[ The World of Arctic Whales| Heavy and Light| Sandy Dennis| Snakes| Bird Brains| Bonobo]
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Few if any true stories about whales have a happy ending. The World of the Arctic Whales, a lavishly illustrated coffee table reference, includes three sad stories in one: the slaughters of the cheerfully gregarious belugas, the ancient bowheads, and the quasi-mythical narwhals. |
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saddest part, as dispassionately recounted as the wealth of scientific
information Stefani Paine recites, is that all three species are still
killed in the name of aboriginal subsistence by people whose only real
reason for killing them is preserving traditions of barbarity which also
included, in the heyday of whaling, both infanticide––especially
of females––and the exposure of old people to the elements.
The recent discovery of stone spearheads in the remains of freshly
killed bowheads and the paucity of bowhead calves meanwhile indicates a
whale species and culture on the brink of extinction: most surviving
bowheads may be the very longest-lived, who learned from woundings as
long as a century ago to stay far from humans.
“The arguments of both the hunters and the preservationists have little to do with whales and have everything to do with people’s feelings, beliefs, and culture,” Paine observes, striving for objectivity. Yet, “The whale is no less dead if killed for cultural or traditional reasons than if boiled for lamp oil. There is a strong argument for conservative management,” she concludes. “It’s time to err on the side of the whales, or there simply won’t be any. There’s no use having a right to something that doesn’t exist.” But of course those who continue killing whales argue that so-called sustainable use provides native peoples with incentive to save the resource. Defining sentient beings as a “resource” permits such logic, which evades recognition that human cultures have not only the option to evolve, but also the moral obligation to do so when tradition is wrong––preferably, of course, as a matter of choice. One familiar with the history of Arctic aboriginal whaling must observe that it was largely abandoned, by choice, until reinforcing the dogmas of cultural preservation and sustainable use served the interests of trophy hunters, furriers, sealers and commercial whalers. ––Merritt Clifton |
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Animal ActsConfiguring
the Human in Western History
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| The Animal Acts introduction explains that the purpose of the anthology is to “...configure the human with the animal, to write zoomorphically and anthropomorphically, to define zones of animality in the human and zones of humanity in the animal.” Emerging from this murk, after much more discussion of the etymology of the word “configure,” is the notion that we embody the best of animals, and they embody the best of us. The rest of the book is given over to essays describing in pompous, polysyllabic and heavily noted detail just what this means, as derived from literary rather than real-life sources. | |
Hearts and MindsThe
Controversy Over Laboratory Animals
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| The back cover blurb says that “In this fine-grained ethnography, Groves talks to people on both sides of the debate to determine what really motivates them. He probes their ideas and emotions,” like the authors of 3,965 other books about the lab animal issue. While the people graciously have their ideas and emotions probed, the animals’ bodies are rather more rudely probed and discarded. | |
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Kinky Cats, Immortal Amoebas, And Nine-Armed Octopuses
Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Behaviors in the Animal World
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| Obstfeld
discusses a number of animal sexual behaviors, linking and comparing
them to their apparent human counterpart.
Why? This has as much relation to understanding animals and animal behavior as Playboy has to comprehension of the complex dimensions of humanity. Cuteness perhaps intended to make us chummily fond of our animal kin comes across as mere voyeurism. |
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Down & Dirty BirdingFrom
the Sublime to the Ridiculous--Here's All the Outrageous but True Stuff
You Ever Wanted to Know About North American birds
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Down & Dirty Birding, a purportedly amusing guide to
birdwatching, suffers from similar self-delusion as Kinky Cats,
Immortal Amoebas, and Nine-Armed Octopuses.
––P.J. Kemp |
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Publicists regularly invade our mailbox and tie up our telephone touting books by celebrities, usually written with substantial help from ghostwriters, which purportedly have some sort of garbled animal protection message hidden among drivel supposed to demonstate the celebrities’ multi-dimensionality––as if anyone cares. We thus approached the late Sandy Dennis’ Personal Memoir with the skepticism of an old cat toward a new dog. |
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Dennis, however, like the late Amanda Blake and the thriving Brigitte
Bardot and Tippi Hedrun, evidently was both sincere and so especially
enthralled with cats that one or another is mentioned on almost every
page, whether or not cats are the subject of the moment in a series of
sketches that amount to a complete if brief interior autobiography. Cats
seem to have interested Dennis far more than either her distinguished
stage career or her personal relationships, which she keeps remarkably
discreet. About all one finds out about the men in her life is that they
were men, and departed, while cats remained in growing numbers. Though
this is indeed a highly personal memoir, cats are the only creatures
Dennis kissed and told about. The celebrity dirt here consists of gentle
laughs at herself, for instance about her naivete in permitting her cats
to use her gravel roof as a litter box all her first winter in her
Connecticut home. Their offerings vanished into the snow until spring,
when they abruptly obliged her to climb up with a shovel and engage in
her only poop-tossing.
––M.C. |
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Harry W. Greene, curator of herpetology at the University of California’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, had the bad luck to be awaiting the imminent publication of his opus, the summation of everything known about snake evolution, just as Michael Caldwell of the Field Museum in Chicago and Michael Lee of the University of Sydney announced perhaps the most important paleontological find about snakes ever––”The missing link between the snake and the lizard,” Lee explained, unearthed by the late geologist George Haas near Jerusalem in 1978, but misidentified then as a lizard. |
| Bone-by-bone
reappraisal revealed a probable ancestral association with mosasaurs,
gigantic seagoing lizards of the Jurassic epoch, whose closest living
relatives are Komodo dragons. Apparently snakes, like other land
species, emerged from the sea; returned much later, as ancestral marine
mammals also would; and then came back to land, in many separate
reinvasions associated with climatic change and continental drift.
Frustrated though Greene must have been, he did anticipate the discovery
with extensive discussion of the evolution of sea snakes as well as land
snakes, and of the relationships among them. There are many extensively
illustrated volumes about snakes, but we’ve seen no others delving
as deeply into as many different aspects of herpetology and associated
human culture. Snakes probably offers a lot more than even the
most dedicated enthusiasts are likely to absorb consecutively. But Snakes
is a book to which one will refer again and again, and each time read
whole new sections.
––M.C. |
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“The corvids are the top of the line in avian evolution,” Candace Savage writes, “among the most recent and successful of modern birds. From some unknown pinpoint beginning, they have diversified and expanded to occupy most of the globe. Whether you go to the Sahara or the Amazon rain forest,” or for that matter the Arctic, “you will likely be met by some kind of crow or crow cousin,” such as a jay, “who will eye you boldly and shout if you come too close.” |
Photograph of Raven Spirit Mask courtesy Triad Associates |
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to Native American legend, says Savage, it was a crow cousin, Raven, who
attached visible genitals to male mammals as a practical joke.
Studies show that cultivated crops make up less than 1% of the crow family diet, while they eat more than 4,000 bugs apiece just during nesting, yet crows and magpies are still massacred, including by the USDA Animal Damage Control program, on purported behalf of farmers. Exercising no more than the normal role of a predator in keeping prey species fit, crows, magpies, and especially jays are as unfairly detested by many bird-watchers, who equally wrongly accuse them of depleting songbirds. As opportunists, they will deplete a bird-feeder, however––much as Raven and kin follow wolves and coyotes, or feast upon roadkill, scavenging their meals as available. In medieval times, they followed armies, and certain banners were developed with crow-scaring in mind, since the presence of crows overhead reputedly signalled not only the location of advancing troops, but also their numbers and extent of vulnerability to an armored cavalry charge. After guns made armor obsolete, crows supposedly learned to anticipate who would be shot. Savage doesn’t delve deeply into the history of crows “winning” human warfare, but does present virtually everything known about corvid behavior, including their use of language. Most corvids, it seems, not only have an extensive vocabulary used with one another and universally understood, despite discernable regional accents, but also imitate the distinctive sounds of other species––sometimes to tease owls, cats, dogs, and gullible humans, but sometimes too in serious attempts to communicate. Some actively solict the help of other species to get food. Contrary to reputation, moreover, “Crows are known for their acts of kindness to injured and ailing members of their species,” Savage writes. “In one well-documented case, a mated male northwestern crow regularly brought food to an unmated female who was handicapped by deformities and partial blindiness. This association lasted for at least two breeding seasons, even though the male was simultaneously pressed to feed young chicks in the nest [with his mate].” Similar altruism is common among foxes, wolves, and coyotes, with whom corvids often keep company. Then there is math. Corvids can count at least to six, and make quite complex judgements about size, weight, timing and distance––for instance, judging the variable heights from which seashells must be dropped on rocks to get at the mollusks inside. To fly too low with a shell is to fail and perhaps lose it. To fly too high is to waste energy and risk theft by another bird. What Savage offers about corvids is remarkable enough, including extraordinary photos of young crows demonstrating their courage by baiting a bald eagle. The sauciest corvid, if he lives to crow about it, enjoys the greatest status within the flock. But the evolutionary implications of the intelligence of corvids, and other birds, should give humans real humility. Even the dullest birds seem about as intelligent as all but the most intelligent mammals, while a case can be made that humans are the only mammals who can credibly claim to be more intelligent than the most intelligent birds––and that may not be by much of a margin, since by most standards, crows, parrots, and pigeons are as intellectually capable as chimpanzees. Whales and dolphins, with their huge brains, don’t even rate. A sperm whale has by far the biggest brain we know of, yet among fellow mammals even a matchbook-sized bat has similar ability at echolocation and responding to atmospheric pressure, the two functions at which sperm whales are known to excell. And no one argues that bats are great intellects, or even the peers of most birds. The real meaning of the whale/bat contrast is simply that whales evolved in an environment in which size is a great advantage, so had little evolutionary incentive to develop mental efficiency. Bats have apparently evolved for much longer, perhaps as long as birds, in a habitat niche––flight–– which favors hyperefficient use of weight. Bats thus evolved an advanced micro-miniaturized on-board computer, while sperm whales chug around with Univac and humans require external help from radar and sonar to do anything comparable to the routine feats of either. Birds, meanwhile, have evolved a far more diverse intelligence than bats, with the same stress on efficiency. But maybe birds weren’t even the brightest branch of their own family tree. Suppose another cataclysm hit the earth as a comet did 65 million years ago, again killing every creature bigger than a housecat. Would the brightest primates survive, or the brightest of any mammal family? Intelligent birds may have evolved from one of the duller branches of Dinosauria, and if some of the dinosaurs with opposable digits instead of wings had continued evolving––for 16 times as long as it took us to reach the chimp level––they’d now be far ahead of us. We’re here, and they’re not, because of our lucky stars. ––M.C. |
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“With this book,” wrote Meredith Small in a prepublication blurb, “de Waal and Lanting ask us to give bonobos their due––to be considered alongside the better-known common chimpanzee as close human cousins. How nice to have the peaceable, sexy bonobo added to the path of human evolution! Bonobos represent the silver lining in our ape heritage.” |
Photograph of bonobo courtesy Cincinnati Zoo. |
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Small is author of What’s Love Got to Do With It? The Evolution
of Human Mating. Bonobos are the equally tall but slimmer creatures
also known as pygmy chimps, who walk erect instead of knuckle-walking,
inhabit a matriarchal society unique among the great apes, are strict
vegetarians unlike the aggressively hunting chimps, do not commit
fratricide and infanticide, and avert conflict with ubiquitous sexual
behavior, not to be confused with consumated copulation.
A case can be made that the love-and-sex relationships of bonobos and chimps are equally active and complex, in light of recent genetic research which has established that approximately 70% of young chimps are sired by males other than those who ostensibly dominate their mothers’ tribes: while the dominant apes hunt and fight, as much to impress other males as the females, the purportedly lesser males sneak back to make their own impression. But chimp sex is strictly male-to-female, and usually in a hurry, frequently furtive, obtained only after much exercise of both strategm and physical force. Bonobo sex is mostly foreplay, leisurely more often than fast, involving all but immediately incestuous combinations of male/female, female/female, and male/male. Instead of jealous squabbling, they tend to take turns with preferred partners. Their notorious lack of modesty explains why they are almost never found in zoos. It also explains why Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape may not get into many libraries. The text is as informed and scholarly as one would expect of the University of California Press. The photos are a kama sutra of simian sensuality, as explicit as anything ever published by The Berkeley Barb, the tabloid that 30-odd years ago mingled commercialized “free love” with radical politics to spark the so-called sexual revolution. That was rather chimp-like. Bonobos would have been across the Bay in San Francisco, enjoying the Summer of Love. ––M.C. |
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