Still on a science essay kick, I was happy to dig into the New York Times Magazine cover story this weekend: "An Elephant Crackup?" about the recent rise in psychotic behavior of elephants. Psychotic behavior includes: goring a tourist with a tusk, crushing a trainer's skull underfoot, stampeding a village, and knocking a man dead with one sweep of a trunk for attempting to remove an ankle chain. Sure, elephants in captivity have always taken revenge on their human captors, but more so in the past ten years than we've seen before. The article gives some compelling reasons why elephants would behave this way, somewhat having to do with the disruption of their packs and habitats, and the post-traumatic stress disorder from this disruption. For example, one elephant that went on a killing spree had previously witnessed the brutal killing of both of his parents as a child, then was moved away from his home to a strange environment where he lived in relative isolation, and with no adult females to nuture him back to health. And pack animals and isolation do not mix. Who wouldn't want to stampede a village to death after living through that?
And if elephants are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, then they, and other animals, truly can feel emotion. A scientist from the article says, "Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals."
Another striking behavior is how elephants treat their dead. Elephants bury their dead, visit the graves frequently, caress the bones with their trunk. They may not understand sorrow and loss, but they express the emotion of it. Not only do this for the dead elephants in their pack, but for the humans they kill, as well. Spooky. Or evidence that we're not as complex as we thought we were, just because we bury our dead.
But what all this made me wonder, what all this came back to, as it often does, is Mister President. If elephants are complex pack animals that feel emotion, how does Mister President feel about me? I'm fairly certain that if I dropped dead in the living room floor one afternoon, Mister President would not bury or mourn. He would sniff around the body and go back to sleep, and only stir when it was time to go for a walk or have a meal, and then he would whine and bay out of sorrow for his own hunger and desperate bladder. This was evidenced by a time when Khoi was walking Mister President a few winters ago, slipped on the ice and twisted his ankle. With his owner wincing in pain and unable to get up, Mister President pulled the leash taut in the direction he still wanted to walk. Sympathy? I think not.
And then there are the times when Mister President wants to get up on the couch, and insists that you and anyone else clear off so he doesn't have to share. Or when he is forced to share, he goes to the furthest end with his backside facing you. Some lap dog.
But there have been those moments, one or two of them, when he's been hurt or scared, that he's needed his pack leader for protection. Once in the dog run, he flipped over a dog and landed on his back and came limping over to me whimpering, pushing against my leg for affection. And another time, I hid behind a tree in Prospect Park and within minutes he was doing a desperate gallop to find me, his expression going from concern to relief when he came upon my tree. Still, though those moments felt like love, they were clearly the need of an animal that instinctually knows he has a dependence on me for food, warmth, protection and more food. Can I interpret that as love? Connection? Why not.
The line between need and affection, in dog-human and human-human relationships, is a blurry one. Would there be love without need? Is love a way of humanizing our own instinctual needs for someone to pay half the mortgage, pick up the kids from soccer and hold our hand in a hospital bed? We hope our affection comes from somewhere else, the way we make one another laugh, the things we share, the way we depend on one another, and so on, and that love is not just a construct to raise us a hair above elephants and dogs and other pack animals. But this has gotten far too philosophical. And from Mister President, dependence is equivalent to love, and demands--pawing an empty water bowl, staring out the window and curling up by his food bowl--as good as affection.
