Animal behaviorists are unlikely to acknowledge that terror can return in the dreams of animals. And yet from a Kenyan “elephant orphanage” comes a report of baby African elephants who have seen their families killed by poachers, and witnessed the tusks being cut off the bodies. These young animals wake up screaming in the night. What else but the nightmare memories of a deep trauma could occasion these night terrors?
Wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers has spent decades studying black bears, following them through forests and swamps. As a graduate student he learned about black bears from his professor, Albert Erikson. One day they were trying to take a blood sample from an anesthetized wild bear, when it suddenly woke. The bear lunged at Erikson. To Rogers’s surprise, Erikson lunged back. The bear turned to Rogers. Erikson said, “Lunge!” Rogers obediently lunged at the bear, who turned and ran away. Rogers says, “I was learning things that would help me interpret bears’ actions in terms of their own fear rather than mine.”
An error to which anthropomorphism can lead is to see bears through our own emotions: we fear them, so we perceive them as angry and hostile. The equal and opposite error into which the fear of anthropomorphism can lead is to refuse to recognize that bears can feel their own emotions. Rogers learned to observe bears in terms of those emotions, discovering that the bears themselves were often fearful. He learned what frightened them and how not to frighten them. “Once I started looking at bears in terms of their fear, and interpreted all the things that used to scare me and interpreted those in terms of the bear’s fear, it was easy to gain their trust and begin walking with them very closely, sleeping with them—doing all the things that you have to do to see how an animal really lives in its world.” So well did Rogers learn to understand the wild bears that he could curl up for the night a few feet from their den or even handle their cubs. Asked whether scientists don’t usually avoid using words like fear and trust to describe animal behavior, he replied, “Yes. But I think that we miss the mark more by ignoring those emotions than by taking them into account. Those are basic emotions that animals and people share.”
His description of a suddenly alarmed bear shows how humans can learn to “read” bears: “You can be very close to a bear and have things be calm, until some little unidentified noise happens far off in the forest. Then the bear is suddenly keyed up, wary. . . . Whenever there’s anything that makes the bear take a deep breath, which is the first sign of their fear, and then you see its ears prick up, you think, ‘Better give the bear a little bit more room, don’t be standing right on top of it, because there’s a good chance it’ll whack you,’” says Rogers cheerfully. “It feels threatened by some other thing and it wants room and the peace of mind from you to deal with that. After being told in no uncertain terms by bears to get away in that situation, after a while I learned.”
Of all emotions animals might feel, fear is the one that skeptics most often accept and one of the few that comparative psychology investigates. One reason is that fearfulness has an obvious evolutionary advantage. Fear can serve as a mechanism to trigger defensive behavior, so its survival value is clear for any organism capable of defense. Fear can set animals running, diving, hiding, screaming for help, slamming their shells shut, bristling their quills, or baring their teeth. If an animal had no mode of defense, fear would confer no benefit. Yet fear has also been known to interfere with survival: the actions of a panicking person or animal are not always the wisest, as when a terrified soldier on a battlefield runs into the line of fire.
People also find it easy to believe that animals feel fear because this emotion is one that humans often elicit from animals, and may even enjoy eliciting. An urban dweller who has never so much as visited a zoo has probably scattered birds into flight, shooed insects away, seen cats flee from dogs or dogs flee from bigger dogs, and has no reason to doubt that animals feel fear.
Nor does a powerful intellect seem necessary to experience fright. Intellect may help one detect subtler reasons to fear, but the less intelligent still find plenty to fear. Those who wish to believe that a great gulf separates people from other animals seldom seem threatened by the notion of animal fear. In animals it may not be called an emotion, however. Thus, while dictionaries call fear an emotion, animal behaviorists may prefer the definition of fear that appears in The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior: “a state of motivation which is aroused by certain specific stimuli and normally gives rise to defensive behavior or escape.”
The biological traces of fear are easy to find in a laboratory. (Indeed, what animal would not have reason to fear a laboratory?) A small electrical impulse to a cat’s amygdala (part of the brain’s limbic system) produces alertness, a larger one produces the expressions and actions of terror. A rat whose amygdala has been removed loses the fear of cats and will walk right up to one. Researchers at New York University trained rats to expect an electric shock when they heard a tone, and discovered to their surprise that the nerve impulses in the rats taught to fear the tone went straight from the ear to the amygdala, instead of via the usual route through the auditory cortex. The theory is that the amygdala attaches emotional import to some forms of learning. Endocrine studies show that hormones such as epinephrine and norepinephrine help pass along fear messages. Geneticists say that in just ten generations of breeding, two strains of rats can be produced from a parental stock, one fearful, one calm.
But even biologists concede that physiological symptoms alone do not form a complete description of fear. Philosopher Anthony Kenny has given the example of a person who fear heights and avoids them scrupulously, as compared to a relatively fearless mountain climber. The person who avoids heights may succeed in doing so and, as a result, seldom exhibit physiological signs of fear. The climber, more often at risk, may show such signs more often, yet cannot be said to be more afraid of heights. Perhaps, though, the notion of a “counterphobia,” developed by the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel, is not entirely inappropriate here. He spoke of people seeking out the very thing they most fear because the fear is unconscious. Thus at least some climbers are terrified of heights but cannot acknowledge this fear to themselves. Their behavior is a kind of deep overcompensation, an internal self-deception meant to keep the feared but fascinating object in constant view. Is this, like the well-known compulsion to repeat traumas, a search for mastery?
Perhaps counterphobia is not confined to humans. Many animals of species that are frequently preyed upon show a macabre interest in the deaths of others like them. Studying hyenas in the Serengeti, Hans Kruuk was struck by the frequency with which hyenas or other predators at a kill were closely observed by wildebeest or gazelle who had drifted over to watch. This has been called “behavior of fascination” or “the bystander phenomenon.” Such onlookers are attracted even when the victim is not of their own species. Animals of prey species also show interest in predators who are not at kills, watching and even following them. A cheetah being observed by a crowd of gazelle made a sudden dart and caught one of them, so the behavior has risks. Kruuk speculates that this dangerous behavior conveys a selective advantage—either because it is worthwhile for prey species to keep an eye on the predator, preventing ambushes, or because they learn valuable information about predators. In his classic study of red deer, F. Fraser Darling noted that “deer have a marked objection to allowing any person or object out of their sight which they may think to be a source of danger.” It may also be an example of counterphobia.
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin made a systematic study of how animals look when they are afraid. In both humans and animals, he found, some or all of the following may occur: the eyes and mouth open, the eyes roll, the heart beats rapidly, hairs stand on end, muscles tremble, teeth chatter, and the sphincter loosens. The frightened creature may freeze in its place or cower. These rules hold true across a remarkable array of species. Somehow it is surprising to learn that when dolphins are terrified, their teeth chatter and the whites of their eyes show, or that a frightened gorilla’s legs shake. Such familiar behavior in a wild animal is a reminder of our ultimate kinship. Melvin Konner has written, “We are—not metaphorically, but precisely, biologically—like the doe nibbling moist grass in the predawn misty light; chewing, nuzzling a dewy fawn, breathing the foggy air, feeling so much at peace; and suddenly, for no reason, looking about wildly.”
Other symptoms of fear may be more specific to a species. A frightened mountain goat, biologist Douglas Chadwick reports, flattens its ears, flicks its tongue past its lips, crouches and raises its tail. According to Chadwick, a kid raises its tail when it wants attention or to nurse. The adult continues to raise its tail when fearful. If the tail is partially raised, Chadwick says, it means “I’m worried,” and a completely erect tail means “I’m scared,” or maybe “Help, Momma!”
Aviculturalist Wolfgang de Grahl notes that frightened young grey parrots in new surroundings may not only flutter wildly at the approach of humans but may hide their heads in a far corner. In de Grahl’s view, these birds probably believe, like the ostriches who were once said to hide their heads in the sand, that they cannot be seen when they do so. But this is likely based upon an overestimation of the stupidity of birds. Humans who cover their eyes or turn their faces away from scary sights do not believe they cannot be seen. Perhaps, like humans, the parrots cannot bear the sight of what frightens them, or are trying to keep their feelings from overwhelming them.
Because people have lived and worked with horses for so long, some of the things that frighten them are fairly well understood. In addition to such obvious dangers as predators, they may be alarmed by unfamiliar motions, noises, and smells. Changes in their environment often frighten horses. Skittish horses even appear to be alarmed by imagined changes: an object that a horse has passed countless times may suddenly cause a horse to shy although there has been no alteration. What frightens one horse will leave another horse unmoved, and some horses seldom display fear. Horses may also be afraid to go to places that do not smell as if horses have been there. A horse that goes happily into horse trailers will sometimes refuse to go into a brand-new horse trailer.
Personal history also plays a part in the genesis of fear for a particular animal, who can learn to fear something that it did not fear before. This is expressed in commonsense beliefs. For example, if you pick up a stick to toss for a dog to retrieve and instead it cringes in fear, your first thought is likely to be that the dog has been beaten. Animals form associations of fear with objects that have frightened them in the past. Memories can be triggered by resemblances or perhaps even by wandering thoughts.
Animals also learn fear to avoid pain. Laboratory rats fear pain and learn to fear receiving an electric shock. Coyotes learn to fear getting a faceful of porcupine quills. Monkeys learn that a long fall is painful.
Most animals fear their predators, logically enough. How they recognize them as predators if they have never seen them in action is not always clear, but the reaction is. In the Rockies, Chadwick one day saw a lynx stalking a large mountain goat billy. It sneaked to a ledge above the billy, to a position that seemed perfect for pouncing, but hesitated. Then the goat spotted the lynx, and backed off into a corner. After a while the goat came forward, stamped his feet, and began leaping up in the direction of the cat, hooking toward it with his horns. The lynx watched for a while, now and then dangling a paw toward the goat before finally walking off. It appeared that the goat was frightened of the predatory lynx at first, but then lost its fear and became aggressive. The lynx was mildly frightened of the goat—enough not to attack immediately and eventually to give up.
One factor in the recognition of predators may be an innate response to staring eyes. Birds have been found to be more likely to mob a stuffed owl if it has eyes. Young chicks who have never seen a predator avoid objects with eyes or eye-spots on them, particularly if the eyes are large. Wild birds at a feeder table are much more apt to flee if a design that is highlighted on the feeder resembles eyes, and the more realistic the eyes, the greater their panic.
Fear of falling from heights also appears to be innate in many animals. Infants of many species (including humans) show terror when confronted with a steep drop, or the convincing image of a steep drop, even if they have never been dropped or seen a drop. The fear of heights is probably triggered in some species more easily than in others. A creature that lives in high places cannot survive if it spends too much time quaking with alarm. Yet the mountain goats observed by Chadwick also showed signs of fear when searching for a foothold on cliffs too precipitous even for them, or when loose rock underfoot started to slide toward a drop.
A brown bear cub who fell into the McNeil River in Alaska and was carried out into the rapids showed signs of fear—flattened ears and wide, rolling eyes. His mother saw him fall in but did not seem alarmed, only going after him once he had been carried a considerable distance away. Perhaps she did not realize that what was safe for her was not safe for him. Or perhaps she realized, or felt, that he was in no real danger. The cub succeeded in getting out on his own.
For social animals, or for the young of most species, loneliness holds fears. The fear of being alone is sometimes hard to separate from the fear of being lost. Wingnut, a particularly timid brown bear cub observed on the McNeil River, was said by Thomas Bledsoe to be literally afraid of his own shadow. He was afraid of being left alone, and would call “hysterically” every time his mother left to fish, continuing until she returned. Again, it may well be that an earlier experience lies behind this reaction. A Pacific bottle-nosed porpoise, Keiki, who lived in a marine park, was released into a bay nearby. Separated from his companions into a location he did not know, Keiki was stricken with terror, teeth chattering and eyes rolling.
Zoo keepers report that captive elephants are subject to “sudden-death syndrome” or “broken-heart syndrome,” which happens (most often with young elephants) when they are separated from their social group or put in a new enclosure by themselves. Jack Adams of the Center for the Study of Elephants ascribes this to “gripping fear.”
Like the horses afraid of unusual things, captive but untamed grey parrots are suspicious of changes in their surroundings. Rather than eat from a new bowl, they will go hungry for days. Even once they have learned to trust and accept food from a particular individual, a change of clothing can create alarm. One aviculturalist reported that a group of mistrustful parrots would accept peanuts only from the aviculturalist’s mother—and only when she wore her usual apron. The term neophobia has been coined for this fear of the unfamiliar. Neophobia can produce odd reactions in an animal raised in unusual circumstances. Indian conservationist Billy Arjan Singh raised an orphaned leopard cub and a tiger cub. In each case the young cat was terrified by its first glimpses of the jungle and had to be patiently soothed, repeatedly taken for walks in the jungle, and generally convinced that it was worth visiting.
Cody, an orangutan raised from infancy by humans, was stricken with terror on first beholding another orangutan. The hair stood up all over his body. He recoiled in fear and hid behind his human “parent,” clinging so hard that he left marks. The placid orangutan who frightened him so much happened to be his own mother.
Jim Crumley has described watching a flock of two hundred whooper swans resting in a field in Scotland. As he looked on, a wave of disturbance passed through the flock. Sleeping birds raised their heads and stood looking to the west, but then the flock settled down. The swans gradually relaxed, and then suddenly became agitated again: all heads shot up, and they called to each other in alarm. This happened three times before the perplexed Crumley understood what was worrying the swans. A thunderstorm was approaching, and the swans had heard it coming before he did. He watched them through the ensuing storm, and saw that the flashes of lightning brought no reaction, but that every clap of thunder terrified them.
Much fear is learned. This accords with classical behavioral conditioning theory, in which animals, including humans, learn to associate negative stimuli with particular events. It is important to be wary of too readily explaining things as innate or instinctive, when they might just as easily be learned by hard experience, or even somehow taught by other members of the species. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas notes some of the specific fears of a husky, Koki, she acquired as an adult animal. The sound made by an object whizzing through the air, such as a rope or a stick, would cause Koki to cower, with chattering teeth and hair on end. According to Marshall Thomas, “the sound of alcohol in a man’s voice” had the same effect. It is possible that Koki was reacting to scent rather than sound, since alcohol affects the odor of human perspiration; but in any case, she had learned to be frightened of men who had been drinking. It is hard to avoid thinking she had been hit by a drunken man.
Classical conditioning theory was shaken up when it was discovered that some stimuli are far more easily associated with fear than others. Rats readily associate food with illness, and will avoid a food if they have been ill after eating it. But they are very unlikely to associate an electrical shock or a loud noise with illness, no matter how often experimenters pair the two stimuli. Many people are afraid of snakes or spiders who have never had a bad experience with them and who seldom see them. Yet, as Martin Seligman has pointed out, very few people have phobias about hammers or knives, although they are much more likely to have been injured by these. Perhaps their familiarity with other uses of these objects dulls fear.
Mountain goats have learned to fear avalanches or rock slides and to take evasive action. When goats hear the rumble of a slide overhead, they put their tails up and their ears back and run for a sheltering overhang, if one is nearby. If not, they stamp, crouch, and press themselves against the mountain. Some goats take off at the last moment.
Everyone has experienced fear without an apparent object—the sense that an unknown misfortune impends. At other times, the fear is in response to the sense that we are on unfamiliar ground, like Singh’s tiger and leopard cubs. We feel that something bad could happen, though we don’t know what. Fear can exist without an object, a vertigo of the morale.
In Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe the elephants are culled annually. During this culling, elephant family groups are herded by aircraft toward hunters who shoot all except the young calves, who are rounded up for sale. The elephant calves run around, scream, and search for their mothers. One year a wildlife guide at a private sanctuary ninety miles away from the park noticed that eighty elephants vanished from their usual haunts on the day culling started at Hwange. He found them several days later, bunched at the end of the sanctuary as far from the park as they were able to get.
It has been discovered quite recently that elephants can communicate over long distances by means of subsonic calls—sounds pitched too low for people to hear. So it is not surprising that the sanctuary elephants apparently received some frightening message from the Hwange elephants. But unless elephant communication is far more refined than anyone has yet speculated, the message cannot have been very specific. The sanctuary elephants must have known that something very bad was happening to Hwange elephants, but they can hardly have known what it was. The object of their fear was inchoate, but the fear was real.
Humans not only fear for themselves, but may fear for others. This feeling borders on empathy, something people are much less likely to concede to animals than fear. While examples of animals frightened for themselves are numerous, examples of fear for others are scarcer. Often the situation is equivocal: a monkey that shows physical signs of fear when watching another monkey being attacked may be fearing for itself as a possible victim, rather than (or as well as) fearing for the other monkey. The clearest evidence of animals frightened for others, as one might expect, comes from parents frightened for their young.
Wildlife biologist Thomas Bledsoe describes the actions of Red Collar, a mother grizzly brown bear whose cubs vanished while she fished for salmon in the McNeil River, a gathering place for bears. First she looked up and down the riverbank, then ran to the top of the bluff and looked there, running faster and faster. She stood on her hind legs to see farther, jerking her head around, panting and drooling. After some minutes Red Collar gave up the search and went back to fishing. Here her behavior is puzzling and susceptible to varying interpretations, ranging from loss of interest (which humans would find difficult to identify with) to belief that no disaster had befallen her cubs. It is worth noting that on the occasions when Red Collar’s cubs disappeared from the river, they had invariably gone off with one of the other mother bears and her family and were in fact safe. According to Bledsoe, at one point two of Red Collar’s cubs were with another bear for three days before she encountered and reclaimed them.
Parents fear not only losing their young but also that they will be injured. Another brown bear Bledsoe observed, Big Mama, was alarmed when her two curious yearling cubs chose to investigate human observers, going after them uttering alarm calls until her cubs left the humans alone. Lynn Rogers, who studies the smaller black bear, says that when faced by danger, mother bears not only urge cubs up trees, but also discourage them from climbing smooth-barked trees like aspens in favor of rougher-barked pines (which are easier for small cubs to climb). Paul Leyhausen observed several mother cats who would allow their kittens to chase mice, but would interfere if the kittens went after rats. Tested away from their mothers, the kittens proved quite capable of tackling rats.
Mountain goat nannies vigilantly try to prevent their kids from taking dangerous or fatal falls. According to Douglas Chad-wick, nannies try to stay on the downhill side of their kids, both when the kids are moving about and when they sleep. Due to the exuberance of the kids, the nannies must watch constantly. Chad-wick notes of one mountain goat, “I could hear her literally cry out when the baby took a hard spill, and she would rush over to lick and nuzzle it, and then encourage it to nurse.” The mother’s cry is very like a human reaction to seeing someone fall, and it tells a perfect story of empathy.
A peregrine falcon father attacked one of his sons every time the young falcon came too close to human observers. Eventually the young bird changed his behavior, avoiding the observers afterward. The father’s fear for his son altered the young bird’s actions.
Social animals may fear for other members of the group. One experimenter decided to investigate the reaction of some young chimpanzees to “a bold man” and “a timid man.” The chimpanzee Lia avoided the bold man, but the chimpanzee Mimi fought him. One day the “bold man” bent Mimi’s finger back until she screamed. Lia joined the attack, but stopped when she got punched (such is the elegance of experimental research). After that, Lia devoted her efforts to trying to hold Mimi back, by grabbing her hands and pulling her away. In a group of caged chimpanzees at Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies, a female chimpanzee with an infant, whose previous babies had been removed, became apprehensive when approached by scientists. So did the other chimpanzees in the group in nearby cages. In this case, however, it is not clear whether the other chimpanzees were actually fearful; they may have been merely hostile. The deep fears that being in a laboratory may occasion in an animal have never been the object of study. Possibly the ethical dilemma created by causing such fear is too transparent to be acknowledged by scientific scrutiny.
Fear at its mildest—a readiness to fear—may be characterized as caution or alertness and has obvious survival value. The alert worm hears the early bird coming and escapes. When this feeling intensifies it becomes anxiety, a painful uneasiness of mind. Psychiatry has made a good living from the fact that some people seem to be incapacitated by the degree of anxiety they feel, while others think their anxiety unnecessary or exaggerated.
Very great fear, like very great pain, can produce shock. The term shock has a medical definition, and there is no doubt that animals experience it. Hans Kruuk describes what looks like shock in wildebeest cornered by hyenas. These animals scarcely try to defend themselves once they have been brought to a standstill. They will stand in one spot, moaning, and be torn apart by the hyenas.
Pandora, a two-year-old mountain goat to be fitted with a radio collar, was trapped at a salt lick by wildlife biologist Douglas Chadwick and his wife. At first she made spirited attempts to escape. She tried to jump out of the enclosure, hooked a horn at Chadwick, and when tackled and brought down, attempted to get up again. While being blindfolded she went into shock, falling limp. Pandora had injured herself only slightly in this struggle, so it seems the reaction was the result of her intense fear. (After being collared, she was revived with smelling salts and released, showing no ill effects.)
In Africa a buffalo was knocked down, but not injured, by a lion, and simply lay on the ground in shock while the lion (perhaps an inexperienced animal) chewed on the buffalo’s tail. Such an instance is another demonstration that fear does not always lead to survival.
Bravery, sometimes considered an emotion, is related to fear-fulness. Unfortunately bravery, or courage, is poorly defined in humans, so it is difficult to look for it in animals. It is often considered to involve proceeding against fear, overriding it or setting it aside. But is a dangerous act brave if you have no fear when you do it? Or is it only brave if you are afraid?
Hans Kruuk reports several instances in which cow and calf wildebeest were pursued by hyenas. In each case, when the hyenas caught up with the calf, the mother turned and attacked the hyenas, butting them so fiercely as to bowl them over. Perhaps this counts as bravery. Without a calf, a wildebeest cow keeps running. Surely fear makes her run. On the other hand, a human in a parallel situation may declare, “I was so angry I forgot to be scared.” Perhaps a mother wildebeest is so angry she forgets fear. Is she brave?
For a nature program about cheetahs on television, a lioness was filmed killing a litter of cheetah cubs. While she was still there, the mother cheetah returned. Seeing the lion, the cheetah circled, hesitated, and then darted close to the lion until the lion pursued her. The cubs had already been killed, though the cheetah probably didn’t know this. The mother cheetah evidently feared that the lion would kill her cubs and also feared being attacked by the (much larger) lion. Her attempt to draw the lion away seems to qualify as a brave act. After the lion was gone, the cheetah found the dead cubs, picked one up, and carried it away. During a sudden storm she was filmed sitting in the rain, crouched over the cub’s body. When the rain stopped, she trotted off without a backward look.
Charles Darwin, too, was interested in animal bravery and gave the following account:
Several years ago a keeper at the Zoological Gardens showed me some deep and scarcely healed wounds on the nape of his own neck, inflicted on him, whilst kneeling on the floor, by a fierce baboon. The little American monkey, who was a warm friend of this keeper, lived in the same compartment, and was dreadfully afraid of the great baboon. Nevertheless, as soon as he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, and by screams and bites so distracted the baboon that the man was able to escape, after, the surgeons thought, running great risk to his life.
For Darwin, then, it was clear that a “mere” monkey could be a friend and a brave one at that. For this he was severely criticized by a modern scientist for his “tendency to anthropomorphize animal behavior,” noting “it is small wonder that he was able to find evidence of all the human attributes [in animals], even moral behavior and bravery.” It apparently upsets some scientists deeply for Darwin of all people to tell a story about the bravery of a small monkey who puts his own genetic future at risk for the sake of a member of another species, with whom he developed not dependence, but warm friendship. Bravery and courage are not words scientists are eager to see applied to a monkey by the founder of evolutionary theory.
Elephant calves, like mountain goat kids or bear cubs, do not always fear what their elders think they should. Cynthia Moss, who studies elephants in Kenya, reports that very young calves appear largely fearless. They may come up to her Land Rover and ex amine it—while people are in it. This often alarms their mothers and aunts, producing visible conflict, Moss reports. Apparently they would like to hustle the calves away but are too frightened to come close enough to do so. They stand very tall, and shuffle back and forth or swing one leg. When the calf eventually wanders back, the adults pull it to them, feel it, and make threatening gestures at the vehicle.
By the time elephant calves are grown, they are likely to have had reason to fear things besides people in Land Rovers. Objects that justify fear appear in most creatures’ lives. But what about an animal that is so protected and sheltered that it never encounters anything frightening? What happens to its capacity for fear? It is possible that such a creature will feel fearful anyway, that its capacity to fear will demand expression, fastening on an object that seems arbitrary.
Koko, a gorilla, was born in a zoo and raised by humans in a sheltered, loving environment. Koko was never exposed to big older gorillas, to leopards, to hunters, or to anything that might frighten her. Yet she has fears—of alligators, for instance, though she has never seen a real one. For years she acted afraid of toy alligators unless their lower jaws were missing. Though not frightened of her alligator puppet, she would play chasing games with it. She once threatened an aide in American Sign Language with being chased by an alligator if she didn’t make lunch faster. She also appeared to be afraid of iguanas, specifically a pet iguana whom she saw often. Although the iguana (described as “comatose”) never made threatening moves toward her, Koko would run into her own room if the iguana was brought out.
Possibly Koko’s fear of lizards and alligators is instinctive, or partly instinctive; perhaps it is strengthened by the lack of anything else to fear. It may be that fear demands an object, and that no matter how secure and protected a child is, vampires, werewolves, or fire engines will be conjured up to serve as that object. In later years, perhaps because she received gifts of dozens of toy alligators of various descriptions, Koko seemed to lose her fear of them.
The chimpanzee Viki, raised by humans, had a fear of tarpaulins so severe that she could be kept from entering forbidden rooms by hanging pieces of tarpaulin on the doorknobs. The famous Washoe, while unimpressed by tarpaulins, has been reported to fear dust mops. Moja, another chimpanzee in the same group, was unmoved by dust mops but found the dividers from ice-cube trays so alarming that researchers kept ice-cube dividers hidden in drawers and cupboards so that, if Moja became unruly, they could punish her by taking out a divider and exhibiting it.
In a remarkable use of narration, Washoe and the other chimpanzees in her group were also led to fear an imaginary “bogeydog.” This grew from an effort to get the easygoing young Washoe to use the sign for no more often. One evening researcher Roger Fouts looked out the window of Washoe’s trailer, and signed to Washoe that he saw a big black dog with long teeth that ate baby chimpanzees. He asked Washoe if she wanted to go out, and got a most emphatic “no.” On other occasions, when Washoe was playing outside and did not want to go in, researchers would sign that they saw the big black dog coming—and Washoe would hasten inside.
Fearless animals sometimes greet travelers to remote islands. These bold creatures, rather than running from humans, may gaze attentively at a person walking up to them with a net or a gun. The botanist Sherwin Carlquist describes an encounter with an insular species of burrowing owl. He came close and photographed the owl, which stood and blinked lazily. A snake slithered by and Carlquist picked it up. Unperturbed, the snake draped itself on his shoulders and allowed him to carry it about all day. In the same archipelago, Carlquist was able to stroke elephant seals lying on the beach and boobies sitting on their eggs. Elsewhere, an island species of chuckwalla (a large lizard) was so placid that it would even disregard “a mild kick from a biologist’s shoe.”
Biologists who arrived on one uninhabited island after an arduous trip paused to rest; one researcher lying on the beach fell asleep. An island wren alighted on his foot, scrutinized his bootlaces, hopped along his body, perched on his chin and—to the joy of the sleeper’s companions—peered long and carefully down each of his nostrils before flying off. Such fearlessness is found in species living on small islands where predators are few or absent. Carlquist argues, “Excessive skittishness is no virtue, in terms of evolution. If a bird spends much of its time flying away from false alarms, it will have that much less time for feeding and other essential activities. Thus, in a predator-free situation, a reasonably oblivious animal might be more successful than a perpetually nervous one.” It is not reported whether island-tame species retain other fears—of heights or of water—but it seems likely. Many island species have calmly met their doom through fearlessness. The great auk and the dodo are only two who disappeared because they did not flee hungry humans or their animal companions.
If fear is the feeling that something bad is imminent, then its converse may be hope, the feeling that something good is imminent. In humans hope, like fear, can be unreasoning and irrational or logical and conscious. One of the most endearing traits of pet animals is their (quite reasonable) hope of being fed, and their unsophisticated joy at the prospect. Dogs whirl around in anticipation, cats purr loudly and rub against objects, people, or other animals.
When Washoe grew older, she had a baby that died four hours after birth because of a defective heart. Three years later she had a second baby, Sequoyah. Sequoyah was sickly, and despite excellent care from Washoe, died of pneumonia at the age of two months. Determined that Washoe should raise a baby, researchers made frantic efforts to find a replacement, and eventually procured Loulis, a ten-month-old chimpanzee. Fifteen days after Sequoyah’s death, Fouts went to Washoe’s enclosure and signed “I have baby for you.” Every hair on Washoe’s body stood on end. She displayed signs of great excitement, hooting, swaggering bipedally and signing “baby” repeatedly. “Then when she signed ‘my baby,’ I knew we were in trouble,” Fouts said.
When Fouts returned with Loulis, Washoe’s excitement vanished instantly. Her hair flattened and she declined to pick Loulis up, impassively signing “baby.” But after an hour had passed, Washoe began approaching Loulis, trying to play with him. That evening, she tried to get him to sleep in her arms, as Sequoyah had done. At first she was unsuccessful, but by the next morning they were clasped together, and from that time Washoe has been a devoted mother to Loulis, who eventually acquired a vocabulary of fifty signs from Washoe and the other chimpanzees in the group. It seems clear that when told she would get a baby, Washoe hoped to see Sequoyah again.
Ludwig Wittgenstein believed that animals may feel frightened but not hopeful. He wrote, in the 1940s, “One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy, startled. But hopeful? . . . A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe his master will come the day-after-tomorrow?” Wittgenstein argues that only those who have mastered the use of language can hope. Not only does this statement remain unproven to this day, but there seems no good reason to doubt that an animal can imagine or even possibly dream about the future. Animals may lack the language of hope, but the feelings that underlie it are probably shared by humans and animals alike. If animals can remember and dream about the past, if fear can be relived, why can they not imagine and project a future in which fear will be unnecessary?