Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

MEETING OUR RELATIVES

I regret to say, my friends, that I am going to serve you yet another traveller’s tale, but have patience, for as always this one has point. It is partly about the joys of visiting somewhere in the off-season, but more importantly it is about realising how close we are to some of the non-human creatures with whom we share this planet.

My wife and I were on our last day in Lisbon before we scuttled back up to Peniche, an hour-or-so north of Lisbon, where we were staying with friends. We had most of the day to kill before our bus arrived, and we had already done extensive explorations of Portugal’s capital. So, most unusually for us, we decided to spend our time in the Jardim Zoologico, the municipal zoo, which is just across a busy road from the bus station.

This was in late January, the off-season because it is in the middle of Europe’s winter, though in fact (as on most of our days in Portugal) the weather was fine. There were no visiting school parties, no howling children and no crowds blocking our views of enclosures and cages. Indeed, in the whole five-hours-or-so we spent in the zoo, there were so few people there that for much of the time we seemed quite alone with the animals. The few vendors of coffee and ice-cream looked hopelessly around for customers who weren’t there and eagerly solicited our business.

We began by looking at the zoo’s impressive collection of tigers, both Siberian and Indian. We saw their dolphin and sea-lion show, staged in a stadium designed for a couple of thousand people. I counted heads before the show started and discovered that there were exactly 23 of us there. For half-an-hour we watched three dolphins perform their complex and exhilarating tricks, followed by two clever sea-lions not quite matching their eclat. 

We entered the large avian cage where volunteers were feeding red- and rainbow-lories and showed us how to distribute the feed. We followed many varieties of macaws and screeching lorikeets and parrots with their brilliant colours. We looked for monkeys and primates; and met orangutans, spider-monkeys and their kin. We saw jaguars and cheetahs close up, behind thick protective glass. We crossed a high bridge over an enclosure with two mud-caked white rhinoceroses, and found ourselves looking at a field of bright pink flamingos. Towards the end of our journey we caught up with the brown bears and giraffes.

We also lingered near the chimpanzee enclosure, where we had ample time to observe their group behaviour. Near a wall, a large group of chimps was sheltering together for mutual warmth in the face of a whippy wind; and a younger chimpanzee was teasing and tormenting an older one by (literally) excreting and then picking up his excrement and throwing it at the oldster. Topping this, another chimp was shitting in the direction of us few human visitors, and then smearing his shit over the plate glass to show what he thought of us.

This seemed to me very close to the humiliation games that young human beings habitually exhibit. But the highlight of the day was watching – from behind very strong plate glass – the family behaviour of a group of gorillas. They were confined inside as cleaners (protected behind a locked steel door) cleaned and then scattered food in one of the gorillas’ indoor chambers, and then retired before the gorillas could enter. In came the gorillas, and we were so fascinated to watch how they behaved that we stayed watching for about 40 minutes.

There was a big, dominant silver-backed adult male, together with three smaller adult females, and one adolescent male (with a tuft of reddish-brown fur on the top of his head) who was followed and tormented by a baby gorilla. The alpha male headed for the fresh food (leaves and twigs) and began feeding himself. The three females stood guard and waited their turn. Sometimes the adolescent male would creep up behind the alpha male and try to steal some food. The alpha male would rapidly turn around and get ready to whack him. Whereupon the adolescent would hide behind a sturdy ladder fixed to the wall, where the alpha male couldn’t reach him.

At one point there was a big scuffle in which the females seemed to assist the alpha male in putting the adolescent male firmly in his place. And all the while, the baby gorilla kept following the adolescent male, taking sly pokes at him and pulling his fur, often calling out to the adults as he did so, clearly drawing attention to the adolescent male’s misbehaviour and attempts to steal food. The adolescent male tried to swing and climb and run away from the annoying fur-pulling baby, but never hit back.

I could very easily assign human roles to this family. Sulky teenager hiding in his room [behind the ladder] and being snitched on by annoying kid brother. Dad bellowing and saying “Can’t a man eat his dinner in peace?” Mother(s) saying “Behave yourself in front of your father!”. Little kid brother knowing how much he could get away with because he knew the bigger kid would be punished if he lashed out. My wife pointed out another human thing. One of the females spent much time worrying away at the lock on the door that led to the gorillas’ outdoor enclosure. Of course she couldn’t undo it, but she was trying to figure out how it worked. So this, said my wife, is the woman patiently trying to work out a practical solution when the rest of the family is squabbling.

At one point the alpha male chased the adolescent up to the higher level from which we were watching. A few inches away, the adolescent gorilla locked eyes with us before swinging back down. Later, the alpha male gorilla himself swung up to the glass and – a very daunting sight – banged angrily on it, clearly telling us to go away and stop watching his family’s affairs. We took the hint and moved on. (My wife, however, says that the large gorilla might have been angered – or indeed partially blinded – by the flashbulb used by a thoughtless tourist standing next to us.)

I know it is foolish to anthropomorphise and claim to see human traits in other species. But it was impossible to observe this gorilla family for long without noticing how much like us human beings their behaviour is. Indeed it was impossible not to realise that they are our close relatives. On later reflection I also thought how fragile are arguments that refer to all formalised human relationships as mere “social constructs”. The human-like behaviour of these gorillas showed a natural hierarchy with assigned roles. It was the product of evolution, not of some malign plot built on a "construction". The same is true of much formalised human behaviour, even if we have more advanced reason to modify what comes naturally.

Perhaps an even more profound part of this experience was the sense of kinship I felt with these animals. Much as I criticise the flawed world-view of Henry David Thoreau, I can’t help thinking of such moments as “Thoreau moments”.

I had one such moment recently when I was finishing a day of volunteer-guiding on the “open” bird sanctuary island Tiritiri Matangi. All day I had been admiring, and pointing out to visitors, the wonderful native birds – kokako, kereru, saddlebacks, tiu, hihi, bell birds and others. But as I trudged back down to the ferry wharf, I saw sitting in a tree a large magpie. These alien and aggressive birds are very much seen as pests in New Zealand, and indeed they are. So for a moment I was irritated by the magpie’s presence on the island. But then I looked more closely and recognised that, in its large size and beautiful black-and-white plumage and stateliness as it sat on the bough, this annoying creature is a marvel of evolution in its own right. And after all, it was no more of an intruder among native species than I, as a human being, was. Hello brother magpie, my kin – even if I’d shoot you if I were a farmer.

Another “Thoreau experience” came about a month after our visit to the Lisbon zoo, when I was on my own in the south-west of France. I spent some hours in the excellent natural history museum in Toulouse. Among many other fascinating things, there was the skeleton of a gorilla. But there was also the skeleton of a human being riding on the skeleton of a horse. The connection of gorilla to human being was obvious enough. But the sight of a human bag-of-bones on the back of a horse bag-of-bones immediately made me think of Gulliver’s Travels - the human ape-creature Yahoos compared with the patient horse Houyhnhnms.

Magpies, gorillas, horses. We are part of a continuum. 

Related footnote: A week after writing the above posting, we watched on Netflix a documentary about Jane Goodall, famed for her observation of, and interaction with, chimpanzees in their natural habitat in Africa. Much of this was delightful. But there was one moment when, at the risk of being accused of heresy, I was moved to sour laughter. Late in her chimp-watching years, Goodall saw the death (by natural causes) of an influential female chimp in the group she was observing. Shortly thereafter, the group split in two - and the two groups proceeded to attack and murder each other. In effect, this was war, carried out by organized bands of chimpanzees. Sorrowfully, Goodall said "This was a very dark time. I thought they were like us - only better." My sour laughter came from her naive assumption that somehow, non-human animals must be morally superior to human beings. Like hierarchies, organised violence is not something that human beings have created. It is built into nature itself, but usually in the form of predation (carnivorous animals killing other animals) or dominance contests (inidividual animals fighting over who will control the herd or pride). Nature really is "red in tooth and claw", and it is surprising that people who have long given up on religious belief somehow think that there once existed a primal harmony between species in an imagined Garden of Eden. As for violence by organized bands of one species against organized bands of the same species - in other words war - I used to tell students when I lectured on the history of warfare, that as far as we know, there are only three species who engage in warfare: ants, chimpanzees and us. Not that this fact in any way lessens my feelings of unity with other species that I expressed in the above posting.