How Animals Grieve (16 page)

Would a dolphin mourn a whale play-partner who died, or vice versa? The play interactions, occurring outside of any long-term friendship, may be too fleeting for that. It may just be that these marine mammals are so primed to come together socially that their usual within-species play patterns spill over into cross-species play when an opportunity arises. The dolphins’ expansive behavioral repertoire, surely rooted in emotion, leads me to think that a hypothesis of shared dolphin grief is highly plausible.

Whale-for-whale mourning may occur in relation to a phenomenon that concerns (and sometimes mystifies) marine-mammal scientists: mass strandings. In February 1998, 115 sperm whales beached themselves in three strandings on the coast of Tasmania. The individuals came from three separate groups, were mostly female (97 of the 112 whales who could be reliably sexed), and represented a variety of ages, from under one year to sixty-four years. In a paper for
Marine Mammal Science
, Karen Evans and her research team report valuable physiological details gleaned from the whales’ carcasses. For instance, I was startled to learn that among the whales were pregnant females ranging in age from twenty-five to fifty-two years; I had not expected whales to be reproductively successful at such advanced ages.

At one of the three strandings, the whales’ behavior could be closely monitored. First, a tight cluster of thirty-five whales moved from open waters toward the surf zone. One whale began to swim away from the others in a “frantic” way, churning up water and moving parallel to the shore, then stranding on the beach. In pairs and trios, the other whales followed the first to the surf zone; from there, wave action pulled them in to the beach. (The last two whales to strand deviated from this pattern; they swam past the others and actively beached themselves in a separate area.)

Sperm whales organize themselves into temporary aggregations of
ten
to thirty adult females and their offspring, with smaller permanent subgroups breaking away from the larger groups and rejoining them at various times. In their paper, Evans and her team put forward no connection between this family organization and the “why” of the strandings. When talking with the media, though, Evans noted that the whales probably beached because of a kind of emotional contagion: the original whale or whales became stranded for reasons related to distress or injury, and family members followed because they refused to abandon their kin.

This explanation for the sperm-whale stranding is tantalizing, and matches up with events in other whale species. When pilot whales strand, says Ingrid Visser of the Orca Research Trust in New Zealand, other pilot whales arrive to inspect what is going on; if rescuers try to herd them away, they become quite stubborn. “If we tried to get them to move past without stopping, they would fight to go back to the dead animal,” Visser told the journal
New Scientist
. “I do not know if they understand death but they do certainly appear to grieve—based on their behaviors.”

Dolphins strand in big numbers, too, and scientists agree there is no single factor that explains why. Between January 1 and March 7, 2012, 189 dolphins stranded on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, far in excess of the annual average of 38. One factor could be Cape Cod’s hook shape, which may trap the dolphins in shallow waters—but a permanent feature of the landscape cannot account for a single year’s spike in strandings. Nor can Cape Cod’s topography explain the dolphin strandings that occur elsewhere. Causes of strandings, including the military’s use of sonar, which may disorient the dolphins’ navigational abilities, are hotly debated. In short, mass marine-mammal strandings are not well understood. Social ties, even social mourning, may help explain some of the whale and dolphin strandings, but these factors offer only a partial answer to a disturbing mystery.

So far, I’ve considered only cetaceans, but questions about mourning apply to nonmammals as well. Sea turtles are reptiles, and gorgeous ones at that. In their swimming grace, they seem wholly unlike the awkward-gaited land turtles with which most of us are more familiar. On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, a spot nicknamed Turtle Beach attracts numerous endangered sea turtles. Residents and visitors a few years back came to
know
and love a turtle they dubbed Honey Girl. Great sadness ensued when Honey Girl was found slaughtered (cruelly, by human hands) on the beach. Grieving residents set up a memorial to Honey Girl that featured a large photograph of her. Turtlelovers flooded the memorial, but an unexpected visitor showed up too. A large male sea turtle hauled himself out of the water and made his way up the beach straight toward the photograph. There he parked himself, in the sand, head oriented toward the image of Honey Girl. Judging a turtle’s gaze as best humans can, observers concluded that he stared hard at the picture for hours.

Was the male grieving for his mate? All along, we have considered how we might come to discern a wild animal’s emotions; doesn’t this question only increase in complexity when dealing with a reptile? A turtle is, after all, many evolutionary eons away from us primates, and indeed from any mammal—it is a creature cold in the bone to our hot in the blood, as psychologist Anthony Rose puts it. When we posit that a turtle is grief-stricken (as televised news reports did in the case of Honey Girl’s presumed mate), aren’t we imposing romanticized notions upon a species that operates on instinct?

We will never know with certainty that Honey Girl’s mate mourned her on the beach, or even that he knew the photographic image depicted Honey Girl. Clues do suggest that something was going on in the male’s mind, something more than a mere attraction to novelty on the beach. His straight-arrow path to the memorial, and the quality of his stillness during his hours in front of it, are notable. Would he have behaved the same way had he encountered a sand sculpture of Honey Girl roughly the same size as the photo, or some other large novel object unrelated to Honey Girl? Short of jetting to Oahu to run a controlled experiment, I cannot say for sure. Whatever that turtle was up to at Honey Girl’s memorial, though, it’s clear to me that he was acting out of choice, behaving in a realm that stretches beyond mere survival activity.

My own experience with tortoises, and turtles, emerges from less exotic locales. I regularly encounter them on roadways as they amble across lanes of traffic, unaware of the imminent risk of becoming brightly colored bits of roadkill. Turtle rescue gives me a thrill, I admit: a quick carry from midroad to the safer verge for the smaller, amiable ones, a behind-the-shell foot-shuffle to guide the bigger, hissy ones (while
avoiding
their snap-rapid jaws). One summer day, after a quickly executed pullover onto a highway’s shoulder, I joined in epic battle with a magnificent snapper poised on the edge of trouble. Plucking the creature from the path of predatory vehicles, I set her (or him) down on grass, and reoriented her toward safer pastures. Back she wheeled, heading once more for the thick ribbon of cars. Perhaps seeking a watery oasis across the road, and thus set to “instinct,” she resisted all aid. Finally, carrying her aloft, I plunged through the smelly and brackish roadside ditch water (sacrificing clean sneakers and pride, as passing drivers gaped) and placed her out of harm’s way. Self-contained, methodical, stoic: that’s a turtle’s nature. “Eat, Move, Mate” would be the turtle world’s best-selling book and movie title. Wouldn’t it? So I once assumed. But, applying the questions raised by the Honey Girl anecdote, I now think it lacks rigor to assume a single “turtle nature.” Tortoises and turtles, I’m learning, not only come in diverse species and sizes, on land and on sea, but behave in ways that go beyond the instinctual.

Consider the tortoise who aimed to help a companion in distress. Here again we benefit from the craze for videotaping the actions of any animal that is cute, comic, or doing something unexpected. In this clip, a tortoise lies canted on its side, legs angled uselessly to the sky and unable to right himself (or herself). A second tortoise approaches. Tortoise B pushes his face right up near A’s body, perhaps to assess the situation, then begins gently to push on A. Nothing much happens at first, but B continues to labor with purpose and precision. Once A begins to tilt back toward the ground, he wheels his legs, thus adding his own force to B’s. When A regains his quadruped stance, the pair moves off together, slowly. With a video of unknown origin like this one, it’s possible that viewers, including me, have been suckered. Could Tortoise A have been placed on his side by a person eager to offer a dramatic scene to a YouTube-addicted world? And what about ethics? Shouldn’t the videographer have helped Tortoise A early on, even before Tortoise B stepped in? Even though the circumstances surrounding this video aren’t clear, the inventive—and successful—problem-solving behaviors shown by Tortoise B are striking.

As I remarked in writing about goats and chickens in the prologue, what we notice in the animals around us is set, to some significant
degree,
by our expectations. We may not even think to look for mourning when a turtle lose a partner. We may not think to look at turtle behavior very closely at all. Yet to be ruled by our assumptions leads to missed opportunities, a lesson brought home by Verlyn Klinkenborg’s fictional tortoise in his novel
Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile
. Timothy was born among the tangy salt smells of Turkey and transported to England on a ship. What Klinkenborg reveals, through Timothy, is that we humans don’t understand other animals nearly as well as we like to think.

Timothy offers an ethnography of sorts, a view of the
Homo sapiens
who weathered the eighteenth-century English winter in ways that are peculiar to Timothy’s sensibility: “Humans of Selborne wake all winter. Above ground, eating and eating. . . . Huddled close to their fires. Fanning the ashes. Guarding the spark. Never a lasting silence for them. Never more than a one-night rest.” Reflecting further on the human condition, Timothy finds little to envy: “Barely able to witness what is not human. Always conjuring with the separateness of their species. Separate creation. Special dominion. Embarrassed by signs of their animal nature.” More than anything, Timothy is flummoxed by humans’ drive to measure, categorize, and rigidly label the natural world, all the while puffed up with the resolute certainty of their understanding. All through his notes and descriptions, the human Gilbert White (a real-life English naturalist of the eighteenth century who wrote about tortoises) refers to Timothy as “he.” White has never seen any evidence to suggest that Timothy is anything other than male, so he leaps to a conclusion. “No eggs buried under the monk’s rhubarb,” Timothy reflects, “or hidden at the foot of the muscadine vine. None laid on the grass-plot. No preening, no dalliance. . . . And so Mr. White has always supposed that I am male.”

As Klinkenborg’s narrative reveals, Timothy isn’t male. She is full of surprises, both about her sex and about her ways of living in the world. I am drawn to this novel because it mirrors perfectly what we are coming to grasp more acutely in animal-behavior science more clearly than ever before: We must look at animals’ actions with fresh eyes and thoughts unconstrained by expectations.

When in 1994 animal behaviorist Gordon Burghardt visited the National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, he stopped at the enclosure
of
a Nile soft-shelled turtle named Pigface. Enclosed alone, Pigface had by that time lived at the zoo for fifty years. (Reading that statistic, I had to stop for a moment and let it sink in: five decades captive.) Burghardt had looked at Pigface before, but this time he did a double take: Pigface was playing with a basketball. The turtle swam through the water, batting the ball with his (or her) nose and chasing it with great energy. This snapshot of turtle play invited Burghardt to think in a new way about the behavioral repertoire of reptiles.

In the twenty-first century, we tend to veer between two poles in thinking about creatures of Pigface’s ilk. We may conclude that the male Hawaiian sea turtle was mourning his mate, Honey Girl, or we may look at turtles and tortoises much like the fictional Gilbert White does, boxed in by assumptions that their lives are circumscribed by the “eat, move, mate” circuit. I don’t think that the Honey Girl anecdote proves the existence of turtle grief, but like Pigface and his play behavior did for Gordon Burghardt, it should shake us into a realization: We won’t have a hope of finding turtle grief until we look for it.

10

NO BOUNDARIES

CROSS-SPECIES GRIEF

The bulky gray body, with its huge ears and dangling trunk, walked in a big open field beside a smaller, white romping one. Tarra and Bella were out for a walk. Side by side, day after day, they roamed the open acres of the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. They even took swims together. The trust that Bella the dog felt for her friend was evident when she allowed Tarra to caress her stomach with one massive foot.

Tarra bonded with the stray dog Bella all on her own, without any urging from her human caretakers. For eight years, the two were fast friends. And thanks to television and the Internet, they became a global video sensation. That two creatures of such disparate size, indeed of such different natures, shared an enduring friendship was uplifting news for many people. Tarra and Bella remind us that when individuals will it so, bonds of friendship may transcend even extreme dissimilarities.

Then one day in 2011, Bella was attacked by a wild animal, or possibly more than one. The attackers were almost certainly coyotes, and they killed her. Though circumstantial, the evidence that could be gathered points to two conclusions: Tarra was the first to discover Bella’s body, and she carried her dead friend back near the barn where the two had spent happy times. No person at the sanctuary witnessed Tarra’s discovery or carrying of Bella’s body, so I cannot affirm the truth of these conclusions, but here are the known facts: Tarra and Bella were seen together on October 24, 2011. The next morning, and indeed through the day, Bella was nowhere to be found. Sanctuary workers began a search for her that yielded no results, and continued it the next day. Bella’s
prolonged
absence was so unusual that people at the sanctuary began to fear the worst.