How Animals Grieve (10 page)

A near-burial by elephants must have been remarkable to witness. Was this interrupted act an attempt to protect the deceased elephant’s body from harm? Why have other long-term elephant researchers not reported (at least to my knowledge) such behavior? Elephant burial of a body cannot be a common act; too many field hours by scientists have accumulated for such a behavior to have been missed were it routine. But it’s impossible to dismiss Moss’s account, given her intimate knowledge of these elephants.

At the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee, elephants are also known intimately, in this case by their caretakers. Elephants’ past histories (mostly in the entertainment or zoo world), how they are adjusting to their new life, with whom they make friends, and how they express their personalities are all noted. Knowledgeable and caring eyes witness subtleties of elephant behavior, then share these with the larger elephant-loving community by posting them on the sanctuary’s website, which has a section devoted to each elephant resident. I have developed a special fondness for the elephant Tina’s story.

Tina was born in 1970 at a zoo in Portland, Oregon. At two years of age, she was sold to a game farm in British Columbia. For fourteen years, she lived alone in a barn, accompanied only by a Saint Bernard dog named Susie. Once in a while, she enjoyed the overnight visits of the owner’s children to the barn. How long must those fourteen years have felt to Tina, who endured so much solitude day by day and hour by hour? Finally, Tina was joined by another elephant, Tumpe. These two females were allowed to remain together even after the farm was sold and turned into the Greater Vancouver Zoo. Again a zoo resident, Tina at least had another elephant for company—until 2002, when Tumpe was sold to yet another zoo, this one in the United States. Tina was alone again.

At this point, Tina wasn’t in the best of health. She weighed too much, and her feet gave her problems, conditions that often beset captive el
ephants.
The Canadian zoo staff not only cared for Tina, they cared about her, enough that they chose to release her from the severe physical and emotional constraints of life in the zoo. In August 2003, Tina was transported three thousand miles to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. There she discovered what she had so long been forced to live without: the sustaining company of others of her own kind.

This happy outcome didn’t come easily. It required patient coaxing from emotional coaches of two species: human and elephant. After all, Tina had not been around more than one elephant at a time; suddenly she had to contend with a host of incoming social signals and to negotiate a web of elephant relationships. By early 2004, Tina still was hesitant in some of her social interactions. When more than one elephant would enter the group stall, out she would go.

One night in mid-January, first the elephant Tarra and then another named Jenny came into the stall and began to rub up against Tina. Though Tina moved into the next stall, she elected to remain near both females. When Jenny barged right on in to Tina’s stall, Tina acted possessive toward her ball and her hay, but she eventually relaxed. This was a step forward. That same month, a bond bloomed between Tina and Winkie. The caretakers noticed that Winkie seemed to want a secretive social tie with Tina. It had taken Winkie over two years to integrate into the sanctuary’s herd. Now, she seemed to crave affection from Tina, yet at the same time hid evidence of it from human eyes.

This behavior is understandable in light of Winkie’s own history. Wild-born in Burma, she was captured at the age of one and transported to a US zoo, where the staff managed her behavior with harsh displays of dominance. It took Winkie years to unlearn the toughness she assumed at the zoo, but it did happen; when she began to stand close to and touch Tina, her gentleness was encouraged by the sanctuary caretakers.

By March, even as Tina’s and Winkie’s pleasurable interactions continued, Tina was developing a special bond with Sissy. Like Winkie, Sissy had been wild-caught at the age of one, in her case in Thailand. Separated from her family and confined to zoos, Sissy experienced a complicated and sad series of events. Swept away in a flood at one Texas zoo, she was beaten by keepers at another. Nonetheless, at the Elephant Sanctuary, Sissy acted in a gentle manner. For emotional security, she
carried
a tire with her most everywhere she went. But she loved the company of elephants too.

At first Tina made some missteps, pushing, pulling, and poking Sissy in a less than affectionate way. But Sissy’s patience was notable, and by April the two elephants were mutually affectionate. During this period, the condition of Tina’s feet began to improve markedly. The coincidence of Tina’s physical and emotional recoveries makes a lot of sense; as with people, the body and the spirit sometimes heal together. Sanctuary staff thought creatively about how to help Tina, in June even going so far as to take molds of her front feet so that custom-made shoes could be constructed for them. If her tender feet were protected, the staff thought, maybe Tina would begin to explore the richness of the sanctuary grounds. The acres of streams and mud and other mini-habitats belonged to Tina as much as to the other elephants.

These hopes for Tina’s future did not come to pass. In July, she died unexpectedly. Under treatment for some minor issues involving loss of motor skills and reduced appetite, Tina had seemed basically fine, and at no time was her situation considered to be life-threatening. She simply collapsed, and she lacked the muscular control to stand even when hoisted to her feet. Lying on a mattress of hay, she stopped breathing.

Tina’s human caretakers were in shock and mourned for Tina that day and for a considerable time afterward. It is Tarra’s, Winkie’s, and Sissy’s responses that I want to focus on, though. Tarra was the first elephant to visit Tina’s body. Years later, Tarra would become a media star because of her tight bond with a dog named Bella. The “Tarra and Bella” story went viral, spurred by television coverage on
CBS Sunday Morning
and the book
Unlikely Friendships
(see
chapter 10
). But now, in 2004, Tarra had just lost her elephant friend Tina. So had Winkie and Sissy, and it was those two elephants who stood over Tina’s body that entire first night and part of the next day. They refused any chance to leave to take food or water, or a walk. Sissy stood quietly, but Winkie did not; her emotion was apparent in her distraught and repeated prodding of Tina’s body.

The next day, sanctuary caretakers gathered to bury Tina. Tarra and Winkie stood at the edge of the grave, where they remained, joined by Sissy, throughout that evening and the next day. Once again, distinct individual differences in mourning were apparent: Tarra was vocal and
asked
for attention from her human caretakers, Sissy stood vigil, and Winkie paced stiffly around.

On the following day, before moving on to another part of the Elephant Sanctuary, Sissy made a choice that surprised the people who witnessed it. She placed her beloved tire, her security blanket, on her friend’s grave. There she left it, an elephant memorial offering, for several days.

6

DO MONKEYS MOURN?

Toque macaques on the island of Sri Lanka live in a visual paradise. The green tree canopy stretches far, and in it the monkeys use their grasping hands to reel in tasty caterpillars suspended from the trees on long, thin threads. The forest boasts lush fruits and a small lake dotted with another favorite monkey delicacy, lily flowers.

Even in the midst of this bounty, the toque monkeys confront dangers, some external to their group and some within it. In a documentary called
Clever Monkeys
, naturalist David Attenborough explains one specific cost of low rank. Only high-status monkeys may hang from tree branches over the water, reaching down to pluck lilies from the surface; their lower-ranking groupmates must enter the water directly and dive for roots and bulbs. The problem isn’t only that it takes time and technique to learn how to do this sort of thing, it’s also the presence of concrete danger: a large monitor lizard who makes his home in the lake.

Aware of the reptilian danger, the monkeys do post a lakeside guard when low-rankers go into the water. The guard’s job is to send up a cry of alarm when the big lizard is sighted. With a vigilant guard on duty, this method works well enough. On the day in question, however, the guard dozes off as a young monkey is foraging in the lake. By the time other monkeys spy the lizard and cry out, it is too late. The camera captures the monitor trundling off with that peculiar side-to-side lizard shuffle, a dead monkey clamped in its jaws. No one follows. The monkey’s group-mates attempt no rescue. The lizard isn’t mobbed, the monkey isn’t visibly mourned.

Later,
another toque macaque is shown dead beneath a tree, the loser in a male-male fight for group leadership. His limbs are stiff, his mouth stretched in a mild death grimace. His groupmates approach, including some of his offspring; seven or eight monkeys at once crowd the body. Some lean in and take a sniff, others touch the corpse—when one monkey touches the dead one’s locked-upright hand, the hand jerks rigidly back into place. After a while, the curious monkeys move on. The dead leader, beneath the tree, is abandoned.

The monkeys’ responses to these two deaths may represent commonplace scenarios among wild animals. The young monkey’s death happens swiftly, and the body departs the scene in the predator’s jaws. What, if anything, the surviving monkeys think or feel about the event is opaque to us. In the case of the older leader dispatched by his rival, the group response is notable. The body is explored through sight, smell, and touch. To a human observer, it’s clear that the monkeys who surround the body know something is anomalous: they surely aren’t confusing their dead groupmate with a resting, sleeping, or wounded animal. There are no outward signs of grief.

In the wild, members of tightly knit primate groups experience a great deal of loss. As reported by primatologist Jeanne Altmann in her now-classic book
Baboon Mothers and Infants
, the mortality rate for Kenya’s Amboseli baboons approaches 30 percent per annum in the first two years of life. After that, it plunges, but then it rises again, and in adulthood, females suffer a death rate of 12 percent. Though these numbers are specific to certain monkeys during a certain slice of time, demographic profiles suggest they are not unusual for wild animal populations more generally.

Experiencing the death of a groupmate, then, or even of one’s offspring or other close kin or social partner, is far from rare for group-living wild animals. If we think about mourning and grief in terms of evolutionary theory, a negative hypothesis (the “null hypothesis,” in scientific terms) may come to mind: Wild animals faced with the challenges of survival and reproduction should not expend time or energy on the expression of grief when a group member dies. A weaker version of this same hypothesis would be that wild animals should expend time or energy on grieving only when the resources required for survival are available in sufficient abundance.

If
a death provokes no particular emotional response, might this absence of grief be explained as an energy-saving strategy that is under the control of natural selection? If so, might some of the survivors feel emotion but simply ignore it? Or are no emotions felt? By observation alone, without the invasive measures of stress physiology, we cannot distinguish between these alternatives. (We’ll consider what those invasive measures do teach us in a moment.)

If any toque macaque is likely to mourn the death of the youngster plucked from the lake by the monitor lizard, it would be his mother. The mother-infant relationship in macaques, as in almost all primates, is exquisitely close. Research shows that in rhesus macaques, a close relative of the toques, mothers and infants share what’s called reciprocal face-to-face communication. This suite of behaviors between moms and babies involves smacking of the lips, mouth-mouth contacts, and, most significant of all, sustained mutual gaze.

Think of how important mutual gaze is in our own species, as bonds develop between babies and their caretakers. A memory so vivid that I’ve carried it for nineteen years comes from my daughter Sarah’s infancy. It was a Saturday, exactly four weeks since her birth. I was carrying Sarah in my arms across the street in front of our house, on my way to pay a welcome call on new neighbors. When I glanced down at her, bundled up against the chill November air, she locked eyes with me and let loose with a huge smile. It was what developmental psychologists call a social smile, the kind of aware, intentional smile that is set apart from the reflexive mouth movements of a newborn. To me, a tired but otherwise besotted new mother, the mutual gaze and first social smile meant one thing: my baby was loving me back.

The contours of the emotional relationship between monkey mothers and babies aren’t well studied. It’s reasonable to expect, though, that gaze and facial expressions shared across the generations both enhance infant survival and cause feelings of comfort or pleasure to flow within the pair. Newborn monkey babies cling to their mothers’ bellies; in the beginning, the mother is the infant monkey’s universe, the source of all warmth, nutrition, and safety. For the mother, infant care is all-consuming. She starts out carrying the infant on her body around the clock (except in a few monkey species where dads and siblings help
out).
Moms may bounce their babies, play with them, smack their lips in affection toward them, and try to catch their babies’ eye to facilitate that mutual gaze.

That many monkey mothers lose their infants early on is something we know from the mortality profiles. When this happens, some mothers simply put down the body, or leave it where it fell, and carry on with their lives. No visible grief seems to accompany these acts of abandonment. Other mothers, though, continue to carry their infants’ dead bodies. Could this carrying be an expression of maternal grief ?