The Age of Empathy (21 page)

There is an abundance of stories of human swimmers
saved by dolphins or whales, sometimes protected against sharks, or lifted to the surface the same way these animals support one another. I find help that crosses the species barrier most intriguing, including cases of apes saving birds, or of a seal rescuing a dog. The latter happened in public view in a river in Middlesbrough, England, when an old dog that could barely keep its head above the water was nudged to shore by a seal. According to an eyewitness, “A seal popped up out of nowhere. He came behind it and actually pushed him. This dog would not have survived if it hadn’t been for that seal.”

Of course, helping tendencies hardly evolved to benefit other species, but once in existence they can be freely employed for such purposes. This also holds for human helping when we bestow aid on sea mammals; for example, when angry activists defend whales against hunters (it’s hard to imagine them doing the same on behalf of giant jellyfish) or when we rescue stranded whales. People come out in droves to keep them wet and wrap towels around them, and to push them back into the ocean when the tide rises. This requires enormous effort, so is an act of genuine altruism on our species’ part.

In one of the more striking descriptions, a whale seemed to understand the human effort, which would suggest perspective-taking. To take advantage of received help is one thing; to actually be grateful is quite another.

On a cold December Sunday in 2005, a female humpback whale was spotted off the California coast, entangled in the nylon ropes used by crab fishermen. She was about fifty feet long. A rescue team was dispirited by the sheer amount of ropes, about twenty of them, some around the tail, one in the whale’s mouth. The ropes were digging into the blubber, leaving cuts. The only way to free the whale was to dive under the surface to cut away the ropes. Divers spent about one hour doing so. It was a herculean job, obviously not without risk given the power of a whale’s tail. The most remarkable part came when the whale realized it was free. Instead of leaving the scene, she hung around. The huge animal swam in a large circle, carefully approaching
every diver separately. She nuzzled one, then moved on to the next, until she had touched all of them. James Moskito described the experience:

We’ll never know what the whale was saying or whether it was truly grateful, which would require it to understand human effort. Do whales fit the co-emergence hypothesis? Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), some animals are just too large for experiments, even relatively simple ones such as the mirror test. This test poses already enough of a challenge with elephants, which are both smaller than whales and land-dwelling.

We were just lucky to have Happy.

The website for a conference titled “What Makes Us Human?” featured videotaped street interviews with Americans about its chosen theme. Typical answers included “Being human means that we care about others,” or “We’re the only ones sensitive to each other’s feelings.” These were laypeople, of course, but often I hear the same from fellow scientists. Michael Gazzaniga, a leading neuroscientist, starts an essay about the human brain as follows:

True, it is human to express such sentiments verbally, as is the invention of the cellphone, but why assume that the sentiments themselves are new? Do apes truly wish one another a bad day at every turn? This remains the standard line, though, even among scientists who appreciate the long evolutionary history of the human brain, including old areas devoted to affection and attachment. I can go on and on offering counterexamples, but am afraid that they’re becoming repetitious. I also don’t want to give the impression that all I ever see is nice behavior. There’s plenty of one-upmanship, competition, jealousy, and nastiness among animals. Power and hierarchy are such a central part of primate society that conflict is always around the corner. Ironically, the most striking expressions of cooperation occur during fights, when primates defend one another, or in their aftermath, when victims receive solace. This means that for many expressions of kindness, something disagreeable had to happen first.

But having said this, the overwhelming evidence that animals, at least some of the time, “wish each other well” is the proverbial elephant in the room during any debate about human nature. I love this English expression, which refers to an obvious truth of massive proportions that is ignored because of its inconvenience. People willfully suppress knowledge most have had since childhood, which is that animals do have feelings and do care about others. How and why half the world drops this conviction once they grow beards or breasts will always baffle me, but the result is the common fallacy that we are unique in this regard. Human we are, and humane as well, but the idea that the latter may be older than the former, that our kindness is part of a much larger picture, still has to catch on.

I am not even particularly interested in demonstrating animal empathy, because for me the critical issue is no longer
whether
they have it, but
how
it works. My suspicion is that it works exactly the same way in humans and other animals, even though humans may
add a few complexities. It is the core mechanism that matters, and the circumstances that turn empathy on or off. I am irresistibly drawn, therefore, toward the great beast in the room, wanting to poke and prod it so as to determine what it is made of. Hopefully, not like the six blind men from Indostan, who couldn’t agree on any of its parts, but more like a scientist who recruits the knowledge of his day to come up with an account of how one member of a species gets to care about another.

Elephants are well known for this. They don’t need a genetic relationship to help one another, such as the aforementioned blind elephant and her friend, both of whom had come to the park from different sources. The same is true in the wild, where unrelated elephants sometimes help one another to their feet as in the description below of a dying matriarch, named Eleanor, on a Kenyan game reserve:

What fascinates me in these and other cases is how elephants manifest the two-lane path to targeted helping. First of all, there is the arousal, marked by stress signals, such as loud vocalizing, urination, streaming glands, raised tails, and spread ears, which indicates emotional contagion. Second, there is the insightful part, where appropriate assistance is being offered, such as lifting a three-thousand-kilogram fallen comrade to her feet. In a separate case, American wildlife biologist
Cynthia Moss witnessed the response after a poacher’s bullet had entered the lungs of a young female, Tina. When her knees started to buckle, members of Tina’s family leaned into her so as to keep her upright. She died nonetheless, upon which one of the others “went off and collected a trunkfull of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.”

This last little detail is telling, since it suggests an attempted solution. It may not be the right solution, but isn’t it the thought that counts? Elephants normally don’t stuff food into one another’s mouths, so why start with one who has just died? And why not put it in Tina’s ear or, for that matter, her behind? It’s the correspondence problem again: The helper seemed aware which part of Tina’s body normally would accept food. There are similar observations, such as an older bull bringing water from a nearby spring to a dying companion, spraying it over the other bull’s head and ears, and trying to get him to drink. This is highly unusual behavior and suggests an insightful approach to the other’s problem.

Thousands of people watched a television nature program in which an adopted baby elephant had slid into a mud hole and couldn’t get out. The surrounding elephants became highly agitated. The noise of trumpeting and rumbling was overwhelming, with everyone going into high gear. The matriarch and another female started working on the problem, one of them climbing into the hole on her knees, while the mud was creating deadly suction on the calf. Both females worked together, placing their trunks and tusks underneath the calf until the suction was broken and the calf scrambled out of the hole. When this film clip is shown to a human audience, they clap as soon as the calf stands on dry land, shaking off the mud like a big floppy dog.

Most such observations concern African elephants, which are actually quite different from Asians—they’re not only a different species, but a separate genus. Asian elephants do the same, however. Here’s one of Josh’s e-mails from Thailand:

Unlike helping among primates, which has been studied from many angles, for elephants we only have stories. But then, those stories come from so many different sources and are internally so consistent that I have no doubt that being thick-skinned doesn’t keep these animals from being extraordinarily sensitive. In fact, Josh’s project in Thailand aims not only to measure how semi-free ranging elephants rally around distressed parties, such as a youngster freaked out by a snake, but also the arousal of the surrounding group. The mournful bellowing by Mae Mai that set off vocalizations by others is a case in point. This gets at emotional contagion, which may be more visible in elephants than most animals, such as when elephants around a
frightened herd member stretch their tails and flap their ears. In extreme cases, they empty their bladders and bowels: an outward sign of emotional engagement that is hard to miss.

This also explains our interest in the reaction of elephants to mirrors. We teamed up with Diana Reiss, who had tested the dolphins before, to see if we could get the same thing going with elephants. It sounded simple, until we reflected on the kind of mirror needed. We were definitely thinking big, bigger than an earlier study according to which elephants fail the rouge test. Looking at that study’s description, it’s not hard to see a few problems. First of all, the mirror was much smaller than an elephant’s body. Second, it was placed on the ground at a distance, so that even with the best of vision (which elephants may not have) attention must have been drawn mostly to the reflection of the animal’s feet. And finally, the mirror was put outside the enclosure, separated by bars, so that there was no way for the elephant to smell or touch it, or feel behind it, which many animals like to do before interacting further. In short, the setup kept the animal from fully exploring this unusual contraption.

We received excellent cooperation from the Bronx Zoo, which built us what we like to call a “jumbo-sized” mirror. It was a giant plastic mirror of eight by eight feet glued to a metal frame with a sturdy cover, so that we could block its view on days we weren’t using it. We didn’t want the elephants seeing the mirror unless we could videotape their reactions. The mirror had a tiny lipstick camera in the middle so that we could film everything close up. Most of all, the mirror was elephantproof. The animals could smell and touch it as much as they wanted, and even look behind it, although we felt they were a little too enthusiastic doing so.

Maxine walked up to the mirror and slung her trunk over it, after which she began climbing up, standing on her hind legs so that she could peek over the wall on which the mirror was mounted. Elephants don’t climb, as everyone knows, and this was the first time keepers with decades of experience had seen anything like it. The wall withstood
the couple of tons leaning on top of it; otherwise our experiment might have ended then and there with a pursuit of Maxine through New York traffic!