Mad Cows and Livid Lambs
> Will Storr
> In a tiny village in rural Assam, two terrified children will
> tonight sleep in a tree house. It doesn't matter how much their
> mother scolds them; there's no way they're going to bed down there.
> Not after what happened. They can still remember that night, of
> course - being picked up by their mother, and how hard she covered
> their mouths with her hands to stop them screaming. They can
> remember the other sounds, too.
> The elephants had come in from the forest again. Then they saw one,
> a vast dark hulk looming out of the black towards their door. Their
> Dad tried to push it away. That's when the elephant carried him
> round the side of the house and killed him.
> Elephants haven't always behaved like this. But in recent years, in
> India and all over Africa, too, some menacing change has come over
> them. And not just elephants - it's almost any species. This
> disquieting pattern has only recently been detected, in part
> because it is so disparate and weird. But it's now widely accepted
> that the relationship between humans and animals is changing. One
> of the world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal
> behaviour) believes that a critical point has been crossed and
> animals are beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten,
> evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and
> made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to
> turn on us. And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists
> that it has earned its own acronym: HAC - 'human-animal conflict'.
> It's happening everywhere. Authorities in America and Canada are
> alarmed at the increase in attacks on humans by mountain lions,
> cougars, foxes and wolves. Romania and Colombia have seen a rise in
> bear maulings. In Mexico, in just the past few months, there's been
> a spate of deadly shark attacks with The LA Times reporting that,
> 'the worldwide rate in recent years is double the average of the
> previous 50'. America and Sierra Leone have witnessed assaults and
> killings by chimps who, according to New Scientist, 'almost never
> attack people'. In Uganda, they have started killing children by
> biting off their limbs then disembowelling them.
> There has been a surge in wolf attacks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
> Russia and France. In Australia, there has been a run of dingo
> killings, and crocodile violence is up. In Beijing, injuries from
> cats and dogs have swelled by 34 per cent, year-on-year. In
> America, the number of humans killed by pet dogs has increased
> sharply since 2000. In Australia, dog attacks are up 20 per cent.
> In Britain, nearly 4,000 people needed hospital treatment for dog
> bites in 2007, a figure that has doubled in the past four years. In
> Bombay, petrified residents are being slaughtered in ever-
> increasing numbers by leopards, leading J. C. Daniel, a leopard
> specialist, to comment, 'We have to study why the animal is coming
> out. It never came out before.' In Edinburgh, in June, there was a
> string of bizarre fox attacks - a pensioner was among the victims.
> In Singapore, residents have been being terrorised by packs of
> macaques. Sharon Chan, a national parks official, told reporters,
> 'It's a very weird situation.'
> The numbers are disturbing enough, but the menacing changes in
> behaviour are especially worrying to scientists. In Australia, the
> biologist Dr Scoresby Shepherd - who pointed out that in areas
> where shark attacks used to happen every three or four decades,
> they are now taking place at least once a year - has suggested that
> sharks are switching their prey to humans. In Los Angeles, Prof Lee
> Fitzhugh has come to the same conclusion about mountain lions. In
> San Francisco, a spate of sea lion assaults lead one local to
> comment, 'I've been swimming here for 70 years and nothing like
> this has happened before.' In Cameroon, for the first time,
> gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They're using
> weapons against us.
> It's easy to see why some suspect revenge. The theory that the
> animals of the three elements are conspiring against us gained
> popularity in 2006, when the Australian television presenter Steve
> Irwin was speared through the heart by a stingray off the north
> Queensland coast. In the aftermath, the phrase 'freak accident' was
> used in news reports. When, just six weeks later, the same thing
> happened to James Bertakis, of Miami (he lived only because, unlike
> Irwin, he didn't pull the barbed sting out), people started
> wondering. Then, in March this year, Judy Kay Zagorski was boating
> on the Florida Keys when a stingray leapt from the water and
> fatally struck her in the face.
> Any sane person might decide that his theory, which posits that
> beasts are working in concert to take revenge on humans, is insane.
> But in the regions where the most research into HAC is being
> carried out, scientists have concluded that revenge for our myriad
> barbarities could indeed be a motive.
> All over Africa, India and parts of south-east Asia, elephants have
> started attacking humans in unprecedented numbers. Not just killing
> - they're rampaging through villages and stomping crops,
> terrorising local populations in any way they can. 'What's
> happening today is extraordinary,' Dr Gay Bradshaw, a world
> authority on elephants, told reporters in 2006. 'Where for
> centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-
> existence, there is now hostility and violence.' Bradshaw is the
> director of the Kerulos Centre for Animal Psychology and Trauma
> Recovery, in Oregon. 'When you see reports of elephants running
> into crops or attacking people, they're highly stressed,' she tells
> me. 'And there are multiple stressors - violence, lack of food,
> lack of water; their families are being broken up; their society is
> collapsing. All of these things are human-derived.'
> Bradshaw describes the elephants as being 'under siege' from the
> locals. But the violence against humans has increased so suddenly,
> and reached such levels, that these traditional factors aren't
> thought to be sufficient to explain it. Bradshaw and her colleagues
> now think that there's been a massive, pan-species psychological
> collapse throughout the world's pachyderms. In essence, we're
> witnessing the dysfunctional shenanigans of a generation of
> depraved elephants. These are individuals who have become
> psychologically fractured after being orphaned at a developmentally
> delicate age or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
> after watching their families being slaughtered.
> 'You could make a parallel between elephants and people who are
> undergoing genocide and war,' Bradshaw says. 'They've gone through
> massive killings and many have sustained culls or severe poaching,
> so they've witnessed the violence and they're traumatised. It's
> critical to understand that when you have an experience at a young
> age, or through adolescence or even as an adult, it enters into the
> brain. In other cases, the normal rearing process is disrupted or
> conducted by distressed parents, so you're creating individuals who
> are mentally challenged.'
> Such claims might be dismissed as so much Disneyfied
> anthropomorphism if Bradshaw did not have the observational,
> psychological and neuroscientific evidence to back them up. And,
> she says, it might not be just in elephants that this critical
> point has been breached. 'I think we're well past the critical
> point,' she says. 'Well past. People are starting to notice these
> atypical behaviours in an array of species.'
> Of the question of elephant revenge, though, she is more cautious.
> 'Put yourself in an elephant's shoes. What's it like living in
> Africa or Asia when you're surrounded by an active threat, not just
> to you but to your family? Let's take, for example, one of the
> things that's happening in Africa. Females are starting to charge
> lorries. Why? It's hard to understand the motive. Perhaps she's
> traumatised. Perhaps it's pre-emptive - they may have a gun. It may
> be self?defence. And other times it may well be revenge. It's not
> that I don't think elephants have the capacity.' Dr Marc Bekoff, a
> leading ethologist, agrees. 'We need to be careful when using that
> sort of language,' he says. 'But I don't think there's any doubt
> that, in certain situations, animals show revenge.'
> At first he thought it was a dream; that shuffling, that banging
> that bulged out of the darkness around him. By the time Michael
> Fitzgerald had roused himself and put on his slippers, he decided
> it was burglars. They were in the garage. He crept forward,
> readying himself for what awaited behind the electric door that was
> slowly, noisily rising. He peered in. It was a badger. Just a
> badger! He'd never seen one so close before. The badger looked up,
> then slowly, calmly walked up to him. 'Pam!' he called to his wife.
> 'Get a camera!' Two minutes later, blood from his arm was spattered
> over his front door.
> 'It was some kind of hell,' Fitzgerald, from Evesham, told the BBC,
> in 2003. 'His razor-blade teeth were around my arm.' Even after he
> had shaken if off, it gave chase, biting his legs and arms. 'I
> never envisaged I would be seeing my own insides,' he said. The
> badger then embarked on an 18-hour rampage around the town.
> Stories like these remind us that there are millions of beasts
> armed with teeth and stingers, who can out-sniff, out-run, out-fly,
> out-fight and out-bite every one of us. The eerie truth is that,
> right now, we're surrounded. As a species, we've been at the top of
> the food chain for so long, we've forgotten that 'humans' are mere
> anthropoid apes and, in distant millennia, we had to fight the
> feral armies to get here. In our hubris, we imagine we're an animal
> apart. For centuries, we've been told by priests and scientists
> that animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking,
> unselfconscious automatons. They're a gift from God, and their
> purpose is to have paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned
> into fancy trousers to be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. Many
> mainstream scientists still warn against anthropomorphism. But it
> doesn't stop the many people who are secretly wondering what's
> really going on behind those inscrutable black eyes? Are the birds
> talking about us? Do lobsters sulk? Can one moose love another? The
> more scientists have discovered about the inner lives of animals,
> the more troubling and strange things have become. 'Things are
> really changing,' acknowledges Bekoff. 'There's a lot of new
> behavioural research, a lot of new neuroscience research that
> demonstrates they are far more complex than was thought. We're not
> inserting into animals something they don't have.'
> Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this gigantic
> paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the capacity
> for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years they've
> been evolving, then why not theirs? 'If you believe in biological
> continuity then, if we have emotions, they have emotions. If we
> have a heart, they have a heart.'
> But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of
> the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be
> misguided sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists
> that animals don't consciously feel pain, and therefore 'make no
> real claims on our sympathy'. When vets and vivisectionists
> anaesthetise their subjects, the argument runs, they're indulging
> in schmaltzy, greetings-card reasoning.
> Dr Paul McDonald, of the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal
> Behaviour, in Sydney, also warns against the sort of talk Bekoff
> persists in. 'There's a temptation to put human emotions into
> animal interactions, which I think is not the way to go,' he says.
> 'The danger is it'll shape your interpretations. Take noisy mynah
> birds, for example. They have a dominance hierarchy, so there's
> often aggressive interactions where one bird appears to beat the
> other up. Through human glasses that could be a punishment or
> something along those lines, where in reality it's about
> maintaining social rank.'
> But McDonald's worldview and his observations seem at odds.
> 'Altruism remains a conundrum,' he says. 'Why do you have so many
> animals helping? Particularly animals that aren't related. If
> you're helping to raise a nephew, at least you're replicating part
> of your genome. But when you're raising a totally unrelated
> individual, that becomes much more difficult - and that happens
> quite commonly.' He points to bell mynah birds, which feed chicks
> in many nests at the same time, even though they may have chicks in
> their own nest. 'That seems very, very strange.'
> Even stranger is the incident Gay Bradshaw reports, of a hero crow
> helping hungry kittens. 'The crow would go get worms and fly down
> and feed them to these starving kittens. Eventually, they became
> friends and played together.'
> And altruism isn't the only documented animal behaviour that was
> once thought to have been purely human. Take empathy and Kuni, the
> bonobo. Kuni watched a starling fly into the glass wall of its
> enclosure and thud to the floor. He picked it up, climbed to the
> top of the tallest tree, stretched the bird's wings out and
> launched it back into the air. When it thudded back down again, the
> ape climbed back down and stood over it for a long time.
> And here's another complex mental state - grief. Elephants, for
> example, stand vigil over the bodies of dead companions for a week,
> before gently covering the corpse with earth. They then visit the
> gravesite for years afterwards, taking turns to handle the bones.
> 'They lift the bones with incredible sensitivity,' says zoologist
> Dr Tammie Matson, the WWF's human-animal conflict specialist. 'It's
> as if they can somehow read something about the elephant that was
> once attached to them.'
> Bekoff, meanwhile, has witnessed a magpie funeral. 'I saw a dead
> magpie on the road and stopped to look at what was happening. One
> magpie went in and touched the corpse and backed away, another
> magpie went in and backed away, then another flew off and brought
> grass back and laid it around the corpse, then another did the
> same.' And then there was the fox funeral. 'This fox had been
> killed by a mountain lion and the next day a female fox found the
> carcass. She covered it up with leaves and pine needles and dirt
> and branches. She stamped it down and stood over it.'
> British neuroscientists have found that sheep can remember at least
> 50 ovine faces, even when they've been separated for years. Cows,
> meanwhile, get anxious. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry
> at Bristol university, has discovered that they have between two
> and four best friends. They also have enemies, bearing grudges for
> years.
> Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of - and
> is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness - is
> language. But even chickens talk to each other. 'If a hawk flies
> over a chicken, it gives a particular call,' says Dr McDonald.
> 'Whereas if it's a fox, it's a different call.' Indeed, according
> to Bekoff, many birds have regional dialects and wolves have, 'very
> complex communication systems. A wolf's tail has 13 to 15 positions
> which send different messages. And when you combine the tail
> position, ear position, gait, odour and sound, you've got a
> kaleidoscope of different modes of communication.'
> And if there's any remaining doubt that animals have the capacity
> to feel anger at humans, take the case of traffic-jamming rhesus
> monkeys. When a baby monkey had its legs crushed by a car in
> Tezpur, India, 100 others encircled it and blocked the road.
> Onlookers described the monkeys as 'angry', while a shopkeeper
> said, 'It was very emotional. Some of them massaged its legs.
> Finally, they left the scene, carrying the injured baby with them.'
> Are we committing the sin of anthropomorphism by calling the
> monkeys angry? 'Let the philosophers debate that if they want to,'
> says Bekoff. 'We've got too many other things we need to deal with
> without worrying about whether we're being anthropomorphic.'
> If revenge is one possible motive behind the dramatic global rises
> in animal-on-human violence, it's surely a minor one. We shouldn't
> be surprised when animals play nasty. They're all at it. In 2002,
> scientists at Michigan State University discovered that even
> bacteria engage in chemical warfare. And even species that we
> believe to be benign turn out to be ruthless. Robins, for example,
> fight each other to the death. And in January, marine scientists
> released footage of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby
> porpoises, tossing them in the air and chasing them to their death.
> Researchers in Scotland described 'perhaps the worst example of
> inter-specific aggression any of us has ever seen. This young
> female had the life beaten out of her.' ?Worse, it has been
> discovered that they're fond of infanticide.
> The rise in animal-on-human violence turns out to have several
> causes which initially appear separate but are all linked. Dr
> Matson is clear on the elephant problem; both its causes and its
> nature. When she arrived in Bushmanland, Namibia, 15 years ago, an
> elephant had just killed an elderly woman. 'That sort of thing
> happened pretty regularly,' she says. When Matson arrived in Assam,
> last year, she met a family who had suffered similarly. 'It all
> comes back to humans, ultimately. It's a competition for resources.
> You've got this clash between the world's most dominant primate and
> the world's largest terrestrial animal.'
> Even pet dogs and their considerably less cuddly cousins, dingos,
> have been clashing with humans. Dr Paul McGreevy, a British
> veterinary scientist, uses the run of dingo attacks in Australia's
> Fraser Island as an example. In April 2001, a nine-year-old boy was
> killed and his seven-year-old brother injured after they were
> chased and pounced on by the dogs. It was said to be only the
> second attack in modern times. Then, just six days later, two
> British backpackers were bitten on the legs and buttocks.
> 'The first step is habituation, a loss of fear,' McGreevy says.
> 'Familiarity breeds a form of contempt. If the animals are no
> longer frightened of humans they begin to hang around instead of
> running away. In Fraser Island, tourists became a predictor of
> food. The second possibility is that animals learn to fear humans
> under certain circumstances. This means they're coming closer to
> humans, but are prepared to defend themselves. When they're primed
> by this arousal, they can have lowered thresholds for aggression
> and produce hair-trigger responses.'
> When a wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a
> human, but still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a
> frenzy at the slightest provocation, it's in a uniquely dangerous
> state. It's not hard to see how McGreevy's dingo theory could be
> applied to cougars, mountain lions, boars, bears and wolves, all of
> whom are having their traditional habitats and feeding grounds
> annexed.
> Scientists studying the increase in big-cat attacks in America have
> suggested that their growing familiarity with us is leading them to
> view humans as hotdogs in trousers. 'There has been a huge increase
> in the opportunities pumas have to observe people,' Lee Fitzhugh,
> of the University of California, told New Scientist. 'Cats have to
> learn what's prey and what's not - it's not instinctive. They spend
> time observing a strange creature before they decide how to
> classify it.'
> Researchers think the same process might be responsible for the
> increase in shark attacks: the popularity of surfing and shark-
> watching dives give the fish more chance to see that we're
> basically harmless and possibly tasty.
> Perversely, conservation may also have worsened the situation.
> Elephant numbers are up as is the crocodile population. In
> Australia, where croc-hunting was banned 30 years ago, numbers of
> the most deadly saltwater variety have risen from 5,000 in the
> early 1970s to more than 70,000.
> What all these problems have in common is, of course, us. We're in
> their face a lot more these days. And that face is full of teeth.
> According to Gay Bradshaw, we shouldn't be asking why they're
> turning on us.A more reasonable question would be, why aren't they
> attacking us more?
> 'Animals have the same capacity that we do, in terms of emotions
> and what we consider to be high-mindedness and moral integrity. In
> fact, I'd argue they have more, because they haven't done to us
> what we've done to them. That's a sobering thought. It's amazing
> that all the animals are as benign as they are. It's amazing their
> restraint.Why aren't they picking up guns?'
Probably the best thing I've read in a long time.
-Lindsay
> In a tiny village in rural Assam, two terrified children will
> tonight sleep in a tree house. It doesn't matter how much their
> mother scolds them; there's no way they're going to bed down there.
> Not after what happened. They can still remember that night, of
> course - being picked up by their mother, and how hard she covered
> their mouths with her hands to stop them screaming. They can
> remember the other sounds, too.
> The elephants had come in from the forest again. Then they saw one,
> a vast dark hulk looming out of the black towards their door. Their
> Dad tried to push it away. That's when the elephant carried him
> round the side of the house and killed him.
> Elephants haven't always behaved like this. But in recent years, in
> India and all over Africa, too, some menacing change has come over
> them. And not just elephants - it's almost any species. This
> disquieting pattern has only recently been detected, in part
> because it is so disparate and weird. But it's now widely accepted
> that the relationship between humans and animals is changing. One
> of the world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal
> behaviour) believes that a critical point has been crossed and
> animals are beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten,
> evicted, subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and
> made to ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to
> turn on us. And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists
> that it has earned its own acronym: HAC - 'human-animal conflict'.
> It's happening everywhere. Authorities in America and Canada are
> alarmed at the increase in attacks on humans by mountain lions,
> cougars, foxes and wolves. Romania and Colombia have seen a rise in
> bear maulings. In Mexico, in just the past few months, there's been
> a spate of deadly shark attacks with The LA Times reporting that,
> 'the worldwide rate in recent years is double the average of the
> previous 50'. America and Sierra Leone have witnessed assaults and
> killings by chimps who, according to New Scientist, 'almost never
> attack people'. In Uganda, they have started killing children by
> biting off their limbs then disembowelling them.
> There has been a surge in wolf attacks in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
> Russia and France. In Australia, there has been a run of dingo
> killings, and crocodile violence is up. In Beijing, injuries from
> cats and dogs have swelled by 34 per cent, year-on-year. In
> America, the number of humans killed by pet dogs has increased
> sharply since 2000. In Australia, dog attacks are up 20 per cent.
> In Britain, nearly 4,000 people needed hospital treatment for dog
> bites in 2007, a figure that has doubled in the past four years. In
> Bombay, petrified residents are being slaughtered in ever-
> increasing numbers by leopards, leading J. C. Daniel, a leopard
> specialist, to comment, 'We have to study why the animal is coming
> out. It never came out before.' In Edinburgh, in June, there was a
> string of bizarre fox attacks - a pensioner was among the victims.
> In Singapore, residents have been being terrorised by packs of
> macaques. Sharon Chan, a national parks official, told reporters,
> 'It's a very weird situation.'
> The numbers are disturbing enough, but the menacing changes in
> behaviour are especially worrying to scientists. In Australia, the
> biologist Dr Scoresby Shepherd - who pointed out that in areas
> where shark attacks used to happen every three or four decades,
> they are now taking place at least once a year - has suggested that
> sharks are switching their prey to humans. In Los Angeles, Prof Lee
> Fitzhugh has come to the same conclusion about mountain lions. In
> San Francisco, a spate of sea lion assaults lead one local to
> comment, 'I've been swimming here for 70 years and nothing like
> this has happened before.' In Cameroon, for the first time,
> gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They're using
> weapons against us.
> It's easy to see why some suspect revenge. The theory that the
> animals of the three elements are conspiring against us gained
> popularity in 2006, when the Australian television presenter Steve
> Irwin was speared through the heart by a stingray off the north
> Queensland coast. In the aftermath, the phrase 'freak accident' was
> used in news reports. When, just six weeks later, the same thing
> happened to James Bertakis, of Miami (he lived only because, unlike
> Irwin, he didn't pull the barbed sting out), people started
> wondering. Then, in March this year, Judy Kay Zagorski was boating
> on the Florida Keys when a stingray leapt from the water and
> fatally struck her in the face.
> Any sane person might decide that his theory, which posits that
> beasts are working in concert to take revenge on humans, is insane.
> But in the regions where the most research into HAC is being
> carried out, scientists have concluded that revenge for our myriad
> barbarities could indeed be a motive.
> All over Africa, India and parts of south-east Asia, elephants have
> started attacking humans in unprecedented numbers. Not just killing
> - they're rampaging through villages and stomping crops,
> terrorising local populations in any way they can. 'What's
> happening today is extraordinary,' Dr Gay Bradshaw, a world
> authority on elephants, told reporters in 2006. 'Where for
> centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful co-
> existence, there is now hostility and violence.' Bradshaw is the
> director of the Kerulos Centre for Animal Psychology and Trauma
> Recovery, in Oregon. 'When you see reports of elephants running
> into crops or attacking people, they're highly stressed,' she tells
> me. 'And there are multiple stressors - violence, lack of food,
> lack of water; their families are being broken up; their society is
> collapsing. All of these things are human-derived.'
> Bradshaw describes the elephants as being 'under siege' from the
> locals. But the violence against humans has increased so suddenly,
> and reached such levels, that these traditional factors aren't
> thought to be sufficient to explain it. Bradshaw and her colleagues
> now think that there's been a massive, pan-species psychological
> collapse throughout the world's pachyderms. In essence, we're
> witnessing the dysfunctional shenanigans of a generation of
> depraved elephants. These are individuals who have become
> psychologically fractured after being orphaned at a developmentally
> delicate age or are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder
> after watching their families being slaughtered.
> 'You could make a parallel between elephants and people who are
> undergoing genocide and war,' Bradshaw says. 'They've gone through
> massive killings and many have sustained culls or severe poaching,
> so they've witnessed the violence and they're traumatised. It's
> critical to understand that when you have an experience at a young
> age, or through adolescence or even as an adult, it enters into the
> brain. In other cases, the normal rearing process is disrupted or
> conducted by distressed parents, so you're creating individuals who
> are mentally challenged.'
> Such claims might be dismissed as so much Disneyfied
> anthropomorphism if Bradshaw did not have the observational,
> psychological and neuroscientific evidence to back them up. And,
> she says, it might not be just in elephants that this critical
> point has been breached. 'I think we're well past the critical
> point,' she says. 'Well past. People are starting to notice these
> atypical behaviours in an array of species.'
> Of the question of elephant revenge, though, she is more cautious.
> 'Put yourself in an elephant's shoes. What's it like living in
> Africa or Asia when you're surrounded by an active threat, not just
> to you but to your family? Let's take, for example, one of the
> things that's happening in Africa. Females are starting to charge
> lorries. Why? It's hard to understand the motive. Perhaps she's
> traumatised. Perhaps it's pre-emptive - they may have a gun. It may
> be self?defence. And other times it may well be revenge. It's not
> that I don't think elephants have the capacity.' Dr Marc Bekoff, a
> leading ethologist, agrees. 'We need to be careful when using that
> sort of language,' he says. 'But I don't think there's any doubt
> that, in certain situations, animals show revenge.'
> At first he thought it was a dream; that shuffling, that banging
> that bulged out of the darkness around him. By the time Michael
> Fitzgerald had roused himself and put on his slippers, he decided
> it was burglars. They were in the garage. He crept forward,
> readying himself for what awaited behind the electric door that was
> slowly, noisily rising. He peered in. It was a badger. Just a
> badger! He'd never seen one so close before. The badger looked up,
> then slowly, calmly walked up to him. 'Pam!' he called to his wife.
> 'Get a camera!' Two minutes later, blood from his arm was spattered
> over his front door.
> 'It was some kind of hell,' Fitzgerald, from Evesham, told the BBC,
> in 2003. 'His razor-blade teeth were around my arm.' Even after he
> had shaken if off, it gave chase, biting his legs and arms. 'I
> never envisaged I would be seeing my own insides,' he said. The
> badger then embarked on an 18-hour rampage around the town.
> Stories like these remind us that there are millions of beasts
> armed with teeth and stingers, who can out-sniff, out-run, out-fly,
> out-fight and out-bite every one of us. The eerie truth is that,
> right now, we're surrounded. As a species, we've been at the top of
> the food chain for so long, we've forgotten that 'humans' are mere
> anthropoid apes and, in distant millennia, we had to fight the
> feral armies to get here. In our hubris, we imagine we're an animal
> apart. For centuries, we've been told by priests and scientists
> that animals are not much more than unfeeling, unthinking,
> unselfconscious automatons. They're a gift from God, and their
> purpose is to have paracetamol rubbed into their eyes, to be turned
> into fancy trousers to be stuffed with nuts on His birthday. Many
> mainstream scientists still warn against anthropomorphism. But it
> doesn't stop the many people who are secretly wondering what's
> really going on behind those inscrutable black eyes? Are the birds
> talking about us? Do lobsters sulk? Can one moose love another? The
> more scientists have discovered about the inner lives of animals,
> the more troubling and strange things have become. 'Things are
> really changing,' acknowledges Bekoff. 'There's a lot of new
> behavioural research, a lot of new neuroscience research that
> demonstrates they are far more complex than was thought. We're not
> inserting into animals something they don't have.'
> Bekoff describes the sound Darwinian logic beneath this gigantic
> paradigm shift. Simply, if our brains have developed the capacity
> for a rich emotional inner-life over the millions of years they've
> been evolving, then why not theirs? 'If you believe in biological
> continuity then, if we have emotions, they have emotions. If we
> have a heart, they have a heart.'
> But there are still many people, such as Prof Peter Carruthers, of
> the University of Sheffield, who would consider this to be
> misguided sentimentality. In his book The Animals Issue, he insists
> that animals don't consciously feel pain, and therefore 'make no
> real claims on our sympathy'. When vets and vivisectionists
> anaesthetise their subjects, the argument runs, they're indulging
> in schmaltzy, greetings-card reasoning.
> Dr Paul McDonald, of the Centre for the Integrative Study of Animal
> Behaviour, in Sydney, also warns against the sort of talk Bekoff
> persists in. 'There's a temptation to put human emotions into
> animal interactions, which I think is not the way to go,' he says.
> 'The danger is it'll shape your interpretations. Take noisy mynah
> birds, for example. They have a dominance hierarchy, so there's
> often aggressive interactions where one bird appears to beat the
> other up. Through human glasses that could be a punishment or
> something along those lines, where in reality it's about
> maintaining social rank.'
> But McDonald's worldview and his observations seem at odds.
> 'Altruism remains a conundrum,' he says. 'Why do you have so many
> animals helping? Particularly animals that aren't related. If
> you're helping to raise a nephew, at least you're replicating part
> of your genome. But when you're raising a totally unrelated
> individual, that becomes much more difficult - and that happens
> quite commonly.' He points to bell mynah birds, which feed chicks
> in many nests at the same time, even though they may have chicks in
> their own nest. 'That seems very, very strange.'
> Even stranger is the incident Gay Bradshaw reports, of a hero crow
> helping hungry kittens. 'The crow would go get worms and fly down
> and feed them to these starving kittens. Eventually, they became
> friends and played together.'
> And altruism isn't the only documented animal behaviour that was
> once thought to have been purely human. Take empathy and Kuni, the
> bonobo. Kuni watched a starling fly into the glass wall of its
> enclosure and thud to the floor. He picked it up, climbed to the
> top of the tallest tree, stretched the bird's wings out and
> launched it back into the air. When it thudded back down again, the
> ape climbed back down and stood over it for a long time.
> And here's another complex mental state - grief. Elephants, for
> example, stand vigil over the bodies of dead companions for a week,
> before gently covering the corpse with earth. They then visit the
> gravesite for years afterwards, taking turns to handle the bones.
> 'They lift the bones with incredible sensitivity,' says zoologist
> Dr Tammie Matson, the WWF's human-animal conflict specialist. 'It's
> as if they can somehow read something about the elephant that was
> once attached to them.'
> Bekoff, meanwhile, has witnessed a magpie funeral. 'I saw a dead
> magpie on the road and stopped to look at what was happening. One
> magpie went in and touched the corpse and backed away, another
> magpie went in and backed away, then another flew off and brought
> grass back and laid it around the corpse, then another did the
> same.' And then there was the fox funeral. 'This fox had been
> killed by a mountain lion and the next day a female fox found the
> carcass. She covered it up with leaves and pine needles and dirt
> and branches. She stamped it down and stood over it.'
> British neuroscientists have found that sheep can remember at least
> 50 ovine faces, even when they've been separated for years. Cows,
> meanwhile, get anxious. John Webster, professor of animal husbandry
> at Bristol university, has discovered that they have between two
> and four best friends. They also have enemies, bearing grudges for
> years.
> Perhaps the evolutionary achievement humans are proudest of - and
> is thought by some to be the very seat of consciousness - is
> language. But even chickens talk to each other. 'If a hawk flies
> over a chicken, it gives a particular call,' says Dr McDonald.
> 'Whereas if it's a fox, it's a different call.' Indeed, according
> to Bekoff, many birds have regional dialects and wolves have, 'very
> complex communication systems. A wolf's tail has 13 to 15 positions
> which send different messages. And when you combine the tail
> position, ear position, gait, odour and sound, you've got a
> kaleidoscope of different modes of communication.'
> And if there's any remaining doubt that animals have the capacity
> to feel anger at humans, take the case of traffic-jamming rhesus
> monkeys. When a baby monkey had its legs crushed by a car in
> Tezpur, India, 100 others encircled it and blocked the road.
> Onlookers described the monkeys as 'angry', while a shopkeeper
> said, 'It was very emotional. Some of them massaged its legs.
> Finally, they left the scene, carrying the injured baby with them.'
> Are we committing the sin of anthropomorphism by calling the
> monkeys angry? 'Let the philosophers debate that if they want to,'
> says Bekoff. 'We've got too many other things we need to deal with
> without worrying about whether we're being anthropomorphic.'
> If revenge is one possible motive behind the dramatic global rises
> in animal-on-human violence, it's surely a minor one. We shouldn't
> be surprised when animals play nasty. They're all at it. In 2002,
> scientists at Michigan State University discovered that even
> bacteria engage in chemical warfare. And even species that we
> believe to be benign turn out to be ruthless. Robins, for example,
> fight each other to the death. And in January, marine scientists
> released footage of gangs of dolphins repeatedly ramming baby
> porpoises, tossing them in the air and chasing them to their death.
> Researchers in Scotland described 'perhaps the worst example of
> inter-specific aggression any of us has ever seen. This young
> female had the life beaten out of her.' ?Worse, it has been
> discovered that they're fond of infanticide.
> The rise in animal-on-human violence turns out to have several
> causes which initially appear separate but are all linked. Dr
> Matson is clear on the elephant problem; both its causes and its
> nature. When she arrived in Bushmanland, Namibia, 15 years ago, an
> elephant had just killed an elderly woman. 'That sort of thing
> happened pretty regularly,' she says. When Matson arrived in Assam,
> last year, she met a family who had suffered similarly. 'It all
> comes back to humans, ultimately. It's a competition for resources.
> You've got this clash between the world's most dominant primate and
> the world's largest terrestrial animal.'
> Even pet dogs and their considerably less cuddly cousins, dingos,
> have been clashing with humans. Dr Paul McGreevy, a British
> veterinary scientist, uses the run of dingo attacks in Australia's
> Fraser Island as an example. In April 2001, a nine-year-old boy was
> killed and his seven-year-old brother injured after they were
> chased and pounced on by the dogs. It was said to be only the
> second attack in modern times. Then, just six days later, two
> British backpackers were bitten on the legs and buttocks.
> 'The first step is habituation, a loss of fear,' McGreevy says.
> 'Familiarity breeds a form of contempt. If the animals are no
> longer frightened of humans they begin to hang around instead of
> running away. In Fraser Island, tourists became a predictor of
> food. The second possibility is that animals learn to fear humans
> under certain circumstances. This means they're coming closer to
> humans, but are prepared to defend themselves. When they're primed
> by this arousal, they can have lowered thresholds for aggression
> and produce hair-trigger responses.'
> When a wild animal is just about not-scared-enough to approach a
> human, but still has enough fear heating its blood to unleash a
> frenzy at the slightest provocation, it's in a uniquely dangerous
> state. It's not hard to see how McGreevy's dingo theory could be
> applied to cougars, mountain lions, boars, bears and wolves, all of
> whom are having their traditional habitats and feeding grounds
> annexed.
> Scientists studying the increase in big-cat attacks in America have
> suggested that their growing familiarity with us is leading them to
> view humans as hotdogs in trousers. 'There has been a huge increase
> in the opportunities pumas have to observe people,' Lee Fitzhugh,
> of the University of California, told New Scientist. 'Cats have to
> learn what's prey and what's not - it's not instinctive. They spend
> time observing a strange creature before they decide how to
> classify it.'
> Researchers think the same process might be responsible for the
> increase in shark attacks: the popularity of surfing and shark-
> watching dives give the fish more chance to see that we're
> basically harmless and possibly tasty.
> Perversely, conservation may also have worsened the situation.
> Elephant numbers are up as is the crocodile population. In
> Australia, where croc-hunting was banned 30 years ago, numbers of
> the most deadly saltwater variety have risen from 5,000 in the
> early 1970s to more than 70,000.
> What all these problems have in common is, of course, us. We're in
> their face a lot more these days. And that face is full of teeth.
> According to Gay Bradshaw, we shouldn't be asking why they're
> turning on us.A more reasonable question would be, why aren't they
> attacking us more?
> 'Animals have the same capacity that we do, in terms of emotions
> and what we consider to be high-mindedness and moral integrity. In
> fact, I'd argue they have more, because they haven't done to us
> what we've done to them. That's a sobering thought. It's amazing
> that all the animals are as benign as they are. It's amazing their
> restraint.Why aren't they picking up guns?'
Probably the best thing I've read in a long time.
-Lindsay