Being Them

Being Them

   Part of reading the recent book by Carl Safina, mentioned in the last post (his book is Beyond Words, What Animals Think and Feel) is that of his own changed outlook.  As he spends time with Cynthia Moss in Africa, now in her 70s and a lifelong observer of elephant behavior, she tells him: Comparing elephants to people -- I don't find it helpful.  I find it much more interesting trying to understand an animal as itself.  His realization?  ...I am stunned.  As a lifelong student of animal behavior, I'd long ago concluded that many social animals --certainly birds and animals-- are fundamentally like us.  I've come to see how elephants are "like us."  I am writing this book about how other animals are "like us"...My task now --a much harder task, a much deeper task-- would be to endeavor to see who animals simply are...like us or not.  We look at the world through our own eyes, naturally.  But by looking from the inside out, we see an inside out world.

    There was much he discovered.  A matriarch (the lead female elephant), once killed, leaves a gap in knowledge, often knowing decades-old paths to water, water that is sometimes hundreds of miles away, crucial during times of drought (a female usually doesn't reach full body size until age 25 and can have babies until past 55).  But there are other effects.  In an article in National Wildlife, writer Lesley Evans Ogden wrote:  The animals live in what is known as a fission-fusion society, their affiliations changing with such factors as time of day, season and scarcity of food or water.  An adult female might begin the day feeding with a dozen other elephants, coalesce with 25 a few hours later, join 100 in the middle of the day, spend the afternoon with 12 and then settle down for the evening with just her young.  Research suggests that matriarch leadership matters most in stressful times... experiments to test the response of elephant families to the recorded roars of lions—an adult elephant’s main nonhuman predators.  Female elephants aged 60-plus listened longer to the roars of the more dangerous male lion than to those of a lioness.  Older matriarchs also coaxed family members into more frequent and compact protective huddles than did younger ones.  In an experiment testing responses to human voices, McComb found that elephants of all ages could distinguish between Maasai and Kamba ethnic languages.  Maasai sometimes spear elephants if they come into conflict with Maasai cattle, whereas Kamba have an agricultural lifestyle that doesn’t pose a direct threat to elephants.  Elephant families were much more likely to form defensive huddles to protect themselves and engage in investigative smelling when they heard male Maasai speakers than when they heard male Kamba speakers.  McComb also found that families with older matriarchs reacted differently to the voices of Maasai men versus boys, hinting at the advantages of matriarchal age.  “Families with older matriarchs are better at social discrimination,” McComb says.
   
   When an elephant is poached, notes author Safina: Their matriarch's death triggers, first, devastating psychological consequences.  Some families disintegrate.  Elephants have extraordinarily close care bonds with their young and breaking them causes intense suffering.  Babies orphaned at under two years of age die soon; orphans under ten die young.  If they still need milk, they are almost always out of luck.  Any family member with milk has her own nursing child, and an elephant can't produce enough milk for two growing elephants...older orphans sometimes wander in bunched-up, leaderless groups.  Survivors, carrying traumatic memories, become fearful and sometimes more aggressive toward humans--which spurs human antangonism toward elephants.

   Does any of this sound familiar?  Returning soldiers with PTSD, families in tough neighborhoods who have watched their father/mother/children shot and killed, fleeing refugees who have lost a leading member of their family, even police officers (now feeling as if they're under ever more scrutiny...as Milwaukee police chief Ed Flynn told Bloomberg Businessweek, "We have to toggle back and forth between being the Peace Corps and the Marine Corps.").  In those cases and many more, it is easy to categorize the situation into a standard one, a group one, a feeling of "us" and "them."  What's "wrong" with them?  Poor things.  Too bad, but it's time for them to move forward.  Certainly, having common things readily available, from food to warm shelter, is nice, as is returning home to safety.  But beyond the inside observation, perhaps as author Safina notes, it's equally --or more-- important to view individuals as just that, individuals, each with their own lives and their own problems and their own efforts to readjust.  From the loneliness of an elderly person dying in a sterile environment with few if any visitors, to a child suddenly losing his parents to an accident, lives change.  And perhaps our job in today's world is to not let the numbness grow, to rally for the positive and rail against the negative...to empathize and try to understand how difficult it just might.  And it is difficult (on both sides), especially with what seems a never-ending wave of negativity.  But if that person, or those people, were you, how would you feel?  Suddenly, you are standing on the other side of the glass, being looked at, being judged, and all the time not able to explain a word of how you got there (maybe because you can't understand it yourself).  It might never happen, or it might happen in an instant...that is life.

   On a closing note, author Safina commented: The different species are like people who knew each other in high school but have since gone on to different lives and livelihoods.  Lots in common.  Common roots.  A bond, perhaps neglected.  We are all so similar under the skin.  Four limbs, the same bones, the same organs, the same origins, and lots of shared history.  And between first breath and final gasp, we endeavor toward a common quest: to live, to raise our young, to find space enough for our lives, to survive the confronting dangers, to do what it takes, to the best of our abilities, to live out the mystery and opportunity of finding ourselves somehow in existence.