty years later the fishermen aren’t surprised when the whales do this. They’re used to it. Today roughly 10 to 15 percent of the whales in the lagoon, predominantly mothers with calves, are sociable. During the winter months, when the whales are in the lagoons, the fishermen stop fishing and work as whale-watching guides and boat drivers instead, earning a good living by taking small groups of ecotourists and researchers out to see the “friendlies.” They tell each of the tourists who come to see the whales to take off their sunglasses because the greys like to make eye contact.
One early March afternoon in Laguna San Ignacio, I spent more than an hour with an adult whale and her calf. The forty-foot-long mother swam slowly toward our panga, her month-old calf bobbing alongside, and then in a single, swift movement, she pushed her baby onto her head and then thrust him toward the boat and our waiting, splashing hands. Again and again she did this and as the calf rolled off the wide expanse of his mother’s head, he shot bubbles, breathed loudly, and turned to look us in the eye. Sometimes he opened his mouth—exposing his baleen, still bright, new, unstained—and then shifted so that we could stroke the side of his head, his wide gums, his long jaw. Stroking the calf felt a little like touching one of those plastic-covered foam stadium seats, or boat keychains that are meant to float. His skin was smooth but squishy and even though the water was cold, he was warm. Twice his mother gently lifted the boat and set it back down again. At least half a dozen times the young whale came up under our hands just to be patted and rubbed, making long, unbroken eye contact with each of us. When he exhaled he covered me in whale snot and seawater, his eyes shining. Was it a joke? I couldn’t tell. But his interest, his playfulness, was unmistakable. He seemed like the world’s largest toddler.
Searching for a friendly whale in the vast expanse of Laguna San Ignacio is impossible; the whales can be anywhere in the lagoon, including an area off limits to whale-watching boats. The guides know that the only way to meet the whales is to motor to the middle or drive around slowly, waiting for an interested whale to approach them.
What’s particularly startling about all of this is that gray whales live a long time, up to eighty years and perhaps even longer. Those first friendly whales who approached Pachico and the other fishermen may have been old enough to remember whaling. They, their mothers, or their fathers could have fought for their lives in the lagoon when it was churning with hunters and their boats, the water red with the blood of whales and men.
“The first time I came down here,” Frohoff told me, “the first whale to approach the boat came up to my side of the panga. I put my hand in the water and she slid under it, and I saw a harpoon scar on her side. I was blown away that this whale knew what it meant to be attacked by a human and she was approaching me anyway.”
The reasons the whales do this remain a mystery. A few theories float and bob tentatively. One is that the whales may be using the boats and human hands like loofahs, to rub off barnacles. But the animals don’t rub hard enough to scrape anything off, and a whale rubbing with any force on a boat would capsize it, something that hasn’t happened since whaling ended. Another theory is that the fishermen are secretly feeding the whales. But the females don’t eat while they’re nursing their calves, and the calves drink only their mother’s milk. The whale-watching guides and fishermen, who spend all day every day in late winter and early spring maneuvering around the animals and getting to know the behavior of individuals, have their own theories.
Jonas Leonardo Meza Otero has been taking people to see the creatures for his entire adult life, and he believes he has at least part of the answer. One evening, as we sat on folding chairs on the beach, drinking Dos Equis and watching the whales spout a few hundred yards offshore, he said, “I think they’re curious. And also they know that they are safe here. I believe the mothers are showing their calves what humans are. She is teaching them a lesson. Also, maybe they’re a little bored since all they are doing here is nursing, and we offer them something else to do.”
It’s true that these whales’ friendly interactions take place only in the Baja lagoons. The same whales are spotted off the coast of the United States and Canada as they make their way north, but they don’t interact with people anywhere else as they do here.
There is another theory: that the mothers are teaching their calves about boats. Besides orcas, who prey on gray whale calves, collisions with boats along the whales’ migration routes are the biggest threat to their survival once they leave the lagoon.
“Some naysayers,” Frohoff said, “might claim that these whales don’t have the intelligence to know the difference between the peaceful climate in the lagoon today and what transpired in the past, that they’re not smart enough to remember that humans can inflict pain and cause death. However, historical evidence, as well as the limited data we do have on these whales, compel us to think otherwise.”
There are many accounts of whales learning to avoid certain areas—particularly dangerous spots where they might run into hungry orcas looking to pick off a calf, human hunters, or be more likely to be hit by boats. Frohoff has credited the whales’ memories for this self-protective behavior and argues that in order to survive their lengthy migrations they have to be intelligent and make quick assessments and decisions.
It may be a stretch to say that the extreme violence of whaling created a kind of species-level psychological trauma in the animals. But perhaps not. As research on whale sociality, communication, and cognition has shown, many cetacean species have culture and language and belong to complex societies. They live a long time, and the ability to remember where they’ve been harmed and where they’ve felt safe is key to the whales’ survival. Mass killings at the hands of humans were fundamental events in their natural history. Their choice to approach us in what was once a watery killing field is a fundamental event in ours.
We can call the whales’ behavior resilience or recovery, or we can anthropomorphize it as a kind of human-directed forgiveness. At the very least, the whales are doing something that seems a lot like the expression of affectionate and playful curiosity. Watching a free-living calf swim out of the depths with his mother and, on her urging, look into my eyes while I looked into his is one of the most powerful and mystifying encounters of my life. I believe this is because it was born of choice. Unlike an aquarium beluga, a zoo-dwelling panda, or my neighbor’s Chihuahua, who may make eye contact because there is nowhere else to look, because they hope to be fed or because they fear me, the Baja whales looked at me with, I’m convinced, something like the same wonder and curiosity I had for them.
Throughout the spring and summer after I left Baja, I thought about the young whales and their mothers as they headed north to the Arctic, maneuvering around container ships and navy vessels and pods of orcas. I wondered whether they passed dolphins heading in to strand, otters drunk with confidence, or frenzied sea lions heading for open water. More than anything, though, I thought about our encounters with other animals and wondered what we might do to make these interactions more like those between the humans and whales of Baja. Could we affect the mental health of both captive and wild animals for the better, not simply by striving to do no harm but by seeking to rectify our mistakes?
It’s a bit of a generalization, but over the past century most of our thinking about wildlife has fallen into two opposing philosophical camps: leave wild animals totally alone, or hunt, hassle, extirpate, or domesticate them. Neither the hard-line conservation approach, such as passing laws to keep people far from wildlife or isolating their habitats from humans, or the opposite, allowing unfettered human access to wild animals and the places they depend upon, has worked. We cannot leave other animals completely alone because we have suffused the world with ourselves and our activities. We also like being around animals and some of them seem to like being around us.
Oliver taught me this. So did Mosha, Noon Nying, and even Gigi. The weight of all these accumulated stories convinced me that we should pay closer attention to the mental health of other creatures—because what is good for them is so often good for us. Many people have already taken on this responsibility, and the resulting observations—of monkey executives, nervous dogs, relaxed rats, demented sea lions, and more—have quietly influenced how we think about our own unraveling minds and what we might do to stitch them back together again.
Trying to understand Oliver also led me to be a bit kinder to myself and the humans and other animals around me. When we feel kinship with a pig or a pigeon, really feel it, we can’t help but share a bit of that affection with our own animal selves. There are exceptions, of course. Adolf Hitler loved his German Shepherd Blondi so much that he risked his own life in the last few weeks of the war to leave his bunker to take her on walks. And Kim Jong-il reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his Shih Tzus and Poodles, flying in a French veterinarian to treat them and feeding the dogs food scraps from his own plate (ensuring that they ate better than the majority of North Koreans). For most people, though, to selflessly love another creature is to be open to loving other humans, who are animals as much as pandas, cows, or Shih Tzus. This is why I never trust an animal rights activist who is misogynistic or thinks that Homo sapiens are, at heart, more rotten than any other species. Human rights activists are animal rights activists by default. The reverse should also be true. Oliver didn’t teach me this as much as losing him made me teach it to myself.
* * *
I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’m not sure where Oliver’s ashes ultimately wound up. Jude returned to Boston before I did, and he volunteered for the sad duty of picking up what was left of our dog, along with his smelly webbed collar printed with acorns and his round bed. I know Jude took the collar into a forest in western Massachusetts, set it on a rock, and walked away. I don’t know which forest. I couldn’t bear to ask.
This is how we love the people and other animals closest to us. When we lose them, the pain is crushing, sensory. I still have a tactile memory of Oliver’s ears, of holding his paws—the pads rough and spreading, the fur between them soft and light. I remember the smell of his neck, feral but comforting, like the pine floors of our apartment in D.C.
For years after he died, thinking about Oliver was like visiting a raw, guilty country. I tried to avoid it. Instead I went to other, actual countries. I met elephants and parrots, cats and whales, horses and seals. Every time I reached for their hides, feathers, fur, or skin, I was reaching for him.
What I discovered is that the guilty country is crowded. So many of us are there looking for answers and blaming ourselves, wondering what would have happened if we’d taken the dog to the park more often, refused to adopt the second cat, who the first one despised, cleaned the iguana’s tank more frequently, given the hamster more time in his plastic ball, or ridden the horse as much as we had first intended. Animal madness isn’t our fault, though—not always, anyway. When it comes to caring for the creatures with whom we share our beds, couches, backyards, and deepest affections, most of us try our best to help them. We often try harder, in fact, than we ever could have imagined possible. Some of us break our own hearts trying, drain our savings accounts, put the vet visits on the credit card, hoping fervently for some sort of deliverance before the bill arrives. Our intentions are good. It’s simply that falling short is the human condition, and some problems cannot be taken care of by hoping.
This should not let us off the hook. There are many structural elements of our lives with other creatures that cause needless suffering and could easily be done away with. We could stop teaching elephants to paint, dance, and play soccer, and casting chimps in commercials and giraffes in feature films. We could close our nation’s zoos, or at the very least stop deluding ourselves that it’s our right to see exotic wildlife like gorillas, dolphins, and elephants in every major American city. We could stop trying to convince ourselves that keeping animals in cages or tanks is the best way to educate and inform one another about them, especially since it often costs the animals their sanity. We could instead turn these zoos and other facilities into places where people might engage with animals, domestic and wild, who often thrive in our presence, creatures like horses, donkeys, llamas, cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, and even raccoons, rats, squirrels, pigeons, and possums. We could exchange the polar bear pools for petting zoos and build teaching farms, urban dairies, and wildlife rehabilitation centers where city-dwelling children and adults could volunteer or take classes on cheese making, beekeeping, gardening, veterinary science, wildlife ecology, and animal husbandry.
We could also stop leading the sorts of lives that cause large numbers of our pets to end up on psychopharmaceuticals. We could spend more time walking and playing with them and less time on our phones, checking email and watching television. We could stop bringing animals into our lives that deep down, we know we cannot care for, and we could recognize, in them and their crazy behavior, our own unhealthy habits reflected back to us.
We could also truly begin to acknowledge the other minds in the water. That is, we could accept the fact that dolphins, whales, and other marine life may literally be driven mad by our actions, and we could make more consistent efforts to protect their hearing, migration routes, water quality, and food sources, since in the end, that is also what is better for us.
We could stop eating mentally ill pigs, chickens, and cows, and do away with corporate farming practices so cruel they’re often institutionalized torture. We could stop trimming our coats with the fur of compulsive mink, foxes, sable, and chinchillas and quit testing our drugs, cosmetics, and medical procedures on lab animals housed alone and in terribly uncomfortable conditions.
We could also, and most important, make a lasting peace with Darwin’s belief that humans are just another kind of animal, different only by degree. This kind of change will not be easy or fast. It will take the self-transformative power of chameleons, the resolve of mules, the fortitude of migrating whales, and the ingenuity and compassion of humans. It will be worth it.