Mystery

“… One way to see the folly in ranking species is to start by trying to rank groups of humans. Are the rich better than the poor?... Are those of us in Western civilization better than uncontacted tribes in the Amazon?... it’s just not appropriate to place living creatures in a hierarchy. Instead we should ask how we can all live together… Consider other species’ treatment of us; most other species are far ahead of humans in respect to these principles. We treat them far worse than they treat us…

Humans embody the most extremes. We can give ourselves credit for being the most technologically talented, the most compassionate, and the most creative, but we also must own that we’re the most destructive, the cruelest, and the most violent. We are all those things simultaneously… We continue to fight and kill one another…

The tendency among humans is for the strong to obliterate the weak. Humans have hunted animals to extinction. Often these have been animals humans had been relying on for food. And each year we kill for food billions of animals we raise as prisoners and whose lives are often more terrible than their deaths. Even if we do continue eating animals, we could do much better by them and raise them more humanely. The way people treat animals affects the way they treat people: if you brutalize animals, you are probably hardhearted toward humans, too…

The biblical creation story in Western civilization says God made the world for us; we are literally at the center of the universe. That concept doesn’t correspond to reality… for many other species we’re a negative presence. Large animals, in particular, are at their lowest population levels in history because of our incredible destructiveness. We aren’t leaving enough room for many of the creatures who share the world with us. We have a lot of work to do if we don’t want to bankrupt the planet and rob future generations, human and otherwise.

Part of accomplishing that is having the humility to see that this is not our planet to destroy. The idea that the earth was created just for us engenders a dangerous sense of entitlement. We need to acknowledge the damage we are doing. Other species manage to exist for millions of years without causing mass extinctions… The best strategy (for minimizing harm to the earth and its creatures) would be to leave them enough room…

Don’t get me wrong, I like civilization. But there are far too many of us… If you look at the countries that have a flat or declining population rate, those are also the countries where women have access to education, financial stability, and family-planning technology. It’s a happy coincidence that we can fix two major worldwide problems with one solution: equal rights for women.

(Chimps and bonobos are) our closest living relatives. Many closer ones, including several other species in our genus Homo, went extinct. Chimpanzees and bonobos are actually quite different from each other socially. There seem to be more parallels between chimpanzees and humans. Chimps use a wider array of tools. Their societies are male dominated, and different groups will attack and sometimes kill each other over territorial disputes. The most dominant males will try to monopolize the fertile females, which ensures that the genes for dominating behaviors are passed on. Young chimps are playful and share with each other, but as they grow older, they display more jealousy, ambition, and aggression.

Bonobos, in a way, are like chimps who never grow up. The adults play with each other, frolicking and grooming and even flirting. They often engage in sexual play, which appears to release tension and promote cooperation. In one experiment, bonobos were able to use play — and foreplay — to work together to open a treat-filled box, whereas chimps faced with the same task couldn’t stop fighting among themselves and failed. Female bonobos rule the roost and maintain the peace, frequently using sex to settle disputes, and bonobo males tend to father equivalent numbers of children. We don’t know how the differences between chimps and bonobos arose. They share a common ancestor, but at one point the formation of the Congo River isolated them, and the two groups diverged. But why did one evolve the sort of female-dominated society we see among bonobos? So far, it’s a mystery…

I recently saw a presentation about experiments in which humans and other animals such as cats and rats were wired up while sleeping. It showed that when people are dreaming, their brains display certain activation patterns, and the other animals had the same patterns. So, yes, they are dreaming...

Dogs are domesticated wolves. The communicative postures we see dogs take — the crouching invitation to play; the submissive rolling onto their backs; the tails between their legs — are common wolf behaviors, too. Their domestication occurred about fifteen thousand years ago. Different dog breeds — greyhounds, mastiffs, dachshunds — look very different from wolves, and from each other, but these huge outward differences arise from minuscule genetic discrepancies. So little has changed genetically between wolves and domestic dogs that scientists no longer classify them as separate species.

You might imagine that stone-age humans actively domesticated dogs by adopting wolf pups as pets, but it now appears that wolves took the lead by beginning to scrounge food from tribes of humans. The least skittish wolves were able to get closest, and they got the most food, which increased their survival rate, enabling them to have more offspring, who inherited their relative calm and friendliness toward humans. Over the course of centuries, wolves domesticated themselves.

(Wolves) live in nuclear families and are exceptionally devoted to them, more so than many people. I’ve never heard of a male wolf leaving his mate and children... People hate wolves mainly because they have been taught to hate wolves. It’s like hating people from other races. Native peoples in the Americas have always respected and admired wolves. As far as I can tell, only two people have ever been attacked by wolves in North America. Wolves fear humans, and they rightly see us as a threat, not as prey. In Yellowstone National Park, in the two decades following their reintroduction, wolves have often encountered backpackers and campers. They flee from those people...

Charles Darwin discussed selective breeding in domestic animals in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species. Though he didn’t know about genetics, he observed that selective breeding often modified traits that breeders weren’t attempting to alter. We now know that these traits are bundled on the same genes that the breeders did select for. So as breeders created animals that were friendlier and more submissive, those same genes also gave them floppy ears and curling tails, variable color and texture of hair and fur, and flatter faces and smaller teeth, for example. These traits come with a genetic predisposition for friendliness that humans have often selected for in domesticating breeds. Those traits together are part of “domestication syndrome.”

Because domesticated animals are fed, sheltered, and protected from danger, they no longer have to survive by being alert to their environment. If you look at a cow, it appears docile and not ready to run at short notice. That’s because docility in domestic animals leads to a better chance of survival in confinement. As humans developed agriculture and settlements and raised livestock, we, too, settled into lives with fewer threats and hazards. Living on farms made us, in essence, farm animals. Like wolves, we domesticated ourselves.

My friend was a fishing guide and was trying to maintain his business during the disaster. He was out fishing, and a dolphin came up to his boat with a lot of oil on its skin and sputtering from its blowhole. My friend felt the dolphin was asking for help. The sad part is, even though humans had caused the problem, he was in no position to assist the stricken dolphin...

I recently saw a YouTube video… A dolphin comes over… and one of the divers notices a hook in its flipper. While the diver tries to get the hook out, the dolphin just lies there. At one point the dolphin returns to the surface to breathe and then comes right back. Finally the diver uses pliers to remove the hook, and the dolphin leaves. The dolphin clearly knew that people were capable of helping it…

Think about the implications of that behavior: they have to realize that we are capable of recognizing their plight and doing something about it. Would a dolphin go to a sea turtle and wait for it to take a hook out of its flipper? My guess is no. The dolphin probably approached the divers because it understood something about human intelligence. But how would it make that assessment? I just don’t know. That’s where it dissolves into mystery for me.”

~ Carl Safina writes about how the ocean is changing, lives of free-living animals, and the human relationship with the natural world. Carl spent a decade working to ban high-seas drift nets and to overhaul U.S. and international fishing policy. Carl’s seventh book is Beyond Words; What Animals Think and Feel. He lives on Long Island, New York with his wife Patricia and their dogs and feathered friends.