Mammals on my mind

Kegu the genet

On the spare-room bed, in a box containing newspaper, a towel, a hot-water bottle and a jersey, and covered with a tray from the oven, the grey kittens are curled up together like caterpillars.  They are three days old and for half of their life-time they have been without food, warmth or shelter.  Every half hour, day and night, I feed them one or two drops until their shrivelled stomachs can manage more and they are strong enough to drink from a bottle.  Once in a while I dab their miniscule little bottoms to simulate the mother’s tongue.  Like all baby mammals that spend their early days in a nest, they will not urinate or defecate until the mother washes them, keeping them and the nest clean.

            In a basket on the floor, also snuggled into a jersey on a hot-water bottle, are four more kittens, a bit older and stronger than the others. They are bottle-fed and cleaned every three hours.  One is wrapped in a nappy awaiting the outcome of an enema.  The dilution instructions for the enema are per 15 kilograms body weight.  The kitten weighs 67 grams.  Nearby a sheet of paper is covered with calculations.  There is need of a mathematician here.

            On a shelf in the cupboard under the stairs, cleared of everything that could possibly break, is a tin tray of sand.  The young genet has decided that that is where he will do his doings, so that is where his sand tray must go.

            The genet is learning to climb.  He goes looping up the edge of the open door like a super-swift inchworm, pauses at the top, eyes slitted, then comes down head first with the same undulating motion, his pads gripping the sides of the smooth, enamel-painted door like a gecko’s.  he climbs up the clothes-horse, noses the freshly ironed clothes off the rails and watches them slither to the floor with intense interest.  He climbs onto the pantry shelf and does the same with a row of cups. The crash of breaking crockery heightens his sense of satisfaction.

            He wants to play and races through the house ahead of me, pouncing on my toes, bouncing off my shins, jumping onto places where I am about to put things down, pushing things down that I am about to pick up.  He keeps up his fast, hard game for an hour as I do the house chores in between feeding animals.  And all the time he gives a running commentary: “Oof-oof!  Oof-oof!” a soft, staccato explosion of air with a small vocal grunt to it.

            Tiring, he scampers up my clothes as if I was a tree, snuffles in my ear, slides down my arm and locks his tiny, round lion paws around my wrist and forearm.  There he rides, his chin on the back of my hand, his eyes dreamy, as I sterilise bottles, mix formulas and make tea for the household.  In error I pour the bushbabies’ formula into the teacups.  Doubtless the added vitamins, minerals, calcium and honey will do the people good.

            The mongoose has found a crack in the sitting-room wall.  With frightening enthusiasm and success he sets about removing the wall from the crack.

            In the pen behind the house are three fawns – two bushbuck and a duiker.  All are injured.  They drink as much as five pints of milk each, over three bottle feeds a day.  Like the kittens they must also be dabbed after each meal. It takes a minimum of half an hour to feed and tend each fawn.  One will not drink until he has sucked my ear lobe for a few minutes.  The duiker must first be kissed on the nose and told how very much like her mamma is this warmed rubber teat.  She is reluctant to believe it and needs a great deal of coaxing.  I rush to fit this in with feeding the other animals, with the housework and cooking, cleaning pens and nests, grooming and exercising our dogs, bringing selected leaves at dawn and dusk for the fawns who are beginning to browse, and catching grasshoppers for the genet and the bushbabies.

            The genet plays a distracting and crazy game in the hay of the shelter before falling asleep on the back of my neck as I crouch beside a fawn.  Bent over, I carry him back to the house, tip him into his nest and cover him up before checking on the leveret.

 

Bushbaby (photo: Simon Bearder)

 The leveret looks uncomfortable. He has a wind bubble. I put him against my shoulder in the recognised way and walk the floor with him, patting his back.  He is the size of a turkey egg.

            The phone rings.  Cupping one hand over the leveret I lift the receiver, tuck it under my chin and continue patting him.  It is my friend Marion.

            “It’s ages since I’ve seen you!” she exclaims.  “How are you doing up there?”

            I ask, “What’s the plural of chaos?”  My 70-year old friend gives a 17-year old giggle. We both wish she lived nearer to give me a hand sometimes.

            The leveret brings up his wind bubble, sneezes loudly and falls asleep.  Hearing him, Marion asks what is it this time and we chuckle again. We discuss the peculiarities of her dog’s digestive system which is giving him trouble and decide on a course of action.

            It is the instinct of the fawns at this age to lie down and keep still while their mother is away browsing.  Only when she is there to watch over them will they abandon safety precautions and devote themselves to uninhibited play.  Since I am the mother, a poor substitute to be sure but better than nothing I suppose, and such exercise is vital for their well-being, I ease the leveret back to bed, feed the kittens one more time, take up my clip-board and sit in the grass of their pen to write.

            Around me they rise and stretch, race and skip and dance. I abandon thoughts of writing to watch them with delight and to study the intricate way they communicate with each other: a flash of eyes, a flicker of ears, a twitch of noses, a shiver of tails, a lift of hooves, a whispered sound of controlled breath, perhaps telepathy. I can pick up only a fraction of it and emulate even less.

            Scientists chide me for my “outrageous anthropomorphisms”, for making it sound as if animals have human attributes and characteristics.  Animals, they point out, are not the same as humans. True.  I agree, although indulging in anthropomorphism now and then can be enormous fun and I have no intention of giving it up! But they are right.

            And yet, sitting here watching my fawns, I wonder how it is that I can understand what they are saying to each other, can identify with their moods and their needs?  How do I know when the leveret is uncomfortable with a wind bubble, when the genet wants to play and when he wants to rest, when the dog is genuinely sick and when she is just looking for sympathy?  How come most of us understand immediately when an animal is, say, in distress, pain or fear, even vaguely apprehensive? Well, because we know how they feel.  Simple!  Why do scientists make such a big issue of it?

            I think the answer is not that animals are like us but that we are like them. We don’t study humans to gain a better understanding of animals, but we do study animals, and very effectively too, to gain a better understanding of humans.

            As I see it, we are all mammals, and as such we share certain responses, needs, emotions, and I think we should not be afraid to recognise this.  We should not be afraid to identify something that we observe in animals by the same name, the same term, that we use when we identify it in humans.  And as we are all mammals, in my work whoever has the greatest need at any given moment is the one who gets attended to first, regardless of species or intellectual capabilities.  This philosophy dictates priorities without which I could never cope.

Bushbuck fawn at ablutions

            All mammals know the pain of childbirth, and the tremendous love for their young – even greater sometimes than their instinct for self-preservation, which must be one of the strongest instincts.  These youngsters drive their parents up the wall sometimes, and the parents chastise them; and as they grow, the young ones – especially the males – tousle and scrap and play-fight, try out their muscles, get cheeky and play dangerous games.  And when they leave the security of the parent they go out with apprehension and bravado.  Don’t we all?

            And the thing that is going to give the most trouble to a male of any species is another male – other males – of his own species, whether it is a leopard or a mongoose or a bushbaby going into territory already claimed by another, to try to get a place for himself and hold what he owns against intruders, or whether it is a boy going out to fight for his country or his ideals or his place in a competitive society, to hold what he owns against bandits and con-men – and politicians!

            Mammals know all about pain and fear, joy and sorrow, hate and love, and the tremendous need for love to be returned.  They know about boredom and the desire for action, at other times the desire for peace and quiet.  They know loneliness and the need sometimes to be alone.  They know jealousy, no matter how some scientists may hedge at the term.  And they know the apprehension of old age when the muscles won’t respond in the old way, the eye is not so quick and the bones ache. And they know about the will to live and the wish to die, about courage – often to a high degree – and sometimes even compassion.  We have so much in common.

            To take it further, here is something people take for granted every day: you can teach a dog, an ordinary dog, elements of the human language.  When you stop to think of it, this is nothing short of marvellous. My Doberman Javelin knew thirty-nine phrases and I could break them up, mix them up, connect them up, in any way I needed, and she understood.

            And look at the exciting research being done with dolphins, recording the sounds they make, trying to decipher them, playing them back and getting replies!  This is the opposite to our methods with dogs.  Here are people learning an animal language and using it to communicate with that animal.

            Chimpanzees, orang-utans and least one gorilla have been taught hand signs and signals which they string together on their own accord to communicate quite a wide variety of needs and thoughts with their trainers.  Who can say that given the anatomy – the tongue, the larynx, the lips – required for human speech, some of these animals would not learn to use a word or two of ours?  A man tells his dog, “Get outside!”  The dog understands.  He curls his lip in defiance.  The man understands the dog.  They are communicating.  But what if the dog actually said, “Go to hell!” which is what he means, as the man knows?  How would the man feel about that?  His ideas about dogs would be shaken to the core!

            Take it further, into the realm of art, thought of as a very human activity.  It turns out that chimps love to draw.  In recent experiments, researchers give a chimp and pencil and show him only that it is capable of making a mark on paper.  The chimp is delighted.  At first he will hold the pencil like a stick and scribble with the use of his whole arm.  But after a while, without being shown, he discovers the same method of holding it as we do.  Thereafter he draws with movements of the fingers and wrist instead of the entire forearm.  When they take a drawing away from a chimp and give it back later, he will take up the design where he left off.  He recognizes his own work.

            One chimp was seen to outline his shadow on the wall.  Another liked to breathe on the window pane and draw designs on it with her finger. The progress of a chimp’s art, researchers find, parallels that of a human child, step by predictable step, until they come to draw faces and further than that the chimp seems unable to go.

            These are apes, of course – a fact that some people find disturbing.  But I learned with surprise that the star of a series of such experiments was not an ape at all but a little Capuchin monkey from South America, named, unimaginatively, P2, who beat the chimps hollow, especially in problem solving.

Genet atop the fawns' pen

So if we must classify humans on one hand and animals on the other, where does the line between them lie? The further we delve into this the further we find we must extend the limits previously set.

            As I see it, one of the main differences is in the matter of abstract thought.  As far as we know animals are not capable of abstract thought.  And yet, how sure of this can we be?  We know, or think we know, when a child is daydreaming.  But unless he gives some physical expression of this we can’t be sure.  He may be inventing some marvellous new gadget or composing great poetry while he gazes into space.  I think that until communication between humans and animals is much more refined, we can’t be absolutely sure that there is not a glimmer of abstract thought emerging in some of the higher animals.

            The most positive difference, I feel, is in awareness.  Certainly a kudu bull, for instance, is aware that he is a very fine fellow, in that he feels good and gets a satisfying reaction from other kudus.  He is aware that he belongs to his species and not another.  He knows his own species by sight and smell, by patterns of behaviour and communication.  Although he may understand these same things very well in other species with which he is familiar, such as sable, eland or zebra, he is aware that he does not belong to those species.

            But is he aware that he is aware?  I think not.  This seems to be the big gap.  Once the mind is aware of its own awareness it can become analytical.  It can take great leaps forward in the matter of foresight.  It can seek to control a situation before that situation arises.  The possibilities for the expansion of thought become boundless.  Is not the difference between a human infant, who is aware of a great many things but who is not aware of his own awareness, and the adult who is, akin to the difference between the higher animals and early people?

            For this marvellous analytical mind there is a price to be paid: once you start to think, to reason, you lose instinct.  Instinct becomes submerged until, among humans, it is only really found in any reliable form in little babies and people under hypnosis.

            It is happening with baboons now.  They are having to cope with a wide variety of circumstances, some of which change virtually overnight, such as a farmer moving into a previously deserted area, or the erection of the Border fence between Zimbabwe and Mozambique with its minefields.  And almost all changes, due largely to human pressures, are hard, bitterly hard, on the baboons.  Because they are being forced to figure out how to cope, as opposed to reacting with blind instinct which may not be appropriate – albeit to cope in the light of experience, rather than foresight – instinct is becoming submerged.

            Hand-rear a baboon and turn him loose in the bush and he will perish.  He won’t know what to eat, how to find it, how to behave, or what are his natural enemies.  He will have learned these things from his family, from his troop – from you.  If he is used to bacon and egg for breakfast that is what he is going to look for in the bush.  Show him a scorpion and though he might have an idea that it may be edible, he will likely get stung.  He won’t know how to pinch off its tail in typical baboon fashion without being shown.  Hand-rear a buck and turn him loose, at least he will nibble at leaves and will know instinctively what he should eat and what to avoid.

            I wouldn’t say even baboons are aware of being aware.  They still share with the other animals this innocence that so often touches our human hearts.  It is just that I can see their minds having to extend and develop in the desperate need for survival, as maybe our remote forebears were forced to develop.  How true that necessity is the mother of invention.  Necessity and desperation.

            Another difference between humans and animals that puzzles me is that, with the possible exception of sea mammals, humans are the only ones to show so much white in their eyes. Even the apes, closest to us physically, show only a touch of white in the corners.  Why this should be and where along the path of evolution it developed I would love to know.  Beauty-wise, I think it is a disadvantage.  Oh to have great, dark, liquid eyes like my fawns!  Or the green eyes of a cat – complete with vertical pupils for devastating effect!

            If all people everywhere could understand how animals feel, could realise that mammals are mammals in all their variations and paths of development, and that we as humans are part of the brotherhood of it all, what could they do about it?  Go out there and kill everything off, as is happening now, today?  You don’t have to fire a shot, you don’t have to set a single trap, to eliminate a species. All you have to do is wreck their habitat in the cause of progress; pollute their water supplies in the cause of industrialisation; kill the insects and lower forms of life on which they depend and interact with, in the cause of pest control; harass them to the point where they will no longer breed.  Or nothing.  Ignore them.  Ignore them in all their fascinating and wonderful diversities and fill their places with more humans, who are, as a species, all the same – the same vicious killers no matter where they come from.

           

Or we can try to foresee, as intelligently as possible, what effect an action of ours will have on all those other lives and conduct it accordingly, in keeping with them.  We, all of us, from the children to the leaders, from the cripples to the supermen, can care, deeply and unashamedly.  It becomes the strong to be gentle.  It becomes the intelligent to be thoughtful. It becomes the brave to be kind.

            When the time is right these dancing, vulnerable, innocent little fawns of mine, like all my wild orphans, will go back to the wild.  The hours I spend caring for them will then be spent worrying about them.  I would feel a lot easier if there were no people around; no poachers, hunters, firesetters, or woodcutters.  They will have enough to contend with without the interference of man.  In fact, wildlife in general would do very well without humanity.

            Could humanity really do without wildlife?

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