Grief and love in the animal kingdom Barbara J. King
I’d like to tell you today
about an orca named Tahlequah.
Tahlequah is also known
as J35 to scientists,
because she swims with the J Pod
in the Salish Sea.
These are the waters off of
British Columbia and Washington State.
Now, last year, in July 2018,
she was well along
in her 17-month pregnancy,
and scientists were very excited
because no baby had survived
in this pod for three long years.
Now, orcas are also
known as killer whales.
They’re profoundly social
and profoundly intelligent beings.
And scientists are very interested
in their behavior,
because in their social networks,
they share habits, information
and even affection.
They create true cultures of the ocean.
But this pod has been in trouble.
The Chinook salmon that the orcas favor
has been way down in the region,
and pollution has been up.
But on July 24th, Tahlequah
gave birth to a daughter,
and scientists were so excited
by this development.
But unfortunately, the same day –
in fact, shortly after birth –
the calf died.
Well, what happened next
electrified animal lovers
across the world,
because Tahlequah refused
to let her baby slip off into the water.
She kept it on her body
and she swam with it.
If it did fall off,
she would dive and rescue it,
and she battled stiff currents to do this.
Now, she kept this behavior up
for 17 days,
and during this time,
she swam over 1,000 miles.
At that point, she let the little baby
slip off into the water.
So today, Tahlequah
swims on with the J Pod,
but her grief still moves me.
And I do believe that “grief”
is the right word to use.
I believe that grief
is the right word to use
for numerous animals who mourn the dead.
They may be friends or mates or relatives.
Because these visible cues,
these behavioral cues,
tell us something about
an animal’s emotional state.
Now, for the last seven years,
I’ve been working to document
examples of animal grief –
in birds, in mammals,
in domesticated animals
and in wild animals –
and I believe in the reality
of animal grief.
Now, I say it this way
because I need to acknowledge
to you right up front
that not all scientists agree with me.
And part of the reason, I think,
is because of what I call the “a-word.”
The a-word is anthropomorphism,
and historically,
it’s been a big deterrent
to recognizing animal emotions.
So, anthropomorphism is when
we project onto other animals
our capacities or our emotions.
And we can all probably
think of examples of this.
Let’s say we have a friend who tells us,
“My cat understands everything I say.”
Or, “My dog, he’s so sweet.
he ran right across the yard this morning
towards a squirrel,
and I know he just wants to play.”
Well, maybe.
Or maybe not.
I’m skeptical about claims like those.
But animal grief is different,
because we’re not trying
to read an animal’s mind.
We’re looking at visible cues of behavior
and trying to interpret them
with some meaning.
Now, it’s true – scientists
often push back at me,
and they’ll say,
“Ah, look, the animal might be stressed,
or maybe the animal’s just confused
because his or her routine
has been disrupted.”
But I think that this overworry
about anthropomorphism
misses a fundamental point.
And that is that animals
can care very deeply for each other,
maybe they even love each other.
And when they do,
a survivor’s heart
can be pierced by a death.
Let’s face it:
if we deny evolutionary continuity,
we are really missing out
on embracing part of ourselves.
So yes, I believe in the reality
of animal grief,
and I also think that if we recognize it,
we can make the world
a better place for animals,
a kinder place for animals.
So let me tell you a little bit more
about animal grief.
I’m going to start in Kenya.
You see here there’s
an elephant named Eleanor
who came one day with bruised legs,
and she collapsed.
You see on the left
that another female named Grace
came to her right away
and, using her own trunk, propped her up,
tried to get her up on her feet.
And she did succeed,
but then Eleanor collapsed again.
At this point, Grace became
visibly distressed,
and she prodded the body,
and she vocalized.
Eleanor collapsed again,
and unfortunately, she did die.
What you see on the right is a female
from another family named Maui,
who came after the death,
and she stayed at the body.
She held a vigil there,
and she even rocked in distress
over the body.
So the scientists watching the elephants
kept close observation on Eleanor’s body
for seven days.
And during those seven days,
a parade of elephants came
from five different families.
Now, some were just curious,
but others carried out behaviors
that I really believe
should be classified as grief.
So what does grief look like?
It can be rocking, as I said, in distress.
It can also be social withdrawal,
when an animal just takes
himself or herself away from friends
and stays by themselves,
or a failure to eat or sleep properly,
sometimes a depressed posture
or vocalization.
It can be very helpful
for those of us studying this
to be able to compare the behavior
of a survivor before death
and after death,
because that increases the rigor
of our interpretation.
And I can explain this to you
by talking about two ducks
named Harper and Kohl.
So we’re into birds now.
So Harper and Kohl were raised
at a foie gras factory,
and they were treated cruelly.
Foie gras does involve
force-feeding of birds.
So this hurt their bodies, and their
spirits were not in good shape, either.
But thankfully, they were rescued
by a farm sanctuary in upstate New York.
And for four years, they stabilized,
and they were fast friends.
They often took themselves
to a small pond on the property.
Then, Kohl started to have
really intractable pain in his legs,
and it was clear to the sanctuary
that he had to be euthanized humanely,
and he was.
But then the sanctuary workers
did a brilliant thing,
because they brought Harper
to the body to see.
And at first, Harper prodded
the body of his friend,
but then he laid himself over it,
and he stayed there
for over an hour with his friend.
And in the weeks after,
he had a hard time.
He would go back to that same pond
where he had been with Kohl,
and he didn’t want any other friends.
And within two months, he died as well.
Now, I’m happy to say
that not all grieving animals
have this sorrowful outcome.
Last summer, I flew to Boston
to visit my adult daughter, Sarah.
I was with my husband Charlie.
I really needed a break from work.
But I succumbed,
and I checked my work email.
You know how that is.
And there was a communication
about a dejected donkey.
Now, as an anthropologist,
this wasn’t what I expected,
but there it was, and I’m glad I read it.
Because a donkey named Lena
had gone to another farm sanctuary,
this one in Alberta, Canada,
as the only donkey there,
and had trouble making friends
for that reason.
But she eventually did make friends
with an older horse named Jake,
and for three years they were inseparable.
But the reason the email came
was that Jake, at age 32, the horse,
had become gravely ill
and had to be put down,
and this is what was going on.
This is Lena standing on Jake’s grave.
She didn’t want to come in at night.
She didn’t want to come in for food.
She didn’t want to come in for water.
She pawed at the grave,
she brayed in distress,
and there she stood.
So we talked and we brainstormed.
What do you do for an animal like this?
And we talked about the role of time,
of extra love and kindness from people
and of urging her to make a new friend.
And here’s where her trajectory does
diverge from that of Harper the duck,
because she did make a new friend,
and sanctuary workers wrote back
and said it worked out well.
Now sometimes, scientists
supplement observation
with hormonal analysis.
There’s an example of a group
of scientists in Botswana,
who took fecal material from baboons
and compared two different groups.
The first group were females
who had witnessed a predator attack
and lost someone in that attack,
and the second group were females
who had witnessed an attack
but had not lost someone.
And the stress hormones
were way up in that first group.
But here’s the thing:
the scientists didn’t just
call them “stressed baboons,”
they called them “bereaved baboons,”
and in part, that’s because
of the observations that they made.
For example, this mother-daughter
pair were very close,
and then the daughter
was killed by a lion.
The mother removed herself
from all her friends,
from her grooming networks,
and just stayed by herself for weeks –
bereavement –
and she then slowly recovered.
So we have bereaved baboons.
Will science tell us someday
about bereaved bees?
Will we hear about frogs who mourn?
I don’t think so, and I think the reason
is because animals really need
one-to-one, close relationships
for that to happen.
I also know that circumstance matters,
and personality matters.
I have documented
cats and dogs who grieve,
our companion animals,
but I also interacted with a woman
who was extremely bothered
because her dog wasn’t grieving.
She said to me, “The first dog
in the house has died.
The second animal does not
seem concerned, the second dog.
What is wrong with him?”
(Laughter)
And as I listened to her,
I realized that this dog was now
the only animal in the household,
and as far as he was concerned,
that was a pretty good deal.
So circumstances matter.
Now, in any case, animals
are not going to grieve
exactly like we do.
We have human creativity.
We paint our grief, dance our grief,
write our grief.
We also can grieve for people
we’ve never met,
across space and time.
I felt this strongly when I went to Berlin
and I stood at the Holocaust Memorial.
Animals don’t grieve exactly like we do,
but this doesn’t mean
that their grief isn’t real.
It is real, and it’s searing,
and we can see it if we choose.
Now, I’ve lost both my parents.
I lost a very dear friend
at a young age from AIDS.
I believe most likely most of you
here have lost someone.
And I have found it a genuine comfort,
a solace, to know that we aren’t
the only beings on this earth
who feel love and grief.
And I think this is important.
I also think we can take
this a step further,
and we can realize
that the reality of animal grief
can help us be better
and do better for animals.
This is already happening with Tahlequah,
because the United States and Canada have
renewed their talks with greater urgency
for how to help the orcas,
how to restore the Chinook salmon
and how to help with the water pollution.
We can also see that if grief is real,
there’s tremendous
plausibility to the notion
that animals feel a whole range of things.
So we could look at joy,
sadness, even hope.
And if we do that,
here’s how we can start
to think about the world.
We can look at orcas and say,
we know they grieve,
we know they feel their lives,
and we can refuse to confine them
to small tanks in theme parks
and make them perform
for our entertainment.
(Applause)
Thank you.
We can look at elephants
and say, yes, they grieve,
and we can renew our efforts
against international trophy hunting
and against poaching.
(Applause)
Thank you.
And we can look at our closest
living relatives, monkeys and apes,
and know yes they grieve,
they feel their lives,
so they don’t deserve to be confined
in highly invasive biomedical experiments
year after year.
And, you know –
(Applause)
the ducks Harper and Kohl,
they tell us something too.
They help us connect the dots
and realize that what we eat
affects how animals live.
And it’s not just foie gras,
and it’s not just ducks.
We can think about pigs and chickens
and cows in factory farms,
and we can know.
I can tell you the science is real
that these animals feel, too.
So every single time
we choose a plant-based meal,
we are contributing
to reducing animal suffering.
(Applause)
So yes, I believe in the reality
of animal grief.
I believe in the reality of animal love,
and I think it is time for us humans
to recognize that
we don’t own these things.
And when we see that,
we have an opportunity to make the world
so much better for animals,
a kinder world, a gentler world,
and along the way, we might
just save ourselves, too.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
Thank you. Thank you.
(Applause)