In late August Brenin and I headed into the University of Alabama for our first class together. The summer had seen him grow up fast and strong and big. From a chubby little bear, he had become long, lean and angular. Although he was not quite six months old yet, he was already thirty inches at the shoulder and weighed around eighty pounds. I used to weigh him, much to his chagrin, by picking him up and standing with him on the bathroom scales. And the days were drawing to a close when I could do that – not so much because I couldn’t lift him, but because we were collectively getting too heavy for the scales. His colour had remained the same: he was brown, flecked with black, with a cream underbelly. He had inherited the big snowshoe feet of his parents and always gave the impression that he was about to trip over them. He never did. There was a black line that ran down the dorsal edge of his snout, from his head to his nose, and this was framed by his eyes, still the colour of almond; eyes that had now taken on the hooded, slanting shape of a wolf’s. In those early days he could barely contain the power he must have felt coursing through his body. I had nicknamed him ‘Buffalo Boy’, because of his habit of charging around the house at full tilt, knocking over any household items that weren’t screwed to the ground (and some that were). During the summer months, our departures from the house had slowly developed into something bordering on ritual. I would announce our departure by saying, ‘Let’s go.’ This would be the cue for him to initiate his party piece: a cartwheel that he would perform on the living-room wall. His method involved running at and jumping on to the settee, then continuing his run up the wall. When he had got as high as he could, he would swing his back legs up and around, then run back down the wall. It was the same story every time we went out. Often Brenin would do his trick before I had said anything at all, as if to let me know that we had people to see and places to go. So I think we can safely say that it was with some trepidation that I drove into the university for that first class.
In fact, there were no major disasters that morning. I had tired him out with a long walk before we went in, and after he had become used to there being other people in the room, he lay down under the table at the front of the room and went to sleep. He did wake up and start attacking my sandals around about the time I was running through Descartes’s arguments for doubting the existence of the external world. But I think everyone agreed this was a welcome distraction.
Things didn’t always go so smoothly. There would be the occasional mishap. After a few weeks, he started to enjoy a post-nap howling session halfway through the class, possibly to register his general dissatisfaction with the way the class was proceeding. A quick glance in the direction of the students confirmed that they knew exactly what he was talking about. At other times, he would decide to stretch his legs, wandering up and down the aisles, having a little sniff around. One day, when he was feeling particularly bold or hungry, or both, I saw his head disappear into the backpack of a female philosophy major – someone who was, I think it is fair to say, a little nervous around dogs at the best of times – to emerge, a few seconds later, with her lunch. Predicting a rash of potential compensation claims from hungry students, I was subsequently forced to insert a clause in the syllabus that I handed out to students at the beginning of the course: a trio of sentences that, I’m pretty sure, had never before appeared on any philosophy syllabus ever written. Immediately following the sections on reading materials and assessment procedures, there would be a paragraph that read as follows:
Caution: Please do not pay any attention to the wolf. He will not hurt you. However, if you do have any food in your bags, please make sure that those bags are securely fastened shut.
When I think back, it was a miracle there were no complaints – or, for that matter, litigation.
In the afternoons, I switched from masquerading as a lecturer to masquerading as a student. I was twenty-four years old when I first moved to Alabama, younger than many of my students. I had raced through my PhD at Oxford in a little over eighteen months, which was unusually – perhaps uniquely – quick. But the system in the US is very different. There it’s a five-year slog – minimum – before you get your doctorate. And since it also takes longer – four years plus, as opposed to three – to get a bachelor’s degree, this means that most Americans are not entering the academic workforce until they’re pushing thirty. And this, from my perspective, was positively ancient. Since half of them were older than I was anyway, if I was looking for friends, students formed my natural constituency rather than my fellow academics. And this was no bad thing: students have a lot more fun.
So when I got to Alabama I relied on a tried and trusted strategy for acquiring a social life: team sports. I had played rugby to a fairly high level in the UK. Like most universities in the US, the University of Alabama had a rugby team – a very good one by local standards – and due to a distinct lack of rigour on the part of the USA Rugby Football Union in their procedures for checking eligibility (i.e. there weren’t any), I was able to pass myself off as a student and play for the team. When Brenin came on the scene, a couple of years later, I would, of course, take him along to training with me. So most weekday afternoons we would find ourselves at Bliss Field, on the edge of the university’s huge sports complex.
At weekends there would be a game against some university or other, either at home or on the road. Brenin would accompany us on all the road trips. Of course, hotels in that part of the world are, almost without exception, hostile to dogs – let alone wolves. But it was easy to sneak Brenin into motels. At a motel you park in front of your room anyway. So as long as the motel’s office didn’t look out on to the parking lot, lupine smuggling activities would generally go undetected. As a result, you name any major university campus in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina or Tennessee and the chances are Brenin went to a rugby match, and post-match party, there. He ate calamari on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on a balmy night in early September. He went to Daytona Beach on spring break. There’s a sorority house in Baton Rouge that he knew like the back of his hand. There’s a downmarket strip club on the western outskirts of Atlanta that he visited on many occasions. He even went to Vegas, courtesy of the annual Midnight Sevens rugby tournament – so called because all the games take place at night.
The rugby players soon realized something that to them was very important: Brenin was a chick magnet. In fact, they used a slightly different expression; more colourful, but not really repeatable here. Whatever we want to call it, the general insight was that if you were at a college rugby party, standing next to a large wolf, then it would be no time at all before some attractive member of the opposite sex (‘rugger huggers’, as they were known) approached you and said, ‘I just love your dog [sic].’ And this gave you an opening without you having to do all the usual preparatory spadework. Consequently, Brenin’s presence by their side became the reward for whichever player had most distinguished himself on the field that day – the MVP (Most Valued Player), as they call them over there. I was disqualified from this competition on the grounds that I could use Brenin for such purposes any time – or so it was alleged.
During term time, we would go on road trips like this almost every other weekend – heading off on Friday afternoons, driving anywhere up to 1,000 miles round trip, playing rugby, getting very drunk and crashing in some cheap motel, before returning on Sunday afternoons, often still drunk, always exhausted, but very happy. On the other week-ends there were home games, where we would do the same thing except without all the driving. And this was pretty much the life we lived – my Buffalo Boy and I – for the first four years of our association.
Wolves play – but not in the way dogs do. Dogs to wolves are like puppies to dogs. And the play of dogs is the result of the infantilism that has been bred into them over the course of 15,000 years. You throw a stick for your dog and the chances are he or she will tear off after it in a haze of frenzied excitement. Nina, my very intelligent German shepherd–malamute, is a sucker for sticks and she’ll run after them until she drops if you let her. I did, at various times, try to convince Brenin of the delights of stick-chasing, ball-chasing and Frisbee-chasing. He would look at me as if I was mad, and his expression was easy to read: fetch? Seriously? If you want the stick so much, why don’t you go and get it? Indeed, if you want it so much, why did you throw it away in the first place?
When wolves play, it is often to the consternation of passers-by, who are unable to distinguish what they are doing from fighting. I didn’t realize this until years later, when I saw Brenin playing with his daughter Tess and with Nina, who had been raised by Brenin to be – stick-chasing proclivities aside – as much wolf as dog. What, by then, seemed so natural to me would arouse howls of alarm in human bystanders. For Brenin, playing amounted to seizing the other animal by the neck and pinning it to the ground. There he would proceed to shake it violently back and forth, like a rag doll. And all of this would be carried on against a background cacophony of growling and snarling. Then he would allow the other dog to wriggle free and do much the same thing to him. This is playing. I don’t know why wolves play so rough, but they do. It is the growling and snarling that give the game away. They are one of the mechanisms that wolves have of reassuring their playmate that they are still playing – for their actions are so close to fighting that they might easily be misconstrued. As I discovered, when wolves really fight, they do so in utter and eerie silence.
Of course, these are all things known to a wolf but not necessarily to a dog. So Brenin’s youthful attempts to initiate play with other dogs generally ended in disaster – with the other dog either attacking him or shrieking in terror. Poor Brenin must have found both responses puzzling. There was, however, one dog that totally ‘got’ Brenin. This was a big, uncompromising pit bull by the name of Rugger – and Rugger loved to play rough.
For a pit bull, Rugger was huge – weighing in at ninety-five pounds – and he was owned by someone who, for a human, was equally huge – Matt, one of the team’s second-row forwards. Pit bulls have a bad reputation, but they are not intrinsically bad dogs. Typically, it’s people who make them bad. We humans are quite comfortable with the idea that we’re all different – our individuality is part of our unique charm, we like to tell ourselves. But in fact, I suspect, individuality has little to do with human uniqueness. Dogs are all different. Some are lovely; others are just plain mean. Of these, the vast majority are made mean by unfortunate conditions of nurture. This, I’m pretty sure, is what had happened to our psychotic Great Dane Blue in the first three years of his life. But some, I also think, are just born mean. Like some humans, they are mean by nature. I should stress that I’m talking about individual dogs here, not breeds. In my experience, there is a slight association between the breed of a dog and its temperament, but nothing more than that.
There was nothing very much wrong with Rugger since there was nothing very much wrong with Matt. It would not be true to say that Rugger always got Brenin. Rugger was older by a few years, and when Brenin was a cub, Rugger despised him. And, as we shall see, when Brenin got to be more than eighteen months old, this engendered a whole new raft of problems between them. But there was a window of a year or so when they were the best of friends. Most weekday afternoons, our practice would be distracted by the dazzlingly acrobatic displays of mock pugilism they would put on at the side of the field.
However, when Brenin reached eighteen months, his attitude towards other dogs began to change. If the dog was female and hadn’t been spayed, then he would inevitably try to jump on her, no matter what the disparity in size between them (a cluster of traumatized West Highlands and Yorkshires and equally traumatized owners quickly learned to avoid Bliss Field on weekday afternoons). But the real problems were with male dogs. Here, his attitude was one of either contemptuous indifference or outright hostility, depending on whether he deemed the dog sufficiently large to constitute a threat. Most of the time, this was not a problem because Brenin was well trained, very obedient, and would not approach other dogs without my say-so. Occasionally, however, they would approach him, usually with a glint in their eyes, and then things would kick off.
Rugger was definitely big enough to constitute a threat. In fact, it was difficult to imagine a more impressively intimidating dog than Rugger. By the time Brenin reached maturity, they hated each other once again, and our rugby practices would see them not playing but strutting past each other, legs stiff and hackles up. Matt and I diligently kept them apart, but eventually there was the inevitable lapse. During the preparations for a game one Saturday afternoon, Rugger managed to slip the chain that attached him to Matt’s pick-up. I was doing some pre-match stretching in the middle of the field and so witnessed the encounter from around thirty yards away. Rugger charged into Brenin – low, squat, all muscle and aggression. Brenin waited until the last moment and then leaped aside. He was now positioned behind Rugger and proceeded to jump on to his back and savage his neck and head. Within seconds one of Rugger’s ears had largely been ripped off and blood was pouring from his face, neck and ribs. As this utterly horrifying scene unfolded, I had been sprinting in from the middle of the field. And in my terror and dismay, I instinctively jumped in and tried to pull Brenin off. This was a mistake; a potentially fatal one. Rugger used the temporary respite to lock on to Brenin’s throat and would not let go.
From this I learned my first valuable lesson of dog-fighting intervention. Never pull your wolf off a pit bull. The second lesson was that if a pit bull has locked on to your wolf’s throat, probably because you were stupid enough to pull your wolf off, then there is only one way of making him release. Forget about trying to prise his jaws open. That’s not going to work. And forget about kicking him savagely and repeatedly in the ribs – that’s not going to work either. Pour water on his face. The only way of dealing with an instinctive action – which is what the pit’s locking action is – is by inducing an instinctive reaction, and water usually works. Luckily, Matt had learned this lesson before I did.
The third lesson is one I learned from subsequent quarrels: if you do have to pull your wolf out of a fight with another dog, then grab him by the tail or the hips and, emphatically, not by the neck. If the other dog is not completely traumatized – and the sort of dog that would attack Brenin is not the sort easily traumatized – then it is going to continue its attack while your hands are placed in the vicinity of your animal’s throat – which is a very bad idea. My hands and forearms still bear the patchwork of scars I acquired during the long and painful process of honing my intervention technique.
I wouldn’t want to overstate Brenin’s proclivity for pugilism. I could probably count the number of significant episodes on the fingers of one hand – and I’m thankful that I still have the fingers necessary to make this claim true. Brenin never inflicted serious damage on another dog – by serious, I mean anything that couldn’t be cured with a few stitches here and there. Even Rugger patched up quite nicely. But this, I am pretty sure, was because I was always there to pull Brenin off. Also, it was rare for Brenin to initiate hostilities – although this may be because, given his training, he hardly ever had the opportunity. And even if another dog did approach him while my attention was distracted, a fight was easily avoided. The dog simply had to make some conventional sign of submission or abasement. The upshot was that all of Brenin’s fights were with big, aggressive dogs – pits and Rottweilers were the most common – that had escaped from their owners and had no intention whatsoever of submitting to him.
It was not Brenin’s enthusiasm for fighting that was the problem. It was his aptitude. If a fight occurred, I would have to wade into the middle of them and try to bring hostilities to a halt. And, not wanting any repetition of the Rugger incident, I had to try to simultaneously grab both animals. This was, to say the least, not easy. But I had to do it, because as long as the other dog went on fighting, Brenin would go on fighting. And if Brenin went on fighting, the other dog would soon be dead. His speed was blinding, his savagery breathtaking. It was difficult to reconcile this Brenin with the animal that would wake me up in the mornings by slapping a big wet kiss on my face; or with the animal that would, several times a day, try to climb on my lap to demand cuddles. But I could never afford to forget that Brenin was both of these animals.
Some people say that wolves, even wolf–dog hybrids, have no place in a civilized society. After many years of reflection on this claim, I have come to the conclusion that it’s true. But it’s not true for the reasons those people think. Brenin was a dangerous animal; there is no disguising the fact. He was utterly indifferent to other human beings – something that secretly and selfishly delighted me. If another person tried to talk to Brenin, or stroke him in the way you might someone else’s dog, then he would look at them inscrutably for a few seconds, then just walk away. But, in the right circumstances, he might quickly and efficiently kill your dog. However, it is not because he was so dangerous that there was no place for him in a civilized society. The real reason is that he was nowhere near dangerous, and nowhere near unpleasant, enough. Civilization, I think, is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.
One evening, when Brenin was around a year old, I found myself sitting in front of the TV eating the staple diet of all self-respecting US bachelors – a microwaveable plate of monosodium glutamate known as a Hungry Man meal. Brenin lay next to me, watching like a hawk, just in case something should tumble off the plate. The phone rang and I went to answer it, leaving the plate on the coffee table. You know when Wile E. Coyote is chasing Road Runner and he runs off the cliff? Think of the moment just after he has run off the edge, the moment when he realizes that something horrible has happened but he’s not quite sure what – the moment just before he begins his mad but futile scramble back. He stands there in mid-air, frozen in place, with a look on his face that gradually transforms from enthusiasm to confusion to impending doom. It was that sort of scene that awaited me on my return to the room. Brenin, having quickly devoured my Hungry Man meal, was making his way rapidly over to his bed on the other side of the room. My return, unwelcome but not entirely unexpected, caused him to freeze in mid-stride; one leg in front of the other, his face turned towards me and gradually coalesced into a look of Wile E. apprehension. Sometimes, just before he began his plunge into the chasm, Wile E. would hold up a sign that read ‘Yikes!’ I’m pretty sure that if Brenin had had this sign available, he would have done the same thing.
Wittgenstein once said that if a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand him. Wittgenstein was undoubtedly a genius. But, let’s face it, he didn’t really know much about lions. A wolf talks with his body; and it was clear what Brenin’s body was saying: busted! You would think he might have profited from a more nonchalant, even insouciant, approach to the business of pilfering. I don’t know how your plate got like that. I didn’t do it. It was like that when I got here. Or even: you finished it before you left, you senile old bastard. But that is not what wolves do. They can talk. And what’s more, we can understand them. What they cannot do is lie. And that is why they have no place in a civilized society. A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think we are better than them.
It is a well-known fact that, relative to their body size, apes have bigger brains than wolves – almost 20 per cent bigger, in fact. So the inevitable conclusion we draw is that apes are more intelligent than wolves: simian intelligence is superior to lupine intelligence. This conclusion is not so much false as simplistic. The idea of superiority is an elliptical one. If X is superior to Y, it is always in some or other respect. So, if simian intelligence is indeed superior to lupine intelligence, we should ask ourselves: in what respect? And to answer this, we have to understand how apes acquired their bigger brains, and the price they paid for them.
At one time people used to think that intelligence was simply a matter of being able to deal with the natural world. A chimpanzee, for instance, might work out that by putting a stick into a nest of ants it can pull out the ants and eat them without getting bitten. This is an example of what I earlier called mechanical intelligence. The world presents the chimp with a problem – acquire food without being bitten – and it solves this in a mechanically intelligent way. Mechanical intelligence consists in understanding the relationship between things – in this case between a stick and the likely behaviour of ants – and using this understanding to further your purposes. As we have seen, wolves are mechanically intelligent creatures – maybe not as much as apes, but more so than dogs.
However, the brains of social creatures are, in general, larger than the brains of solitary creatures. Why would this be? The world makes the same mechanical demands on social and non-social creatures alike. The same sorts of mechanical problems arise whether you are a tiger, a wolf or an ape. The conclusion we should draw, it seems, is that mechanical intelligence is not what drives the increase in brain size. This observation provides the basis of what Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne – two primatologists at the University of St Andrews – have called the ‘Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis’. The increase in brain size, and the resulting increase in intelligence, are driven not by the demands of the mechanical world but by those of the social world.
We must be careful not to put the cart before the horse. You might think, for example, that it was their bigger brains, and resulting greater intelligence, that made some creatures realize that their lives would be better off in groups – that the group afforded them mutual support and protection. That is, they became social animals because they were more intelligent. According to the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, the truth is the other way around: they became more intelligent because they were social animals. The increase in brain size is not the cause of animals living together in groups; it is the effect of animals living together in groups. Social animals need to be able to do things that solitary animals do not. Mechanical intelligence might consist in understanding the relationships between things, but social animals need more than this; they need to understand the relationships between other creatures like them. This is social intelligence.
For example, an ape, monkey or wolf needs to be able to keep track of other members of its group. It needs to know who is who, and to be able to remember who is superior and who is subordinate to it. Otherwise, it doesn’t behave properly and suffers as a consequence. Many insects – ants, bees, etc. – have to accomplish this trick too. But insects do it by way of the depositing and receipt of chemical messages: this was the strategy which their evolution bequeathed them. But in the social mammals another strategy was employed: an increase in intelligence of a certain sort. According to the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, it is the social nature of animals – and the need to keep track of social relations – that drives their increase in brain size and power, and not the other way around.
This much apes and wolves have in common. However, at some point long, long ago, apes travelled an evolutionary path that wolves did not. And the reasons for this are, to most experts, genuinely unclear. Living in groups brings with it both new possibilities and concomitant exigencies – possibilities that were never available to solitary creatures and exigencies that were never required of them. The first possibility is that of manipulating and exploiting your colleagues – and so acquiring all the benefits of group living while incurring fewer of the costs. Such manipulation and exploitation are based on a capacity for deception: the primary, and most effective, way of manipulating your colleagues is by deceiving them. The first exigency of group living, at least if you live in such a group, is a consequence of this. Since it is not good to find yourself incurring more costs and accruing fewer benefits than your fellow apes, group living is also going to require that you become smart enough to be able to tell when you are being deceived. The consequence is an escalation in intelligence driven by the imperative to deceive while not being deceived. In the evolutionary history of apes, the escalating ability to bullshit goes hand in hand with the increasing capacity to detect bullshit – with the latter, of necessity, just about outperforming the former.
There is another possibility afforded by living in groups – that of forming alliances with your peers. In ape societies, alliances are ways of using some members of your group to gang up on other members of your group. To do this, you must have the ability to scheme. But this possibility brings with it another requirement. It is not good – not conducive to your well-being and long-term prospects – to be the object of the scheming of others, the victim of one alliance after another. If others are constantly scheming against you and you want to remain part of the group, then you must constantly scheme against them. Living in certain sorts of groups brings with it the requirement to be at least as much a schemer as schemed against. In these groups the ability to scheme entails the requirement to scheme.
Scheming and deception lie at the core of the form of social intelligence possessed by apes and monkeys. For some reason, wolves never went down this path. In the pack, there is little scheming, and little deception. Some evidence seems to suggest that dogs might have the capacity for some primitive and singularly unimpressive forms of alliance building. But the evidence is inconclusive. And even if it is true, one thing is clear: with regard to these sorts of capacities, scheming and deception, dogs and wolves are like children compared to the great apes. No one really understands why apes should adopt this strategy while wolves did not. But even if we don’t know why it happened, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: it did happen.
This form of intelligence, of course, reaches its apotheosis in the king of the apes: Homo sapiens. When we talk about the superior intelligence of apes, the superiority of simian intelligence over lupine intelligence, we should bear in mind the terms of this comparison: apes are more intelligent than wolves because, ultimately, they are better schemers and deceivers than wolves. It is from this that the difference between simian and lupine intelligence derives.
But we are apes, and we can do things of which wolves could never dream. We can create art, literature, culture, science – we can discover the truth of things. There are no wolf-Einsteins, no wolf-Mozarts and no wolf-Shakespeares. And, more modestly of course, Brenin couldn’t write this book; only an ape could do that. Of course this is true. But we have to remember where all of this came from. Our scientific and artistic intelligence is a by-product of our social intelligence. And our social intelligence consists in our ability to scheme and deceive more than we are the victim of schemes and deception. This is not to say that scientific and creative intelligence simply reduce to schemes and deception. These were, presumably, the last thing on Beethoven’s mind when he wrote the Eroica. Nor were they there in unconscious form, guiding his behaviour in a subterranean manner. I am not proposing any laughably reductionist account of Beethoven’s compositional abilities. Rather, my point is that Beethoven could write the Eroica only because he was the product of an extended natural history that turned on the ability to lie better than one is lied to, and to plot better than one is plotted against.
We do other creatures an injustice and ourselves a disservice when we forget from where our intelligence came. It did not come for free. In our distant evolutionary past we went down a certain road, a road that wolves, for whatever reason, did not travel. We can be neither blamed nor congratulated for the road we took. There was no choice involved. In evolution, there never is. But while there is no choice involved, there are consequences. Our complexity, our sophistication, our art, our culture, our science, our truths – our, as we like to see it, greatness: all of this we purchased, and the coin was schemes and deception. Machination and mendacity lie at the core of our superior intelligence, like worms coiled at the core of an apple.
You may think this is a wilfully one-eyed portrayal of human distinctiveness. It may be true that we have a natural proclivity for conspiracy and duplicity. But surely we have more prepossessing features? What about love, empathy and altruism? Of course I don’t contest that humans are capable of these things as well. So too, for that matter, are the great apes. But I have been trying to identify not simply what is true of human beings but what is distinctive about them. And the idea that only humans possess these sorts of more positive characteristics is difficult to sustain.
To begin with, there is the vast wealth of empirical evidence that suggests – to all but the most closed-minded behaviourist – that all social mammals are capable of deep feelings of affection towards each other. When wolves or coyotes reunite, after time spent apart hunting, they gallop towards each other at full tilt, yipping and whining, their tails wagging furiously. When they meet, they lick each other’s muzzles and roll over with their legs flailing. African wild dogs are equally effusive: their greeting ceremonies involve cacophonies of squealing, dervish-like wagging of tails and extravagant leaps and bounds. When elephants reunite, they flap their ears, spin around and emit a deep greeting rumble. In all cases, unless you find yourself in the grip of an indefensible behaviourist ideology – an ideology that you insist on applying to other animals but refuse to apply to humans – the obvious conclusion is that these animals have genuine affection for each other, that they enjoy each other’s company and that they are happy to see each other again.
Evidence of grief is equally compelling, and the more field studies are conducted the more compelling it becomes. Here, in his book Minding Animals, is Marc Bekoff describing an event in the life of a coyote pack that he studied in the Grand Teton National Park:
One day Mom left the pack and never again returned. She had disappeared. The pack waited impatiently for days and days. Some coyotes paced nervously about, as if they were expectant parents, whereas others went off on short trips only to return empty-handed. They traveled in the direction she might have gone, sniffed in places she might have visited, and howled as if calling her home. For more than a week some spark seemed to be gone. Her family missed her. I think the coyotes would have cried if they could.
Foxes have been observed burying their dead mates. Three male elephants were observed standing over the de-tusked corpse of an older female who had been killed by poachers – they stood there for three days, touching her and trying to get her to stand up. The famous naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton once used the grief that a male wolf, Lobo, felt for the loss of his mate to trap and kill him. Seton, a wolf hunter before he became a writer, spread the scent of Lobo’s mate, Blanca, by dragging her body across trap lines. Lobo returned to his beloved mate, only to be killed by Seton.
These are just anecdotes, you might say. Perhaps, but the anecdotes now number in their thousands and are growing every day – and that is ignoring the stories pet owners have to tell about their companions. Also, as Bekoff puts it, once you have enough anecdotes, they become something quite different: they become data. On any reasonable construal of ‘enough’, that transition point has long since passed.
One has only to read the wonderful work of Jane Goodall to understand that feelings of affection, empathy, even love are common in apes. And when, for example, she describes in Through a Window the rapid and painful decline of the young chimpanzee Flint following the death of his mother, Flo, one cannot, if one has even half a heart, fail to be moved. But evidence for the existence of these sorts of emotions in other mammals is just as strong. Affection, empathy and love – far from being uniquely human traits, or even uniquely simian traits, these are common throughout the world of social mammals.
There are, in fact, good theoretical reasons why this is so; reasons first adduced by Charles Darwin. Any social group needs something to bind it together – a form of social glue. For the social insects, the glue consists in both the pheromones that the insects use to communicate with each other and the fact that each social insect is more like an individual cell than an individual organism – a cell whose welfare and even identity is bound up with the hive or colony organism. But with mammals, evolution apparently employed a very different strategy that involved the development of what Darwin called the ‘social sentiments’: feelings of affection, empathy, even love. What holds together a wolf pack, or a coyote pack, or a pack of African hunting dogs is the same as what holds together a chimpanzee colony or a human family. This is what we all have in common.
I am, however, interested not in what we all have in common but in what distinguishes us from other creatures. And most of us accept – indeed insist – that it is our much-vaunted intelligence that separates us from ‘dumb brutes’. If so, then we have to realize that this intelligence did not come for free. It came because, many ages ago, our ancestors walked a path that other social animals did not, and that path was paved with duplicity and conspiracy.
This general account of human intelligence is not seriously in doubt. In Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal describes his classic study of the Arnhem chimpanzee colony and so demonstrates some of the complexities of chimpanzee group dynamics. In the colony, three males were continually vying for group leadership. At the beginning of the study, the alpha position was occupied by Yeroen. One of the important factors preserving his leadership was the support of the colony’s female chimpanzees. Luit’s protracted and ultimately successful bid to dethrone Yeroen was based on eroding this support. Prior to this challenge, Luit had occupied a relatively peripheral position in the colony – being forced by Yeroen to live slightly apart from the rest of the group. The key change in the dynamic occurred when another younger male, Nikkie, had grown up sufficiently to form an alliance with Luit. Together, the two of them engaged in a policy of ‘punishing’ – i.e. meting out beatings – to the females, not for the sake of it but with the aim of demonstrating Yeroen’s inability to protect them. After around four months of the prosecution of this policy, the females started to support Luit, almost certainly because they were fed up with the punishment they were continually receiving from the pair and because of Yeroen’s inability to prevent this.
Following his ascension, Luit quickly changed his policy. As leader, he now needed to change his attitude with respect to both the females and the other males. With the former, he relied on their general support and therefore adopted an even-handed keeper of the peace role. With the males, however, he became a loser-supporter. That is, when he intervened in a conflict between two males, it was usually to support the loser. Thus, even though his rise to leader had been secured with the help of Nikkie, he would routinely side with other apes in their disputes with Nikkie. This policy made good sense. A winner in a conflict between two males might be strong enough to directly challenge Luit’s authority. But this would not be true of a loser. And by supporting the loser Luit also increased the probability of the loser’s support in further conflicts. In other words, the exigencies of leadership required him to form alliances with those who could not challenge his authority to protect himself from those who could.
Eventually, Yeroen and Nikkie formed an alliance and deposed Luit. Nikkie became the new formal leader, but the real power seemed to belong to Yeroen. Indeed, following Nikkie’s rise to the top, Yeroen worked so effectively against him that it is doubtful if Nikkie was ever really in control. Nikkie foolishly pursued a policy of supporting the winners in conflicts, and the peace was kept by Yeroen. For example, when Nikkie prepared to intervene in a conflict between two females, Yeroen would often turn on him and, perhaps aided by the two females, chase him away. Why did Nikkie put up with this? He had no choice: he needed Yeroen in order to keep Luit in check. Thus Nikkie was a leader who was never accepted by the females. Indeed, he was regularly set upon by alliances of them. Yeroen, on the other hand, formed alliances with the females in order to keep up the pressure on Nikkie, and formed an alliance with Nikkie in order to keep Luit in check. It is fairly clear who possessed the real power.
Yeroen’s superior intelligence, relative to both Luit and Nikkie, consisted in his ability to form multiple alliances for multiple purposes: one alliance to keep Nikkie in check, another to keep Luit in check. Luit’s alliance with Nikkie, in comparison, seems crude. To be a truly successful ape – to exhibit simian intelligence at its best – one must be able to conspire not just against one ape but against many. And the most successful apes are those who are able to conspire with the very same apes that they also conspire against.
In addition to the sort of scheming exhibited by Yeroen and Luit, the scheming that manifests itself in unstable and constantly shifting alliances, deception plays a pivotal role in all the classic studies of ape behaviour. Indeed, in an influential study (‘The manipulation of attention in primate tactical deception’, published in their volume Machiavellian Intelligence), Whiten and Byrne have distinguished no fewer than thirteen different types of deception commonly employed by apes. We don’t need to worry about the details of each type; some representative examples will provide enough of a flavour.
A subordinate male chimpanzee or baboon will often hide its erect penis from a superior male – at the same time as it is deliberately displaying it to a female. To this end, it rests the arm that is closest to the dominant male on its knee and allows its hand to hang loosely down. All this time, it is shooting furtive glances at the other male. I think I love this example because it is so deliciously sleazy: only in apes do we find this inimitable combination of slyness and lasciviousness. This is a form of deception that Whiten and Byrne refer to as concealment. A common result of this episode of concealment is another: this time the male and female hide their entire bodies behind a convenient rock or tree and surreptitiously copulate.
Here is an example of a different type of concealment, one that Whiten and Byrne call inhibition of attending. A troop of baboons is travelling along a narrow trail. One baboon, female S, spots a nearly obscured clump of Loranthus – a vine that is highly prized by the baboon palate – in one of the trees. Without looking at the others, S sits down at the side of the trail and begins intently self-grooming. The others pass her by and, when they are out of sight, she leaps up into the tree and eats the vine. This is the baboon equivalent of pretending you have to tie your shoelace when you have, in fact, spotted a twenty-pound note lying on the ground.
It is easy to understand the connection between alliance-formation and deception on the one hand and increase in intelligence on the other. Both forms of behaviour require the ability to understand not just the world but also, crucially, the mind of another. Underlying both is the ability to see, understand or predict how the world appears for someone else.
Consider our sleazy chimpanzee, hiding his penis from the dominant male while displaying it to a female. To do this, the chimp must have a concept of the dominant chimp’s perspective. That is, he must understand that the dominant chimp can see, that what he can see is not necessarily the same as what other chimps can see, and that what he can see is dependent on where he is in relation to other chimps. That is, to successfully engage in concealment, a chimp must have at least some idea of what is going on in the mind of other chimps. When primatologists talk of the impressive ‘mind-reading’ abilities of apes, they are talking about this ability.
The sophistication of mind-reading abilities is increased a notch or two in our second example of deception. In order to inhibit her attending or looking, the baboon S must not only have the idea that others might see the Loranthus vine, she must also have the idea that others might see her looking at the vine. That is, S understands that others might understand that she sees something significant in the tree. When S sees the vine, this is what is known as first-order representation: S has formed a visual representation of the world. If one of her companions understands that S is seeing something interesting, then it has formed a representation of her representation of the world. This is what’s known as a second-order representation: a representation of a representation. However, when S understands that others might understand that she has seen something interesting, this is a representation of a representation of a representation: a third-order representation.
Here, again courtesy of Whiten and Byrne, is an even more impressive case. A chimp – let us call him chimp 1 – is going to be fed bananas. These are contained in a metal box that is opened from a distance. As the box is opening, another chimp – chimp 2 – appears. Chimp 1 quickly closes the metal box and walks away, sitting down a few yards away. Chimp 2 vacates the immediate area, but then hides behind a tree and watches chimp 1. As soon as chimp 1 opens the box, chimp 2 charges and relieves chimp 1 of the bananas. Chimp 1 can see that chimp 2 can see him seeing – this is third-order representation – but chimp 2 can see that chimp 1 can see that he can see him seeing. This appears to be a truly remarkable case of fourth-order representation.
The same sort of ability to understand the minds of others can also easily be seen when apes form alliances with and against each other. The key to any successful alliance – even a simple one – is to understand not only how your actions will affect others; equally importantly, it is to understand what sort of response your actions will prompt in others. That is, you must understand the relationship between what you do and what others will do because of what you do – recall Luit and Nikkie’s campaign of violence against the female colony members. And to understand this is to understand how what you do provides reasons for what others do. To this extent, successful formation of even simple alliances involves understanding the minds of your fellow apes.
In short, the augmentation of intelligence that we find in apes and monkeys, but apparently not in other social creatures, is the result of twin imperatives: to scheme more than you are being schemed against and to lie more than you are being lied to. The nature of simian intelligence is irredeemably shaped by these imperatives. We became more intelligent so that we could better understand the minds of our peers, and so deceive them and use them for our own purposes – precisely what they were trying to do to us, of course. Everything else – our impressive understanding of the natural world, our intellectual and artistic creativity – came afterwards and as a consequence.
So far, however, we have left the most interesting question unanswered. Indeed, we have left the most interesting question unasked. Why would wolves have ignored the path to intelligence taken so effectively by apes? At this point, the experts shrug. Some have suggested that it might have something to do with group size. But this is little more than a vague gesture in the direction of an answer, since no one has ever made clear the connection between group size and the desirability of schemes and deception. I have another idea: a hypothesis that worms its way out, diffidently but nonetheless perceptibly, from either side of just about every line ever written in the literature on apes.
Luit is making advances to a female chimp, while Nikkie, who is at this time the official alpha male, is lying in the grass about fifty yards away. You can probably predict Luit’s flirtation technique: he is flashing the female, displaying his erect penis while keeping his back towards Nikkie, so that he can’t see what is going on. Nikkie, suspicions aroused, gets to his feet. Luit slowly shifts a few paces away from the female and sits down, once again with his back to Nikkie. He doesn’t want Nikkie to think that he is moving only because he has spotted Nikkie’s advance. Nonetheless, Nikkie moves slowly towards Luit, picking up a heavy stone on his way. Luit occasionally looks around to track Nikkie’s progress, and then he looks back down at his penis, which is gradually losing its erection. Only when his penis is flaccid does Luit turn around and walk towards Nikkie. And then, in an impressive demonstration of just what a ballsy chimp he is, he sniffs at the stone before wandering off to leave Nikkie alone with the female.
Why did we walk an evolutionary path neglected by the wolf? Passages like this – and there are many of them – provide us with an unequivocal answer: sex and violence. This is what made us the men and women we are today. Even a lucky wolf – an alpha male or female – gets to have sex only once or twice a year. Many wolves never have sex – nor do they give any obvious signs of missing it or resenting their enforced abstinence. Ape that I am, I can’t quite manage to look at sexual matters objectively; but imagine an ethologist from Mars engaged in a comparative study of the sexual lives of wolves and humans. Might not the ethologist conclude that the wolf’s attitude towards sex is, in many ways, a fundamentally wholesome and restrained one: they enjoy it when they have it, but don’t miss it when they don’t? If we replaced the wolf with a human and sex with alcohol, we might say that the human had managed to cultivate a healthy attitude, steering effectively between the vices of excessive indulgence and repressive abstinence. But we can’t bring ourselves to think about sex in this way. Of course we should miss it when we don’t have it, we are compelled to think: this is natural, this is healthy. We think this way because we are apes. In comparison with the wolf, the ape is addicted to sex.
It is an interesting question why this should be. Perhaps it is simply that wolves don’t know what they are missing. At least, that is what the ape in me wants to think. Female wolves are in reproductive cycle only once a year. The entire cycle lasts around three weeks and the wolf is fertile only during the middle week. In any pack, it is usually only the alpha female who will go into reproductive mode. The reasons for this are not understood. Some researchers suggest that it is a form of social stress occasioned by their status that prevents subordinate females from going into reproductive cycle. But this is more a guess than anything else.
Apes, on the other hand, typically do know what they’re missing. Poor old youthful Brenin: with his misguided and perpetually thwarted attempts to copulate with every female dog in Tuscaloosa County; in his refusal to discriminate on the basis of breed or size; and in his utter contempt for the constraints imposed by simple physical possibility. He hadn’t yet mastered the healthy and restrained attitude towards sex lauded by our imagined Martian ethologist. He must have had the idea that he was missing something – or else what was the point of all that effort? But, due to my constant vigilance, he wasn’t in a position to know precisely what; nor would he be for many years to come.
Once you do know what you’re missing, of course, then you will come to separate sex from reproduction in a way that Brenin was not able to do. Brenin was motivated by a blind genetic stirring, not by knowledge of the pleasure that would thereby follow – for he was unacquainted with that. But we apes know all about the pleasure. For the wolf, pleasure is a consequence of the drive to reproduce. The ape has inverted this relationship. For it, reproduction is an occasional – sometimes inconvenient – consequence of the drive to acquire pleasure. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this simian inversion. Different species embody different conceptions of the relation between reproduction and pleasure. But neither is there necessarily anything right with it.
The simian inversion does, however, have one clear consequence. The motivation to scheme and deceive will be far greater for apes than for wolves. Schemes and deception are the means the ape employs to satisfy the craving that goes with the simian inversion. This is not to say that they cannot scheme and deceive for purposes other than sex. Earlier, we saw how baboon S employed deception in order to acquire a tasty clump of Loranthus. However, we are trying to understand the respect in which apes are different from wolves. A wolf can be just as attracted to a hidden cache of food as an ape – but, unlike the ape, it will not try to acquire this through deception. The conclusion seems to be, therefore, that the ape’s capacities for deception were acquired in a different context and for a different reason. The context and reason, I suggest, are, in part, provided by the simian inversion of pleasure and reproductive success.
The history of human thought – and not just Western thought – is organized around a distinction between rationality or intelligence on the one hand and pleasure or enjoyment on the other. The latter two are consigned to the realm of base or brute desires. It is our intelligence or rationality that makes us human and divides us from the rest of nature. I think, however, that rationality and pleasure are far more intimately connected than we have been willing to allow. Our rationality is, in part, a consequence of our drive to acquire pleasure.
Just as the motivations to scheme and deceive are greater for the ape, so too are the risks. Nikkie wasn’t going to gently reprimand Luit: he picked up a heavy stone in order to pummel him more viciously than his bare hands would allow. What is often passed over in discussion of the impressive schemes and deceptions of apes is a certain kind of malice in the methods they employ to prosecute those schemes. This malice has no echo in the lives of wolves.
The fight between Brenin and Rugger was an impulsive and impromptu eruption. This is not to say that they wouldn’t have killed each other given the chance. I don’t know, not with any certainty, whether the fight would have resulted in death if allowed to continue – but if it had, it wouldn’t have surprised me. However, had death been a consequence of the fight, there is no real sense in which it was an intended outcome. Brenin and Rugger simply lost their tempers. Their trespasses against each other were crimes of hot blood; they were crimes of passion.
Suppose Brenin and Rugger, Nikkie and Luit were humans. How would they fare in a court of law? Brenin and Rugger would have been condemned for losing their tempers. And if Nikkie had simply flown into a rage at the sight of Luit working his magic on a female and attacked him on the spot, that would have aroused similar condemnation. But Nikkie paused on his way over to Luit to pick up a rock. If Nikkie had gone on to attack Luit – and any clear sign of indiscretion on Luit’s part would unquestionably have been enough for him to do this – then he would, and should, be judged more harshly for his assault. Picking up the rock proves intention; it is sufficient, under the law, to demonstrate premeditation. Nikkie’s crime would have been one of cold blood, not hot blood. Given a reasonably sympathetic judge, the victor in the fight between Brenin and Rugger, if the fight had resulted in death, would have been convicted of manslaughter. But Nikkie, stone in hand, motivated by malice aforethought, would have been sent down for murder. I think this is what the difference between the malice of wolves and the malice of apes basically amounts to: the difference between manslaughter and murder.
Malice aforethought saturates so many simian interactions that one cannot help but conclude it is an endemic feature of the simian character. In fact, perhaps the single greatest contribution apes have made to the world – the single defining contribution for which they will always be remembered – is the invention of malice aforethought. If the reversal of the relation between reproduction and pleasure is the simian inversion, then we might call malice aforethought the simian invention.
Schemes and deception become so much more important when you are faced with a creature capable of malice aforethought. Put yourself in Luit’s position, with Nikkie advancing on him, weapon in hand. If Luit had been a wolf, things would have gone much easier for him. The dominant male might have attacked, but Luit could easily have avoided serious punishment simply by submitting. But if Nikkie had been unconvinced by Luit’s deceptions, then he would have beaten Luit mercilessly, come what may. No matter how abject his apologies, and no matter how sincere his expressions of remorse, the outcome was going to be the same. A wolf will quickly forgive and forget. But an ape is driven by malice aforethought and is not so easily mollified. The ape is merciless to its peers in a way that the wolf is not and could never be.
The eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote, ‘Two things never cease to fill me with wonder: the starry skies above me and the moral law within me.’ Kant was hardly atypical. An examination of the history of human thought shows that we value two things over all others. We value our intelligence: the intelligence that allows us to understand, among other things, the workings of the starry sky above us. And we value our moral sense: our sense of right and wrong, of what is good and what is bad; the sense that reveals to us the content of the moral law. Our intelligence and our morality, we think, distinguish us from all other animals. We are right.
However, rationality and morality do not come fully formed like Aphrodite from the waves. Our rationality is both impressive and unique; but it is also a superstructure erected on a foundation of violence and the drive to acquire pleasure. In Nikkie also we find, in nascent form, the vaguest intimations of a moral sense: a primitive sense of justice. Luit avoided a serious beating because Nikkie could not find sufficient grounds for acting against him. But it is no accident that a sense of justice should first come to be embodied in an ape. When one ape attacks another, and this attack is carried out with malice aforethought, and cannot be deflected by ritual gestures of conciliation on the part of the victim, then it is important that these attacks do not occur too often. If they do, then the colony will soon disintegrate. And so, because of its malicious and violent character, we find in the ape at least the beginnings of a type of sensitivity. There is a part of Nikkie which recognizes, albeit vaguely, that an attack on Luit must have grounds, where these are supplied by the presence of the appropriate evidence. This evidence provides his attack with justification and so makes it warranted. Grounds, evidence; justification, warrant: only a truly nasty animal would have need of these concepts. The more unpleasant the animal, the more vicious it is, and the more insensitive to the possibility of conciliation, the more it has need of a sense of justice. Standing on its own, alone in all of nature, we find the ape: the only animal sufficiently unpleasant to become a moral animal.
What is best about us comes from what is worst. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it is something we might want to bear in mind.