… animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.
John Berger, Why Look At Animals?
People must always have watched animals, either because they were sizing them up for dinner, or because they were there and it happened that when you turned your gaze on them they were interesting. In addition, you need to know how animals behave if you’re planning to stalk them and your life, or at least your well-being, depends on catching one every now and again. You might draw them on the walls of your cave while thinking about them and putting together what you learn. You would also watch animals because they are so unlike those who are like you that it is surprising to find that they seem to behave, at least sometimes, in ways you recognise in yourself or others in your group. And vice versa. People whose lives are quite leisurely, gathering and hunting when needed, building and taking down accommodation as required, carving canoes or tools or decorations, have plenty of time to take pleasure in watching the world around them. Now, and surely then. In 1974, on the cusp of Thatcher and Reaganite economics and the world of the Yuppie, a book called Stone Age Economics by Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins1, proposed, after analysing the daily life of present-day ‘simple’ societies closest to those Stone Age primitives we assume so much about, that they were the original (and perhaps the only) affluent society. Time to stand and stare, or more likely, sit and watch.
Stones are good to watch, clouds too, but animals are even better, since they both move and interact. Watching, over a period of time, means getting to know at least something about what you are watching, even if it wasn’t your intention. But modern science requires more than staring and putting together what you see into an explanation. That is known in scientific circles as ‘common sense’ or ‘folk psychology’ (both intended as wholly derogatory terms, sometimes rightly). Scientific watching demands professionalism and agreed rules. Professionalism and agreed rules are the only ways to gain respect and acknowledgement from those fellow watchers who belong to your peer group. Science becomes Us, common sense Them, and there is no common ground. It is, as those scientists who still think like that put it, the only way to find out the objective truth. In terms of animal studies, for more than a century the question for biologists and zoologists, if not for volunteer elephant eco-tourists, has been whether observations in the field with some degree of anthropomorphism, or controlled, ‘objective’ laboratory experiments give the best (that is ‘correct’) understanding of animals; of how they behave and why they behave as they do.
The fashions of zoological procedural preferences have followed a similar path to the animal television programmes of my childhood. Those first programmes in the studio with individual zoo animals in cages or on tables, and an expert standing behind them talking about their morphology and characteristic behaviours, followed the scientific belief, which had been gathering pace since the Enlightenment, that to gain knowledge it is necessary to bring things into the laboratory under proper conditions (that is, human conditions) to observe and test. Early TV animal programmes simply tried to popularise the procedure. Some of the most Olympian scientists disapproved of those programmes, even when they treated animals most like laboratory subjects, because ‘popularisation’ was inimical to science, which was to be done by a small group of initiates and it didn’t matter very much what the wider world knew since the knowledge in the wider world was irrelevant. The true results would gradually filter into the general population on a need-to-know basis. That sort of attitude still holds in some quarters, but, in the later years of the twentieth century, the views of a number of animal researchers began to change and a gradual, if grudging, acceptance began of the alternative on-the-spot ways of the likes of Armand and Michaela and Hans and Lotte. TV viewers, presenters, producers and even some scientists like a bit of adventure with their science, so ‘the field’ was ideally a faraway exotic venue, an ‘africa’ of some sort, where the largest, most dangerous, strangest, rarest creatures could be discovered, in situ, for everyone’s delight. In the late 1950s, like the ancient division of the world into the Dionysian and Apollonian, the study of zoology seemed to be inhabited by either exoticists who stalked the white rhino and described what they saw in awed voices, or laboratorists who set rats in labyrinths and timed them learning their route to a food incentive. Let’s say humanists versus behaviourists.
The history of behaviourism goes back at least as far as Descartes, but in recent times it was declared ready for the modern world by John B. Watson, who in 1910 described ‘The New Science of Animal Behaviour’ in an essay for the readers of Harper’s Magazine: ‘Apparatus and methods are at hand for forcing the animal to tell us about the kind of world he lives in.’ In the 1930s B. F. Skinner designed the notorious ‘operant conditioning chambers’ which took his own name and became the template for animal behaviour experimentation. Inside these Skinner’s Boxes, rats, pigeons, dogs and monkeys (even babies, it was rumoured) had to press levers to get food or avoid electric shocks, in order to prove that all behaviour could be conditioned. In effect, that all behaviour was nothing more than the result of physiological stimulus and response in a direct and simple way that could be understood by laboratory experiment. And once biochemistry was up to speed, it followed that all activity could be broken down into particular chemicals being turned off and on by other chemicals to improve the organism’s position in relation to the conditions in which it found itself. The behaviourists declared whatever individual, personal sense human beings (let alone animals) had of a mind that was outside or supplementary to the stimulus and response of physical organs to be subjective, untestable and therefore deemed not to exist. Subjectivity, the sense of the self, became a fairy story, the great illusion, to the behaviourists who wanted and now believed they could get precise answers under controllable experimental conditions to their questions. It’s what we all want, deep down, isn’t it? Precise answers, preferably with numbers attached, to very complex questions.
Behaviourist theory escaped captivity in the 1950s and ran feral through the real world for the next three or four decades. It was implemented in the forms of new educational theory, the design of gambling slot machines and most recently the use of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that quick and dirty method of dealing with all manner of mental ills. It’s not hard to see how behaviourist theory in its various forms could look sparkly in the second half of the twentieth century: it was so neat, so modern and promised to solve messy problems without any resort to mucky metaphysics, or the unsettleable notion that any creature on earth needed to have something as nebulous as a mind of its own.
There has always been a humanist resistance to the idea, naturally. The Papers of Andrew Melmoth is a strange novel by Hugh Sykes Davies, published in 1960. It tells the posthumous story of a ‘young scientist, chiefly concerned with genetics and animal behaviour’ who mysteriously disappears after giving increasing cause for alarm by his own unaccountable behaviour. Melmoth worked in a laboratory with rats, ‘specially bred albinos, who spent their whole lives in laboratories, as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them, since about 1897’.2 The narrator, who is trying to piece together Melmoth’s disappearance, had been invited to visit the laboratory where he found Melmoth noting down the variations of the clicks on a machine which recorded the activities of the rats in the next room. In each of ten drums there was a rat running on the wire at the bottom which was turning a structure in the middle of the room, beside each drum was a much smaller cage. Melmoth was taking an interest in one particular rat. ‘You’ve come at an interesting moment. There’s a female rat in there who looks like breaking the record for distance covered in a revolving cage. Well over seven thousand miles already – not far short of the diameter of the earth.’
Melmoth tells the narrator that she’s been in the cage for four years.
‘Do you really mean that she has spent her entire life in that treadmill and that minute cage?’
‘Yes,’ he said, still smiling, a crease of tolerant amusement under his colourless eyes. ‘We have to make the living cage small, because we want them to make most of their movements on the drum, where their activity is recorded. She hasn’t had a bad life, you know. Well fed, kept at a nice uniform temperature, no worries.’
Again I decided to ask the obvious question. ‘How would you like to spend your entire life like that?’
He was almost childishly pleased at the predictability of my reactions … ‘But I do spend my life just like that … We all do. We all have one little cage where we live and eat and sleep; and we all have some kind of drum we climb into, and run and run and run. Earning money, doing a job, even doing research like this. Sometimes we think we’re getting somewhere, not just going round in circles. Perhaps that rat thinks she’s getting somewhere. She’s seen the world, you know, in a sense; nearly the diameter of the earth. In a way she’s better off than I am. I’ve got my two cages just like her, but I’m not at all sure I’m getting anywhere.’3
This is a precis of the song ‘Little Boxes’, written by Malvina Reynolds, and sung by Pete Seeger in 1963, which described the American suburban conformist mid-century world in much the same conditioned/ response terms as Melmoth, though without using the word ‘rat’:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
Folk singers, anti-nuclear protesters and ‘mad’ scientists in novels (as well as a few not-so-mad real scientists) were seeing the stainless-steel laboratory world in a similar light. It was, perhaps, not so much the misuse of animals they were objecting to, as the equating of laboratory animals and humans in some of the social solutions of the time. High-rise housing projects, rat-tested tranquilliser drugs, the educational division of children by dubious IQ testing, were all looking particularly nifty and economic to some people in charge of planning and development. Melmoth is one of them, but working closely with rats, and having a dark trauma in his childhood, he becomes more involved with the animals than with people. Hugh Sykes Davies writes a chilling and pitiful (perhaps pitiless) description of the female rat going for the record, as watched by the novel’s narrator:
I moved so that I could again see the cage and its occupant. She looked very feeble, and staggered a little from side to side as she tried to run at the bottom of the drum. It was going so slowly that the clicks, widely spaced, sounded louder and more spasmodic, like despairing gasps for breath. She stopped for a moment, swaying unsteadily from side to side on her paws; the drum ceased its revolutions, but still swayed up and down. Then she tried to run again, but failed, and fell on her side against the wire side of the cage. Her mouth was opening and shutting convulsively – I remember it was surprisingly pink inside. The clicking stopped.
She wasn’t quite dead, and the narrator suggests that she looks in pain. Melmoth, the clear-eyed pain-giver answers: ‘That only means that she’s alive,’ he said soberly. ‘Pain is inseparable from life; inability to feel pain is death, in a limb or a whole body.’ The rat dragged herself back to the drum and began to run again at a steady rate. Melmoth became hopeful that she might, after all, make the diameter of the earth.
She raised her head higher, until it was painfully strained against her back, her mouth wide open, her red eyes staring up the endless slope of wire mesh which had always reared itself before her, and eternally rolled down beneath her flying feet. She no longer gave the impression of fear and feebleness, but rather of a fierce strength of purpose. The clicks were coming in such quick succession that they almost merged into one another … And she went faster, always faster, so fast that she was within an ace of gaining on the wire that rolled down and under her, of climbing at last a little way up that endless descending hill whose summit had been the goal of her lifelong journey … Suddenly, without any faltering or other warning, she fell over on her side, rocking a little with the movement of the still swaying cage, but otherwise motionless … She was without motion or force, her paws drawn up to her body, her furry flanks quite still. The red eyes were wide and open, but I felt sure that they saw nothing.
Before he goes in to check that she is dead, Melmoth jots some calculations on a piece of paper:
‘Seven thousand, three hundred and fifty one point six miles,’ he told us, not without a certain note of pride and even of respect. ‘About six hundred miles short of the diameter. But I don’t suppose she knew that.’
Melmoth the scientist is at odds with his own traumatised child-self. He gets more and more immersed in rats, and starts to pay attention to them even outside the laboratory. Soon he spends all his free time watching a colony of rats in a rubbish dump, and then he descends into the sewers. His eventual disappearance is inevitable as he becomes increasingly sucked into the underworld of wild rats.
The Papers of Andrew Melmoth is a parable or a warning, or simply the story of a damaged human and a scientist living impossibly together in one body. All those things. But the monstrous and pitifully heroic last moments of Melmoth’s female rat stands at the centre of the objective observer/anthropomorphism debate that has been going on for centuries.
In parallel to behaviourism, the new discipline of ethology developed, which looked at animals in their natural environment, but equally on human terms even, and especially, with the intention of understanding human behaviour through watching animals. In 1973 Karl von Frisch won a Nobel Prize for his work on the bee dance and its meanings, sharing it with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen who studied the social behaviour of geese, jackdaws and herring gulls. They worked outside the laboratory, on whole animal behaviour, and they were happy to draw exact parallels between their animal subjects and human behaviour. Lorenz wrote entertaining books about being followed around by the geese which had imprinted on him as chicks so that he became their mother. He embraced anthropomorphism, referring to his jackdaw pair as ‘Mr and Mrs Jackdaw’, and applied the lessons he learned from animals to the ways humans behaved. Lorenz used the word ‘family’ about the reproductive behaviours both of humans and animals, and he seemed untroubled by the simplicity of seeing the biological usefulness of animal mating arrangements as an explanation for human social organisation.
It became politicised. The Dutch Nikolaas Tinbergen was imprisoned by the Nazis, while Konrad Lorenz joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1938 and took up a party-funded university chair. He wrote, ‘I’m able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists.’ He used his studies of the linkage of inheritance and behaviour patterns to give scientific weight and language to the eugenicist ambitions of the Nazi regime. Lorenz was eventually forgiven by some, but the usefulness of ethology to the Nazis was firmly imprinted on those who had paid attention to more than the scientific investigation. It left a taste that was recognisable when in the 1960s and 1970s ethology became the source of several massively bestselling books. Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape) and Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative and The Hunting Hypothesis) looked at studies of primates – chimpanzees and baboons – which examined their sexual, aggressive and social behaviour and, in a popular and palatable form, made those primate behaviours ancestral to everyday human activities. Aggression and social positioning were innate and inherited parts of primate behaviour derived from their evolutionary history, so therefore, violence, war and greed for power in politics, business and gender relations were merely natural in humanity who are, after all, primates themselves. Morris and Ardrey explained that we humans do this or that because it is in our nature, coded, programmed. Baboons and especially chimpanzees could be studied and nicely fitted out by humans with human explanations for their behaviour (male baboons fight and manipulate each other to decide which animal becomes the boss), then the resulting elision of human-language and animal-activity was returned to human nature as insolubly innate, biological and only to be expected explanations of ourselves (male adolescents, businessmen and nations fight and manipulate their way to the top of the gang or the corporation or world because, well, it’s in our deepest nature). Baboons and tycoons scramble over weaker members of the group, and society is all the stronger for it, and anyway, it’s how nature intended baboon and therefore, by evolutionary extrapolation, human society to be. Those of us (humanists, socialists, women) who didn’t fancy being either baboons or tycoons, raged at the reductionists. Nature and the natural came to mean quite different things according to what side you were on. What chimpanzees and baboons thought of all this, no one knows.
Edward O. Wilson is the world’s leading authority on the life and behaviour of ants, but he is even better known as the man who established the modern behaviourist discipline of sociobiology as a scientific method. In Sociobiology: The New Synthesis4 he suggested that his use of evolutionary principles and the tracing of genetic history in understanding the behaviours of ants should be applied to all animals, including the human kind. Evolutionary selection and gene expression, he claimed, set actual limits on the influence that culture had on human behaviour, and possibly had even more influence on us than culture.
Scientists and humanists should consider together the suggestion that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized … Only when the machinery can be torn down on paper at the level of the cell and put together again will the properties of emotion and ethical judgement come clear … Stress will be evaluated in terms of the neurophysiological perturbations and their relaxation times. Cognition will be translated into circuitry. Learning and creativeness will be defined as the alteration of specific portions of the cognitive machinery regulated by input from the emotive centers.5
Philosophers, politicians and scientists took sides. Those who believed that ‘human nature’ was infinitely malleable and subservient to cultural influences and constraints, like the philosopher Mary Midgley, went into battle against Wilson and sociobiological methods. She replied that
You cannot explain a piece of behaviour by digging into the body of the behaving person, unless your attempts to explain it in more immediate ways have reached a point where that information is called for.6
I imagine that for Wilson, the reductionist scientist, and Midgley, the humanist philosopher, ‘more immediate ways’ mean completely different things. Stephen Jay Gould, biologist and humanist, was having none of it.
[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make ‘novelty seeking’ or any other complex and overt behaviour. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life’s circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.7
This doesn’t seem to have had much effect on Wilson’s certainties. But those on the side of humanism (and these days, post-humanism) preferred not to think of themselves or other animals as an engine capable of being stripped down to its component parts and thereby completely known when put back together again. The old battle between physicalists and humanists, raging since Descartes and the division of the world into spirit and mechanism, continues.
Still, of all the creatures we watch, the social insects, along with the higher primates, have been irresistible to those looking to animals for an explanation of human behaviour. For millennia, human beings have peered into hives, termitaries and ant heaps and found in their seething interiors, for better or worse, reflections of themselves. The intense busyness and division of labour in insect colonies provide us with a compelling, nature-driven excuse to draw conclusions about us from them. Ants and bees have given writers and polemicists metaphor, analogy and allegory for their economic, political and moral teachings. Ants, in particular, have been used by supporters and detractors of military, socialist and fascist societies as emblematic. So strange, so many and so well organised. Like us, but stompable if things get out of hand, although they’re also capable, in movies at least, of overwhelming individual humans with their sheer numbers and single-mindedness – providing a messy death for a Cold War Russki in the last Indiana Jones movie (ants don’t take sides, being alien, other and emotion-free, but the bad guys always make the wrong decisions, which amounts to the same thing in the sticky end).
If ants tell the story of our negative potential, bees, on the other hand, usually have top billing in our affections (except, again, when paradoxically gone bad in some well-beloved bad movies like The Swarm and The Killer Bees) since they produce something that human beings can utilise and like very much. Also bees are what you might call furry. You don’t see many cuddly ants in the stuffed-companion section of toy shops. Bees haven’t always been benign, however. Bernard Mandeville wrote his satire The Fable of the Bees in 1714, claiming that their individual vices such as greed and desire for power are essential in the production of their (and our) healthy society, and that the strict division of labour within a limited monarchy was by far the most efficient way for bees to produce honey and humans to make a living. The Fable was written, Mandeville explained, ‘in order to extol the wonderful Power of Political Wisdom, by the help of which so beautiful a Machine is rais’d from the most contemptible Branches’. Mandeville’s thriving hive collapses when the bees start murmuring about instilling virtue and honesty in individuals. His warning had not been heeded by 1895 when in a pamphlet, Liberty Lyrics, Anarcho-Communists extolled bees, ‘for their freedom from masters, money, newspapers and “property tyrants”’.8 Ants had their admirers, too: in the Bible, for instance (‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.’ Proverbs 6:6), while Aesop’s virtuous, labouring ant rebukes the lotus-eating grasshopper who asks it for a handout, having sunned itself all summer instead of storing food. In the 1920s, metaphorical reflection on the social insects became altogether hazier, if not downright mystical. Rudolf Steiner, having broken away from the theosophists to create his very own splinter philosophy, anthroposophism, tried to answer ‘certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe’ by comparing the collectivity of the beehive to the singular human brain: ‘Inside the beehive things basically happen the same way, only with slight differences, as they do in the head of a human being.’9
Maurice Maeterlinck published The Life of the White Ant in 1926, though he actually stole it from the Afrikaner poet Eugène Marais, who had published The Soul of the White Ant in 1925 in Afrikaans. Marais had spent much of his life staring into termitaries in South Africa and built a theory about the nature of group existence:
I am trying my utmost to prove that the termitary must be looked upon, not as a heap of dead earth, but as a separate animal at a certain stage of development. You must take my word for it that all this is very important and necessary if we are to get even a faint inkling of the perfect group soul and its characteristics.10
If ants weren’t theosophical, perfect, group souls, then they were warnings against totalitarianism. In 1921 Karel Capek’s The Insect Play included the Ant Realm where blind obedience to state and work produces a pitiless drive to overcome the world, and a report on the Communist International deliberations on what to do about Fascism in January 1934 was headed Communists’ Aim White-Ant Fascism. The oxymoronic, neurotic, rebellious ant and bee were latecomers to the parade. These are breakaway individualist ants for the Me generation. In 1998, egged on by love, an animated ant called Z, voiced by Woody Allen, tries to make a break with his totalitarian society in Antz. And in Bee Movie (2007, strapline: ‘Honey just got funny’) Barry the drone is appalled to find that he has no further job prospects after training to become a worker in the honey-making industry. He leaves his hive and explores the world. At present, individuality trumps communal endeavour or the group soul. In an interview with CNN in 2001, Edward Wilson summed up much of his work on ants: ‘Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species.’ But who knows what new deal the financial crisis of 2008–9 might bring to the everlastingly useful metaphor of the social insects?
Though Edward Wilson has stuck with ants and continues to write about them, he hasn’t stopped generalising his sociobiological methods. In his most recent non-fiction book, The Superorganism,11 he reiterates his position: ‘All modern biology consists of a process of reduction of complex systems followed by synthesis.’ Wilson’s synthesis, based on his study of ants but also applicable, he believes, to human beings, states that natural selection has shaped social behaviour using the mechanism of variable reproductive success, and therefore particular behaviours can be studied and understood by reconstructing their evolutionary history. The key here is what Wilson understands by the word understanding. The big problem sociobiology had to confront was that observed instances of altruism in certain animals (such as worker ants who ‘give up’ their own personal reproduction for the greater needs of the ant heap) made no sense. Altruistic individuals seem to deselect themselves and therefore to defy natural selection – the fulcrum of evolutionary development. Why would female worker ants produce sterile eggs which they feed to the Queen’s fertilised larvae, when it would seem to deprive them of the reproductive sine qua non demanded by evolutionary theory? Sociobiologists solved their problem, at least to their satisfaction, by concluding that individual altruism was an illusion (like mind), and developed the concept of ‘inclusive fitness’. In 1964 William Hamilton provided the algebraic answer: rb>c, where r is the fraction of genes an altruist shares with the recipient of the altruistic behaviour; b is the increase in units of offspring produced by the recipient; and c is the cost to the altruist measured in units of offspring. The non-algebraic case was the man [sic] deciding whether to dive into a fathomless lake to save someone who is drowning. Shall I jump? Not a good swimmer, actually. Well, let’s see: this is a tight-knit community, and that guy flailing around in that wet, dangerous water is a stranger in these parts. Chances of his sharing half of my genes? Minimal. Chances of my further offspring sharing half of my genes? Maximal. rb>c. Hell, let him drown.
When I was reading about this theory in the 1980s, it was very hard not to equip my mental images of rats and ants with tiny calculators for working out their genetic odds. Of course, I was younger and shallower then, but it’s still difficult to shake off the arithmetical ant and rat. Wilson is much more grown up about it: because of the way in which the ant reproduces (haplo-diploidy: just trust me, or look it up for yourself) all the female offspring of a queen share 75 per cent of each other’s genes, and have more genes in common with each other than with their male siblings or their potential children, so – tap, tap, tap on the calculator keys – it benefits the sisters to kill any of their brothers who fail to leave the nest to mate, and to nurture the Queen’s larvae (their sisters) with their own offspring. They sacrifice their individual fertility in the cause of being genetically better represented in the group’s future. It’s all in the arithmetic, but since arithmetic in any form makes me cry, I would probably be as aberrant an ant as I am a sociobiologically rational human being. Wilson would point out that it’s not a matter of making a conscious choice, it’s chemical. And someone called T. D. Seeley provides some general comfort, to superorganisms if not to me and you, in the title of a paper, quoted by Wilson: ‘Decision-making in superorganisms: how collective wisdom arises from the poorly informed masses.’
Edward O. Wilson knows more than anyone else has ever known about the degrees of ant sociability, how ant societies have developed and what makes them function as they do without human language, universities and pension arrangements, and he writes elegantly. The Superorganism is an elaboration of his earlier academic book on ants, but the new one, written with Bert Hölldobler, has a preface entitled ‘Note to the General Reader’. The newer book is intended for a wider audience than just those with a purely academic interest in ant colonies. As part of that wider audience, and looking at the big picture, it strikes me that even if you replace words like spirit or soul with ideas of generelatedness and chemical descriptions in order to explain the apparent unity of purpose of the ant colony, so that various pheromones (rather than the desire of the Queen ant) control the will and organisation of an ant heap, the resulting concept of the superorganism doesn’t seem to take us so very far from what the world-mind-ers, Marais and Steiner, were writing about. But Wilson is aware of the human, unscientific tendency to look at the big picture, and warns
The extremes of higher level traits may at first appear to have a life of their own, one too complex or fragile to be reduced to their basic elements and processes by deductive reasoning and experiments. But such separate holism is in our opinion a delusion, the result of still insufficient knowledge about the working parts and processes.12
Ah, a delusion. But then, on that basis, isn’t everything we believe we understand a delusion? How are we to know when we know everything? New information always supplements and corrects what we think is the final answer to our questions, even in the field of the social insects. And if we could be sure we knew everything about working parts and processes, would that mean we understood? Wilson offers far more detailed and fascinating information on ants than the earlier works of those vague metaphysicians and New Ageists in their search for communal meaning. However, to presume Wilson’s version to be truer than the older versions is to suppose that intricate chemical explanations are not themselves a kind of mystification or metaphor. Being a non-biochemist, the phrase ‘Thus, information about ovarian activity is encoded in the CHC profiles’ actually means less to me than words like ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, and to be told that β-Pinene is the precise chemical component of the pheromone which causes alerting and circling behaviour, or gets ants to bite, is not only something I’ll have to take on trust, but it’s also unclear to me what it is, once you know that, that you know exactly. β-Pinene and 2-Butyl-2-octenal make ants circle and bite: binary do/don’t codes for particular built-in behaviours. Which is interesting; but still something seems to be missing about the ‘life of their own’ of the ‘higher-level traits’ that Wilson refers to, just as the cloudy poetics of Marais and Steiner leave a gaping technical hole. Which is to say that I can’t quite shake off my tendency to illusory holism. Even after carefully reading five hundred pages of incredibly detailed chemical and evolutionary information about ants, something remains to be desired. Wilson and Hölldobler perhaps sense this, because in an epilogue to their book that begins by looking at the future of ant research, they end by trying to answer the question ‘Finally, what is the significance of this knowledge for our species?’13 Odd, really, that there needs to be any. Understanding about ant life doesn’t seem to be enough. It turns out they believe that human society and ant society do have a great deal in common, such as our spectacular ecological success and the exclusion of non-social species that competed with us. Group selection, they say, has driven both us and the ants, and ‘the residue of that evolutionary force affects us still in our irrational and destructive tribal wars’. Unlike the ants who are ruled by rigid instincts, we have intelligence and culture. Yet our intelligence has resulted in the fine mess we have got ourselves into, while ‘the rigid instincts of the social insects have fitted them harmoniously into the living environment’. They conclude rather evasively that ‘By coming to see who we are and how we came to be, our species might find better ways to live harmoniously, not only with one another but also with the rest of life.’14 This sounds as waffly as Marais and Steiner, but I suppose that it is meant to suggest that our salvation is in our evolutionary history rather than the stars in our eyes, and that we need to look to our biochemical processes. I have no idea what we need to do, but I don’t think Wilson and Hölldobler have gone very far towards solving the problem they pose of human venality. They do seem to have proved that ants don’t behave at all, but merely respond to chemical stimuli and their own genetic history, but strangely or not, this seems to make them less rather than more interesting.
Ethology, behaviourism and sociobiology are very beguiling to the part of us that craves precise explanations to human problems: go to the animals. It reignites the idea of the animal-in-us and nails it with what looks like scientific modernity. The popularisers of behaviourism and sociobiology give simple (and bang-up-to-the minute technological-sounding) explanations and justifications for things that before had been difficult and worrying. They invited us to settle into a comfy pessimism, knowing there wasn’t much we could do about ourselves, and as a bonus, there was no need to deal with complexity of thought or engage with theories of mind. Psychology paid close attention: if things were perhaps hopeless on the general front, in individuals behaviour could be altered simply on the basis of stimulus and response. There was no need for time-consuming talk therapies or philosophical wonderings. In addition, based on what they now understood about the genetic wellsprings of human behaviour, we could let them devise drugs, as well as procedures, to deal with the least useful aspects of how our genes forced us to go about our business.
In the mid-1980s I visited a hospital that specialised in treating disturbed and disturbing adolescents with behaviourist methods. I was tutoring a young man who lived in local authority care, who wasn’t acceptable in regular school. When Social Services decided that he should be admitted to the unit in order to solve his intractable social and personal problems, he asked me to go and look at it. The unit followed strict behaviourist principles. The staff issued tokens with which anything beyond basic living requirements could be bought: beginning with better food, staying up later, watching TV and wearing your own clothes, and escalating to weekend passes and eventually discharge. Like Skinner’s rats, the young people earned (and lost) tokens by conforming to (or disregarding) the rules, which covered everything from washing themselves to social interaction with their peers and staff. When patients went out of control they were physically subdued and put into one of the ‘time-out rooms’, padded cells with viewing windows in the locked doors, until they were calm enough to return to the group. Just before I visited, one girl who had been discharged had returned after attempting to kill herself. She told me how difficult she had found it living out in the world where tokens and rules were not provided (please note, would-be liberators of laboratory-bred animals). She didn’t know what she was supposed to do, she said. Nobody told her; it was too hard. I imagine the system worked for some people. The local authority was certainly very excited about it and sent the most difficult adolescents there. During my visit, one of the nurses told me that every patient who was admitted was automatically put on a drug called Tegretol: an anti-epilepsy pill to prevent seizures, which effectively damps down the activity of the nerve cells in the brain. Sleepiness, dizziness and vomiting are some of the milder, most common side effects. Originally each patient was given an EEG when they were admitted, the nurse told me, but a high proportion of the young people were found to have ‘frontallobe disturbance’, so it was decided that everyone was to be put on Tegretol. After that, the token system trained their anti-social behaviour. Sociobiology began in rat boxes and ant colonies and inexorably widened out into human psychology. Whatever way we choose to look at animals will always have implications for how we look at human beings – that, finally, is what animals are for. We can’t help it.
I’m not sure very many researchers of the behaviourist persuasion would, these days, go along with Edward Wilson in using words like ‘delusion’ and ‘illusion’ about those who are uncomfortable with a purely mechanistic description of the world. At least they’re less likely to do so aloud. The case for a more humanistic, ‘holistic’ view of animal and human behaviour may not have convinced them but there is such a marked change of mood in the general public (about how our food is reared, transported and killed, for example) that there is a new degree of caution among behaviourists, or at least an attempt to synthesise – or possibly colonise – animal-centred attitudes with what they regard as the only testable, true realities of biochemistry.
I went to talk to Donald Broom, the world’s first Professor of Animal Welfare at Cambridge University’s Department of Veterinary Medicine. Although he’s a behaviourist, he told me that he didn’t discount the emotions or feelings of animals at all. Behaviourism, he said, was misunderstood by those who thought its practitioners took no account of the experiences of the animals they tested in labs. The point was that with animals being so variously different from human beings, it was difficult to assess their welfare needs unless they could be properly tested. Certainly, animals had emotions and feelings, it was quite wrong to suggest they didn’t, but we can only reliably (as opposed to intuitively) know what these are by measuring their physiological effects. There was no proof anywhere that non-humans don’t feel pain, he explained. But if I just thought how hard it is to put myself in the position of another individual human being, I would see how much harder it is to know what a non-human creature was feeling. He thought that dog owners could make objective observations as well as a scientist, based on their long-term knowledge of their own particular dog, but that, too, was a form of measurement. It was not identification: ‘If this was happening to me, I would feel this,’ but properly evidence-based: ‘My dog usually looks or behaves like this, and now, when such a thing happens, she behaves or looks differently. She is not within her normal range, therefore her welfare is compromised.’
Broom was helpful and explained carefully what animal scientists do. He sent me a paper he had written on animal welfare. It began with a definition:
Welfare is a term which is used about animals, including man, but not about plants or inanimate objects. If, at some particular time, an individual animal has no problems to deal with, that individual is likely to be in a good state that would be associated with good feelings and indicated by a particular body physiology, brain state and behaviour. Another individual may face problems in life such that coping is difficult or not possible. Coping implies having control of mental and bodily stability and prolonged failure to cope results in failure to grow, failure to reproduce or death. Individuals are likely to show some direct signs of their potential failure to cope or difficulty in coping and they are also likely to have had bad feelings associated with their situations. The welfare of an individual is its state as regards its attempts to cope with its environment. The origin of the concept is how well the individual is faring or travelling through life. The term environment in the definition of welfare means, for an individual, something that could have an effect from outside that individual, or for any particular response system, something that could have an effect from outside that system. Potentially damaging challenges may come from outside the body, e.g. pathogens, causes of tissue damage, or attack by conspecifics, or from within it, e.g. anxiety, boredom or frustration, perhaps because of lack of key stimuli or lack of overall stimulation. Other impacts of the environment may be positive and lead to better welfare.
It is generally accepted by animal welfare scientists that the concept of welfare refers to the measurable state of the individual on a scale from very good to very poor. Since welfare can be poor, it is not logical to speak of preserving, ensuring or compromising welfare.
The paper concludes:
Welfare depends on extent of adaptation, a variety of coping methods and how well needs are met. Welfare encompasses health and any stress or feelings. Feelings are biological mechanisms and are part of coping methods. Like some other coping methods, feelings involve high-level brain activity as well as simpler physiological functioning. Although many aspects of welfare involve feelings, not all of welfare is about feelings. Many feelings are not easy to evaluate and there are occasions when feelings can be misleading or absent when welfare, and hence quality of life, is being assessed.
Some coping involves prediction and other complex brain abilities. Animals with better brains probably cope better. Established methods in welfare assessment, including measures of strength of preference and scientific measures of abnormal behaviour, physiological responses and clinical condition, should be used to evaluate welfare in clinical and other situations. Terminology should be used precisely in this area of science, medicine and veterinary medicine.15
This is an attempt at behaviourism with a caring face, or at any rate, the new terms in which behaviourism has devised well-being to comply with modern laws about animal welfare without offending its sense of itself. The need for precise terminology and universal tests is at the heart of science. And the idea that it is not stress, but the ability to cope with stress which counts, is useful to those working with animals, especially the finding that those ‘with better brains’ cope better. It permits a degree of stress in the very animals that we need to make stressed. After all, if we are using animals to find solutions for human ills, stress is at present very high on the human agenda. This is not to say that a behaviourist approach to welfare isn’t useful. If we are going to do science, and have rules about the subjects that are used, science has to know how to deal with them in the terms it understands. It’s simply that the tone of the article seems to speak beyond the needs of laboratory researchers and assistants and towards great and general truths. Science is inclined to do that. And those who look at science warily are inclined to dismiss its stated methods as blind to the obvious. In rebuttal, science regards ‘the obvious’ in the same light as erroneous ‘common sense’and ‘folk psychology’.
If you give cats a problem to solve or a task to perform in order to find food, they work it out pretty quickly, and the graph of their comparative intelligence shows a sharply rising line. But the older experimenters then say (although they will never publish on this subject): ‘the trouble is that as soon as they figure out that the researcher or technician wants them to push the lever, they stop doing it; some of them will starve to death rather than do it’.
Vicki Hearne, Animal Happiness
While it can’t be said that behaviourism has gone away, it’s certainly true that more people are investigating other ways of studying animals and are not only speaking up about it, they are increasingly insisting on their way being at least as fruitful as the behaviourists’. The question of what constitutes science is much debated by those who work with animals and those who think about how we work with and relate to animals. Field observers and philosophers are talking to each other, and they are also listening to those previously unconsidered people who spend their time with animals – farmers, trainers, breeders and even pet owners.
An unpublished paper by Vinciane Despret, a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Liège, in Belgium, examines some of those other ways of trying to observe animals.16 The question she poses is whether we need to know how the animals on which we experiment understand what it is they are being asked to do, and whether or not they can cooperate, or on the contrary actively impede the experiment. What scientists like to assume is that they themselves do not exist, and are not part of the experiment. The requirement for objectivity causes them to devise experiments and to behave, as if they (as well as their subjects) were machines. What objectivist rat and other laboratory-animal scientists have required of themselves is that they make no relationship with the animals they work with. To do so would invalidate the experiment. In real life, they do, of course, make relationships with the creatures with whom they spend their working day. Being humans as well as scientists, they really can’t help it.
Dr Claire Bryant of the Cambridge Veterinary Medicine Department studies bacteria and disease resistance. When I visited her in her lab, she escorted me through a series of super-clean rooms, which involved us putting on freshly laundered overalls and unlocking double security doors. In the various rooms we peered into labelled Petri dishes stacked neatly on shelves or in refrigerators. I gazed at dark dots on gel, some of them lethal, others fit for lunch, none of them meaning anything to me until they were named (botulinus, salmonella) and I was given some explanation of their place in the world by Dr Bryant. There didn’t seem to me to be much of anything I would call life in the lab, apart from the researchers in their white coats, poking pipettes into flasks, looking into microscopes or reading computer screens. Not much chance for anthropomorphising about her subject, I supposed.
‘Oh, I chatter to them all the time,’ she said, fessing up. ‘I worry about them if they’re not developing properly, too slowly or too fast. And I’ve been known to give them a good talking to, to buck them up, or try and coax the slower-growing colonies along. Not when anyone else is in the room, obviously. I have a relationship with all of them.’ And, of course, how could anyone avoid it? We relate to what we are engaged with. If you show people slides of triangles, circles and squares in relation to each other, they will narrate stories about them chasing each other, running away, forming a crowd while a loner stands outside.
But even when scientists acknowledge that experiments might be influenced, they assume that only the observer is doing the influencing. Clearly, Dr Bryant felt differently about her rapidly growing and slower-developing bacteria. Despret describes an experiment where students were given rats to test, some of them having been told that they were dealing with specially bred bright rats, with generations of experience of maze work, and the others given rats that were regular undistinguished lab rats with no special breeding. The students with bright rats found their rats bright, and the students with dull rats found their rats dull. No surprise there, not even when you discover that the rats were all the same regular lab rats with no distinction about them or between them. But the fact is that the ‘dull’ rats were perceived as performing less well than the ‘bright’ rats even when the statistics sometimes showed otherwise. And even more complexly, one student felt warmly towards his dull rat, and became proud of its ability to excel at simple-mindedness. That rat was actually, according to the figures, doing better than average at its task.
Robert Rosenthal did this experiment in the 1960s. His aim was limited. He wanted to discover what were the ‘little things that “affect the subjects to respond differently than they would if the experimenter were literally an automaton”’.17 But how did the students influence the rats? Did the affection of the student enhance the ‘dull’ rat’s performance to do better than its actual averageness? Did that rat respond to the careful, affectionate handling rather than the expectation of its handler, and therefore do well? Was it a case that the assumptions of the experimenters affected the experiment, or that the rats were responding to their handling? Despret takes us back to Jacques Derrida and his cat looking at him in the bathroom to remind us that ‘animals look at us, respond to us and constantly ask for responses from us’.18 Scientists might well influence experiments, and animals respond. Maybe if the scientists ask the right questions, the animals might even cooperate in the investigation.
Alex the Parrot is an example of a cooperating (and non-cooperating) partner in animal observation. Despret quotes the late Vicki Hearne, an animal trainer, writer and philosopher, on the subject of parrots and participation:
You go up to a parrot, and he’s probably in a cage and you’re not, so you feel pretty superior, maybe you even think you can feel sorry for the parrot, and you ask the parrot how he is, and he says something gnomic like, ‘so’s you’re old man’ or ‘how fine and purple are the swallows of the late summer’. Then the parrot looks at you in a really interested, expectant way, to see if you’re going to keep your end up […] You start trying to figure out what the parrot means by it, and there you are. You haven’t a prayer of reintroducing whatever topic you had in mind. That’s why philosophers keep denying that parrots can talk, of course, because a philosopher really likes to keep control of a conversation.19
Irene Pepperberg discovered that parrots are most motivated by the presence of rivals. So instead of teaching Alex to speak, she started to teach her human assistant to speak while Alex the parrot was present. Alex, attentive and taking an attitude to being ignored, became a prolific talker.
Not only did he speak, describe, count, classify objects into abstract categories and use concepts like ‘same’ and ‘different’, but he could use speech so as to influence the behavior of others: ‘Come here’, ‘I want to go to that place’, ‘No’, ‘I want this’. Moreover, intentionality is a characteristic that may be achieved through the device: not only by responding to the demands the parrot makes, but also by voluntarily ‘misunderstanding’ a new signifying sound the parrot may inadvertently produce. The researchers acted as if this sound was intentional and responded to this new act of language as if Alex had wanted to demand something or comment intentionally. The effect of the misunderstanding, of the ‘as if’, is that a sound produced accidentally not only becomes a word that signifies something for the parrot because it has signified something for the researcher, but makes the parrot enter into a world in which different beings intentionally respond to each other and become, through and for each other, intentional. ‘Several researchers,’ Pepperberg remarks, ‘have shown that a child’s competence often advances when adults interpret and respond to its utterance as “intentional” even before there is evidence to support such intentionality.’20
Consider how you train a captive bird to talk. You teach it to say ‘hello’ every time you come into view, and then you reward it by giving it a peanut. ‘It somehow never occurred to the researcher,’ Pepperberg comments, ‘that the bird would consider the vocalization “hello” to be a request for the nut rather than a comment on the entrance of the trainer.’21 So you get parroting, not language, and then you know for sure that what parrots do when they ‘talk’ is not language.
All of this, of course, suggests there might be some very different and interesting results if researchers were to take their subjects into account as reflexive, responsive beings. People like Pepperberg and others have been actively doing that both in the laboratory and in the field and publishing their findings with less hesitancy than they might once have felt. The most famous of these are several women who have devoted their lives to studying the higher primates in their native habitats: Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with gorillas, Birutė Galdikas with orangutans, and Barbara Smuts with baboons.
Smuts described the advice she was given as a new field-worker. Which was to be ‘like a rock, to be unavailable, so that eventually the baboons would go on about their business in nature as if data-collecting humankind were not present’. Despret quotes the philosopher Donna Haraway’s reaction here:
Scientists ‘could query but not be queried’: ‘people could ask if baboons are or are not social subjects, or ask anything else for that matter, without any ontological risk either to themselves, except maybe being bitten by an angry baboon or contracting a dire parasitic infection, or to their culture’s dominant epistemologies about what are named nature and culture … I imagine the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something,’ Haraway writes, ‘and asking if that being were or were not educable to the standard of a polite guest’.22
The idea that we can be rude to animals is galvanising. Being rude means that you do not recognise the other’s selfhood. It’s not surprising that we’re rude to animals. We wander around other parts of the world, standing and snapping at artefacts, and treat the people who live there as if they were not individuals but part of the scenery, and as if no account is to be taken of them. We get what we want, a photo of a building, while the local inhabitants are trying to go about their business. We don’t consider their customs, or their sensibilities very much. Very gradually, we are beginning to see that this is no way to behave in parts of the world where we are strangers. We have hardly come round to admitting that about our sojourns in the worlds of animals. The official, scientific advice is to behave as if you were not there and ‘just observe’. Barbara Smuts found that she got nowhere with this strategy and tried another. She learned to behave in baboon company like a baboon. ‘I … in the process of gaining their trust, changed almost everything about me, including the way I walked and sat, the way I held my body and the way I used my eyes and voice. I was learning a whole new way of being in the world – the way of the baboons.’ What resulted, she says, was an understanding of how the baboons expressed themselves, and an ability to be understood herself.
Having a relationship with another species, that is, communicating with them on mutual terms is one of the great dreams of the human species. Dr Dolittle aside, we see this yearning most clearly in science fiction. Not the kind where we are invaded by warmongering Martians and finally defeat them, but a more amiable kind where other more advanced intelligences arrive from faraway parts of the universe, and we learn to communicate. E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the popular movie versions of this genre. Another example is the moment when my cat sits on my lap and moves her head and neck towards me to show exactly where she wants to be stroked, and when I oblige, she purrs her satisfaction and then settles down for a nap. Behaviourism, I suppose, is a reaction against that dream, a kind of heroic despair or craven arrogance that insists we are lonely intelligences in an unwitting universe. The anthropomorphic way of seeing being in things and creatures is dismissed as childlike, something that must be given up along with our cuddly bears. Anthropomorphism is not just about animals, it’s an ancient and sticky human habit.
Small children (and adults) lie in bed in the morning and watch as the abstract patterns on their curtains become faces of angels and devils, old men and elegant women. Clouds are very like a whale. Ink blots transform into young men loving their mothers. Twilight fills with villains. We see animation where there is none, conjure up life from light and shade. The material world mutates under our gaze into what we most deeply understand: ourselves and our lives. No meaningless shape is allowed to remain meaningless. We can’t help it. It is not just anthropomorphic, but anthropocentric. Anthropocentrism is, perhaps, a worse misvision of the planet than our anthropomorphic compulsion. We are, unsurprisingly, the centre of our universe. We remake the world according to our cultural perceptions. But it’s not as if we could do otherwise. Go to Antarctica and stand in the way of a penguin. It won’t look up at you. It won’t pause on its journey. It simply makes a minimal detour around you and returns to its direct path. This obstacle – you – that can move is not a skewer endangering its life. Not food. Not anything known and therefore to be ignored, incorporated into the landscape with other things to be ignored. You are another kind of rock, probably. Who knew that rocks could move? Never mind, get on with business. That is the only way you will fit into the penguin universe (though it might have changed now that 40,000 people a year are visiting them). The effort to think other than us-like is almost as difficult for us as it is for penguins. We think it our way.
But, unlike penguins, we are also hyper-self-conscious, and we can’t help but know we do this. There’s little point in berating ourselves, but we should at least try to place ourselves in a more organic planetary context. So some will make the effort to overcome the natural tendency, either on the grounds that it is unscientific (behaviourism), or that it is unjust and plain inaccurate (post-humanism). It is important to know what it is that we do without thinking about it. It’s a gift and a curse we are inclined to believe we do not share with other creatures: to understand what it is we can’t help but do.
Anthropomorphism always worries me. That remaking of otherness as a replication of self – visually, morally or allegorically. The ‘cuteness’ that we see in animals, which has nothing to do with them but only with the onlooker, distresses me. I observe my own automatic humanising assumptions towards the young of other species, the ‘feelings’ which I suppose when I see an animal in pain or alone or dying, and try to keep it under control. I dislike and disapprove of the colonising aspect of finding easy connection with animals, while at the same time aching for it and identifying it in my relations with animals. The balance of the affect is always ‘They are somewhat like me’, rather than ‘I am somewhat like them’. We deny dignity and selfhood, whatever that might be to whatever creature it is, by making sentimental assumptions about why, what or how an animal is experiencing. Animals are not there for us to relate to, I want to insist grimly when folk coo or laugh at their behaviour, but it’s what we (and I) want to do most with animals, as well, of course, as eat them and utilise their fur and skin and other parts for our clothing, accessories, scent, cosmetic and medicines.
Some years ago, I was in Valencia with a friend for a weekend. One afternoon we were in a taxi driving along a wide busy street. Fleetingly, as we passed at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour, I saw a dog on a lead standing on the edge of the pavement, vomiting into the gutter, its owner standing behind it, waiting for it to finish. It couldn’t have been for more than a second that I saw the image before we were already somewhere else. It was a flash, not an incident. My friend in the car noticed nothing, and recalls nothing (I’ve asked her). I remember it as if it were a slide on a light-box. A still and permanent image is filed in my brain, brightly vivid, with perfect detail and outline. The dog, no particular breed, with its neck extended to throw up, the owner, a woman, unexceptional-looking, holding the lead slackly, waiting for the upheaval to end, not especially anxious. Sometimes, when I wake in the night that picture comes to me, along with the rush of distress – quite physical, like juices flowing – that I had about it at the time, as I sat in the car, already speeding away from the event. An awful sense of pity, of doom even. A lightning knowledge of fear and confusion in the world. The pity is not that the dog is being sick, but that the dog does not know why this is happening to it. It doesn’t understand why it’s being sick. Of course, neither did I, nor, very possibly, did its owner. But we had the ability to find out. We could take the dog to the vet, or have noticed that it had eaten something vile on the street just a few moments before, and connect it to the vomiting. If it turns out the dog is ill, an underlying assumption I instantly made, it won’t know why it continues to be sick and in pain (or even that it does continue). The pity I felt at the flashing moment I saw it, and the same pity that comes with every repeating memory of it (as if it were some trauma of my own, so perhaps a screen memory) is quite painful, disturbing, and is about suffering without knowledge. I feel the same way about very small children who are sick. As soon as it is possible to explain the cause of suffering, my distress changes to something more muted and practical. This is not to suggest some special sensitivity of mine, but an admission of the extent to which I identify the world that is not me as me. You could call it empathy, but that would require me to be in the place of the dog. In fact, I put the dog in my place and ‘feel’ accordingly. I can only be feeling the pity for myself, as if I were the dog, and was vomiting and failing to understand. And it’s not, when you come to think of it, necessarily a terrible thing for the dog, because it might not have the assumption that it should understand, or even mind about vomiting. Experience does not have to come with knowledge to be bearable, if you are an other. I can’t know. But I can assume up an everlasting storm. Even now, writing about the dog vomiting, I have to suppress an awful sense of panic. The tendency to anthropocentrism and being aware of it in myself makes me all the fiercer when I see crowds laughing at the antics of the chimpanzees in the zoo, or wailing at the cuteness of the suffering king penguins hatching their chicks in the Antarctic winter, although I know perfectly well what the anthropomorphisers are feeling and why. I am what you might call conflicted.
Despret and Haraway quote Barbara Smuts’s fieldwork with baboons as a hopeful breakaway from the limitations of behaviourist observational models. Her attitude to living with other creatures makes radical common sense, that dangerous phrase. If you want to know about the other, you have to learn from them to be with them on their terms as well as your own. They and others describe it as a reappropriation of ordinary ‘common sense’, and a rejection of the sneer about ‘folk psychology’. It is a methodology that was seen in the 1970s as new and breakaway. In particular it uses ‘focal sampling’ as the key. Interaction is what is studied, rather than the isolated animal, so many individual animals in a troop are followed for substantial, repeated and regular periods, having all their movements, interactions and everything they do noted. Then by collating the data, it is possible to see a pattern of social behaviour, to identify recurring contacts between the animals and to see how they operate as individuals and in a society.
This is not unproblematical. There are so many assumptions here. Words like ‘friendship’ are used, the meanings of the interactions are interpreted according to the fieldworker’s understanding of them. The ‘mood’ of animals on their own and between each other is assessed –‘mental state attribution’ it is called by Daniel Povinelli in a collection of articles on the subject of anthropomorphism, Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals.23 An article in the same collection by Duane Quiatt, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, takes an icy look at what he calls this altered perspective by field-workers on their subjects.24 He examines the research methods of Barbara Smuts, along with other field researchers of similar views such as Shirley Strum, another baboon observer, and the writings of Cynthia Moss, an elephant watcher. He quotes Smuts as she describes the need to find a new method that allowed observers to focus ‘on those behaviours that were most meaningful to the animals themselves’.25 Much of the behaviour that was analysed was grooming activity and proximity to other individuals, and these Smuts uses to describe degrees of ‘friendship’ between certain animals in a troop. More regular grooming and being more frequently within a certain distance of a particular other animal was interpreted as a friendship between them. Smuts asks the question ‘What exactly is friendship to a baboon?’ and it is clear that she thinks she can get an answer of some sort.26 Quiatt describes this and similar statements: Altman writing of rhesus monkeys in 1962: ‘I left it to the monkeys to tell me what are the basic units of social behaviour’; Louis Leakey sending the untrained Jane Goodall to work at Gombe with chimpanzees, because he wanted someone unhampered by academic prejudice. He quotes Smuts again, saying that the detailed recording of their social interaction allowed her to see the baboons ‘from a baboon’s perspective’, and Strum describing her ‘journey into the world of the baboon’.27 A moment comes when Strum, although trying to preserve her distance from the habituated baboons ‘is approached by an immigrant male, Ray, who, positioning himself between Strum and two resident males, solicits her support in agonistic interaction with them. Strum refuses to cooperate. “Ray won his struggle alone,” she writes, “but I shall never forget how honored I felt by the compliment paid me”.28 Even though I perfectly understand this emotion, if only because I feel exactly that sometimes when my cat deigns to sit on my lap, and, like the rest of the world, experienced an uprush of envy at David Attenborough’s romp with the gorillas, the effect of those statements on Quiatt, and on me, is to question whether the nature of the language Strum uses can be related to effective science.
There is an unmistakable underlying sneer in Quiatt’s paper, and I can’t help notice that most of the fieldworkers he quotes are women. He also talks about Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, who he says taught us to look at gorillas as individuals, ‘albeit with an uncomfortable feeling that Fossey may have gone a bit too far in preferring gorillas to human beings’.29 To call his tone patronising is an understatement. At Smuts’s declaration: ‘I made a determined effort to forget everything I knew about how baboons are supposed to behave. Instead, I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was important.’ Quiatt responds ‘Only a spoilsport would suggest that she is unlikely to recognise what is important in baboon behaviour until she puts it in perspective with all that she has learned’.30 This way of talking by Smuts and the others Quiatt declares to be a ‘very literary and romantic way of describing one’s professional work’; he wonders if the shift in perspective demanded and described by the fieldworkers is ‘no more than a leap of the anthropomorphic imagination? Is it wholly metaphorical?’31 Am I being over-sensitive to feel that he’s really speaking of that long (and still) assumed split between the literary and imaginative (female), and the scientific and factual (male)? He does talk about Nicholas Humphrey and other men who have been involved in the new methodology, but the male/female, professional/unprofessional, science/imagination, objective/autobiographical dichotomies keep emerging in his text. Still, let’s suppose there is a possibility that women might approach their science differently, and permit imagination in their work (I’d even allow that some men might be included in this behaviour). Science only precludes imagination, or even the literary, if the results are falsified by using them. It’s right and proper that methodology be questioned, so let us also forget that Quiatt is a man and that his tone is superior in an unpleasantly familiar way. The fact is that I also find myself conflicted (again, always again) by those quotes of Smuts and Strum, and not just by the words pulled out by Quiatt, but by readings of other zoological researchers who take the same approach. At least a little wary, in spite of Despret’s positive and delightful description of the upshot of Smuts methodology:
She explains that, having learned the way baboons express their emotions or intentions, she could respond to them and be understood. As a result, the baboons started to give her very deliberate dirty looks, which made her move away. This signaled a profound change: Smuts was not treated like an object (to avoid), but was recognized as a subject, a reliable subject with whom baboons could communicate, who would move away when told to do so, and with whom things could be clearly established.32
The idea that it is possible to ‘become’ or live with or befriend another species, or even ‘learn the way of the baboons’ is immensely beguiling, as Quiatt says (again suggesting that it’s a soft option): ‘… isn’t it what we all want, at some level? – to throw off the blinders of convention and habit and peer directly into the heart of behaviour?’33
Yes, it is. We all want to interact with the gaze of our cats, to know the other, although (or perhaps because) we do not even know ourselves very effectively. It is a fact that we do, but it is a fact that can be dismissed as ‘literary’ or ideological (as opposed to realistic) or emotional (as opposed to rational). For the life of me I cannot see why people should not attempt to spend quality time with other species and try and learn what it is like to be them and to live on their terms. Nor do I see why their reports should be dismissed as ‘unscientific’. The Skinner Box is no more of a reality for an animal stuck in one than a human observer who hangs around in its habitat for years pretending to be one of them. How can animals-in-laboratory results be more ‘scientifically’ accurate? What can you learn about learning from rats in laboratory mazes, other than how rats in laboratory mazes learn? Something, but not ‘the truth’ about rats, let alone people.
But equally I worry about the suggestion by those using the new methodology that they have got to the heart of the matter – that they are more effective in being undeluded than the old-style lab researchers and the behaviourists. Certainly, Smuts and her admirers have picked up the twentieth-century notion of the impossibility of objectivity in a way the behaviourists haven’t. But having acknowledged that we can’t absent ourselves from what we are watching, can we then assume that simply by living there and looking very closely, we have overcome the limited one-way perspective? Quiatt remembers Richard Garner, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, shut himself in a cage in the rainforest and let the chimpanzees come and look at him while he played them phonograph recordings of chimp sounds. He supposed, when he recorded the chimps in the zoo, that he had come to understand some of their utterances as meaningful – though like Australians and Americans, they must have mutated from their wild forest cousins’ language. He watched as the wild chimpanzees ‘responded’ to the calls. Quiatt suggests that, like Garner, we must always remain in our cage, which is made of ‘… our own cognitive limitations, which we hardly know how to take into account but cannot ignore when considering observer perspective’.34 This is the crux of the matter, though Quiatt hardly comes up with a ‘scientific’ solution to this problem any more than Derrida, Haraway or I have. In all likelihood there is no solution – and there, along with our cognitive isolation – is a truth we can hardly bear, so we argue (and sometimes sneer) that we are right and they are wrong, in order to keep the uncertainty at bay.
Primate ethologist Frans de Waal describes an experiment that was later famously done with human beings, in which it emerged that monkeys (all or some is not clear) stopped pulling a handle to get food for themselves when they witnessed another monkey being shocked each time. In one case, a monkey refused to pull the handle for twelve days. ‘These monkeys were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain on others.’35 That sentence, and the title of the book, Our Inner Ape, powerfully suggest a connection of concern for others between humans and monkeys or apes. After describing the refusal response, de Waal acknowledges that it is not likely that the explanation is actually a concern for the other’s welfare, but ‘distress caused by another’s distress’. The suggestion then is that we too, like the monkeys, respond with sympathy for others because of the emotional discomfort it causes to ourselves (which a behaviourist like Donald Broom would then convert into analysable chemical changes and discuss in terms of evolutionary fitness). It can work both ways. If you’re inclined to believe that we are like apes, then the latter argument is the one you take. If you fancy that apes are like us, you can go with de Waal’s former statement ‘literally starving themselves to death’. Then again, the infamous Stanford Experiment seemed to suggest that humans, at least, would overcome their distress and keep pressing the pain button if ordered to do so. In an experiment de Waal did himself, he placed two capuchin monkeys side by side and exchanged pebbles for food. Then he introduced inequity. He exchanged pebbles for food with both of them twenty-five times in a row, alternately:
If both received cucumber, this was called equity. In this situation, the monkeys exchanged all the time, happily eating the food. But if we gave one of them grapes while keeping the other on cucumber, things took an unexpected turn. This was called inequity … grapes are among the best rewards. Upon noticing their partner’s salary raise, monkeys who had been perfectly willing to work for cucumber suddenly went on strike. Not only did they perform reluctantly but they got agitated, hurling the pebbles and sometimes even the cucumber slices out of the test chamber.36
De Waal says, ‘This surely was a strong reaction equivalent to what, with some pomposity, is known in people as “inequity aversion”.’ Here again we have a suggestion that monkeys and humans have something in common: a sense of fairness. The following sentence acknowledges: ‘Admittedly, our monkeys showed an egocentric form of it. Rather than supporting the noble principle of fairness for everybody, they got upset about being short-changed.’37 Surely, a real sense of fair play would have had the monkey with the grape offering some of it to his deprived neighbour? The experiments are set up and observed meticulously, and the inferences are carefully described, but in between de Waal’s readers are allowed to make some, at the very least, woolly connections and conclusions about human nature. I imagine that in his scientific papers he would be unlikely to equate grapes with a pay rise and, as he does below, the bonuses of Wall Street bankers. Once again, humans look at animals and find ways to make them tell us something we want to hear about ourselves.
In an article for the John Templeton Foundation’s website*, de Waal offers an overview in which he concludes that there is a capacity for morality and sympathy in the transactional behaviour of apes, and how it could be as effective a biologically adaptive feature as methods of mate selection. He ends with the suggestion that evolutionary biology is at the heart of our niceness as well as our more negative characteristics (perhaps to give evolution a better reputation, since he is writing for a religiously based organisation). He is readjusting the shadows in the darker assumptions about our animal selves made by the likes of Desmond Morris and Robert Ardrey in the 1960s and 1970s, and he does so by being a primatologist who takes anthropomorphism seriously. The italics in the following passage are mine.
Reciprocity … is visible when chimpanzees share food specifically with those who have recently groomed them or supported them in power struggles. Sex is often part of the mix. Wild males have been observed to take great risks raiding papaya plantations, returning to share the delicious fruit with fertile females in exchange for copulation. Chimps know how to strike a deal.
Our primate relatives also exhibit pro-social tendencies and a sense of fairness. In experiments, chimpanzees voluntarily open a door to give a companion access to food, and capuchin monkeys seek rewards for others even if they themselves gain nothing from it. Perhaps helping others is self-rewarding in the same way that humans feel good doing good. In other studies, primates will happily perform a task for cucumber slices until they see others being rewarded with grapes, which taste so much better. They become agitated, throw down their measly cucumbers, and go on strike. A perfectly fine vegetable has become unpalatable! I think of their reaction whenever I hear criticism of the extravagant bonuses on Wall Street.
These primates show hints of a moral order, and yet most people still prefer to view nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’. We never seem to doubt that there is continuity between humans and other animals with respect to negative behavior – when humans maim and kill each other, we are quick to call them ‘animals’ – but we prefer to claim noble traits exclusively for ourselves. When it comes to the study of human nature, this is a losing strategy, however, because it excludes about half of our background. Short of appealing to divine intervention as an explanation, this more attractive half is also the product of evolution, a view now increasingly supported by animal research.38
It isn’t that I think de Waal is necessarily wrong about either primates or people, it’s simply that the terms of the discussion are so variable, and our interest is garnered by making it seem that so much is at stake for us.
It is impossible, I am sure, for us to study animals entirely on their own terms, yet if we don’t, we ought to be clear that we interpret what we see according to our feeling about ourselves. Even the idea that we should be thinking in terms of cooperating with animals rather than studying them from on high, is an idea based on what kind of human beings we want to be. We call behaviourists and anthropomorphist ethologists by political names – of the right and the left, socialist and fascist. Biological and evolutionary research has always been tainted by service to the state, as it was in the case of Lorenz under the Third Reich, or Herbert Spencer’s Victorian Social Darwinism, or Lysenko’s attempted verification of the inheritance of acquired characteristics for Soviet Russia. We really can’t talk about rats, either in literature or science, without talking about ourselves, and how much harder it is to investigate the world of primates without believing that they are us and we are them – or even that they are not us and never will be because only we can be us. Post-humanists may want to look the other way: to see animals clearly, no longer through the murky glass of us, but they will, like everyone, always be mired in millennia of cultural assumptions and our inability not to make human use of the non-human animal world.