When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Authors: Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
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snakes or spiders who have never had a bad experience with them and who seldom see them. Yet, as Martin Seligman has pointed out, very few people have phobias about hammers or knives, although they are much more likely to have been injured by these. Perhaps their famiHarity with other uses of these objects dulls fear.
Mountain goats have learned to fear avalanches or rock slides and to take evasive action. When goats hear the rumble of a slide overhead, they put their tails up and their ears back and run for a sheltering overhang, if one is nearby. If not, they stamp, crouch, and press themselves against the mountain. Some goats take off at the last moment.
Nameless Fears
Everyone has experienced fear without an apparent object— the sense that an unknown misfortune impends. At other times, the fear is in response to the sense that we are on unfamiliar ground, Hke Singh's tiger and leopard cubs. We feel that something bad could happen, though we don't know what. Fear can exist without an object, a vertigo of the morale.
In Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe the elephants are culled annually. During this culling, elephant family groups are herded by aircraft toward hunters who shoot all except the yoimg calves, who are rounded up for sale. The elephant calves run around, scream, and search for their mothers. One year a wildlife
FEAR, HOPE, AND THE TERRORS OF DREAMS
guide at a private sanctuary ninety miles away from the park noticed that eighty elephants vanished from their usual haunts on the day culling started at Hwange. He found them several days later, bunched at the end of the sanctuary as far from the park as they were able to get.
It has been discovered quite recently that elephants can communicate over long distances by means of subsonic calls—sounds pitched too low for people to hear. So it is not surprising that the sanctuary elephants apparently received some frightening message from the Hwange elephants. But unless elephant communication is far more refined than anyone has yet speculated, the message cannot have been very specific. The sanctuary elephants must have known that something very bad was happening to Hwange elephants, but they can hardly have known what it was. The object of their fear was inchoate, but the fear was real.
Fear ior Otners
Humans not only fear for themselves, but may fear for others. This feeling borders on empathy, something people are much less hkely to concede to animals than fear. While examples of animals frightened for themselves are numerous, examples of fear for others are scarcer. Often the situation is equivocal: a monkey that shows physical signs of fear when watching another monkey being attacked may be fearing for itself as a possible victim, rather than (or as well as) fearing for the other monkey. The clearest evidence of animals frightened for others, as one might expect, comes from parents frightened for their young.
Wildlife biologist Thomas Bledsoe describes the actions of Red Collar, a mother grizzly brown bear whose cubs vanished while she fished for salmon in the McNeil River, a gathering place for bears. First she looked up and down the riverbank, then ran to the top of the bluff and looked there, running faster and faster. She stood on her hind legs to see farther, jerking her head around, panting and drooling. After some minutes Red Collar gave up the search and went back to fishing. Here her behavior is puzzling and
WHEN ELEPHANTS IVEEP
susceptible to varying interpretations, ranging from loss of interest (which humans would find difficult to identify with) to belief that no disaster had befallen her cubs. It is worth noting that on the occasions when Red Collar's cubs disappeared from the river, they had invariably gone off with one of the other mother bears and her family and were in fact safe. According to Bledsoe, at one point two of Red Collar's cubs were with another bear for three days before she encountered and reclaimed them.
Parents fear
Mountain goats have learned to fear avalanches or rock slides and to take evasive action. When goats hear the rumble of a slide overhead, they put their tails up and their ears back and run for a sheltering overhang, if one is nearby. If not, they stamp, crouch, and press themselves against the mountain. Some goats take off at the last moment.
Nameless Fears
Everyone has experienced fear without an apparent object— the sense that an unknown misfortune impends. At other times, the fear is in response to the sense that we are on unfamiliar ground, Hke Singh's tiger and leopard cubs. We feel that something bad could happen, though we don't know what. Fear can exist without an object, a vertigo of the morale.
In Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe the elephants are culled annually. During this culling, elephant family groups are herded by aircraft toward hunters who shoot all except the yoimg calves, who are rounded up for sale. The elephant calves run around, scream, and search for their mothers. One year a wildlife
FEAR, HOPE, AND THE TERRORS OF DREAMS
guide at a private sanctuary ninety miles away from the park noticed that eighty elephants vanished from their usual haunts on the day culling started at Hwange. He found them several days later, bunched at the end of the sanctuary as far from the park as they were able to get.
It has been discovered quite recently that elephants can communicate over long distances by means of subsonic calls—sounds pitched too low for people to hear. So it is not surprising that the sanctuary elephants apparently received some frightening message from the Hwange elephants. But unless elephant communication is far more refined than anyone has yet speculated, the message cannot have been very specific. The sanctuary elephants must have known that something very bad was happening to Hwange elephants, but they can hardly have known what it was. The object of their fear was inchoate, but the fear was real.
Fear ior Otners
Humans not only fear for themselves, but may fear for others. This feeling borders on empathy, something people are much less hkely to concede to animals than fear. While examples of animals frightened for themselves are numerous, examples of fear for others are scarcer. Often the situation is equivocal: a monkey that shows physical signs of fear when watching another monkey being attacked may be fearing for itself as a possible victim, rather than (or as well as) fearing for the other monkey. The clearest evidence of animals frightened for others, as one might expect, comes from parents frightened for their young.
Wildlife biologist Thomas Bledsoe describes the actions of Red Collar, a mother grizzly brown bear whose cubs vanished while she fished for salmon in the McNeil River, a gathering place for bears. First she looked up and down the riverbank, then ran to the top of the bluff and looked there, running faster and faster. She stood on her hind legs to see farther, jerking her head around, panting and drooling. After some minutes Red Collar gave up the search and went back to fishing. Here her behavior is puzzling and
WHEN ELEPHANTS IVEEP
susceptible to varying interpretations, ranging from loss of interest (which humans would find difficult to identify with) to belief that no disaster had befallen her cubs. It is worth noting that on the occasions when Red Collar's cubs disappeared from the river, they had invariably gone off with one of the other mother bears and her family and were in fact safe. According to Bledsoe, at one point two of Red Collar's cubs were with another bear for three days before she encountered and reclaimed them.
Parents fear
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