Animals in Translation (23 page)

The same study also found that male dogs are 6.2 times more likely to bite people than are female dogs, and intact males are 2.6 times more likely to bite people than neutered males.

Finally, there are some animals, including some dogs, who are just
plain trouble. It's not their breed and it's not their owners. It's them. They're born that way, and they are bad, dangerous dogs.

If you're trying to buy or adopt a dog with the
absolute least
genetic proclivity to aggression, your best bet is probably a female, mixed-breed adult. However, it's really not necessary to be hyper-vigilant about the genetics of dog bites when you're choosing a pet. Serious dog bites are so rare that from 1979 to 1994 only .3 percent of the U.S. population got bitten badly enough to seek medical care. When you consider the fact that just about everyone in America who isn't living in a prison or a nursing home has fairly regular exposure to dogs, that's a very small number. You're better off thinking about how a particular breed of dog, or a mixed-breed dog, will fit into your life.

A
NIMAL
V
IOLENCE

People who love animals often think of animals as being aggressive but not
violent.
Only humans, they'll tell you, commit rapes, murders, or wage wars.

But that turns out not to be true. Some chimpanzees actually fight what Jaak Panksepp calls
mini-wars.
This is organized, violent behavior. Two groups of males from rival troops will meet at the border between their territories and fight. So many chimpanzees die in these mini-wars that in a lot of places the ratio of adult females to males is two to one. Jane Goodall has talked about how upset she was to find out that her beloved chimps could do something so awful. War is not unique to human animals.

I've heard many stories of violent behavior in farm animals. A woman I met told me about an expensive ram she bought from a small hobby farm (that's a farm whose owner raises farm animals as a pastime, not a full-time business). The ram was perfectly tame and gentle around people, so she thought he was fine, and she put him out with her twenty ewes. The ewes had already been bred and were in the early stages of pregnancy so they didn't come into estrus. The ram smashed their sides in and killed them all.

Many animals can be horrifically violent for no reason, it seems, other than the sheer desire to kill and maybe even to torture. It took many, many years for people to finally realize that dolphins, for
instance, aren't the benign, perpetually smiling sea creatures they look like to us. Instead, dolphins are big-brained animals who commit gang rape, brutal killings of dolphin “children,” and the mass murder of porpoises. In her book
To Touch a Wild Dolphin,
Rachel Smolker writes that male dolphins stick together in gangs and will chase a female down and forcibly mate her. Female dolphins don't form groups the way male dolphins do.
¹⁴
Reading the book I found the similarity between dolphin gangs and human gangs creepy.

There was evidence that dolphins were killing babies and porpoises for years, but researchers just didn't see it. They kept thinking that the porpoises must have been killed by boats or fishing nets. Finally someone pulled a porpoise who had just been killed out of the sea and found tooth marks on its side that perfectly matched the teeth of a dolphin. Ben Wilson, a dolphin expert at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told the
New York Times
that when he realized it was the dolphins who were doing the killing, his reaction was, “Oh my God, the animals I've been studying for the last ten years are killing these porpoises.”
¹⁵

Animal experts always manage to make infanticide seem not so bad. The standard explanation is that adult males have evolved to kill babies in order to bring the mother into estrus so she can have
their
babies. That could be true, but when you put infanticide together with other animal violence you may start to wonder just how
evolutionary
it is for an adult male to kill a baby of his own species or even his own group. Is animal infanticide really what nature intended? Or is it, at least some of the time, an aberration of what nature intended?

A videotape about the predatory behavior of killer whales made me see animal aggression differently. The different pods had each developed a different killing specialty. Some pods killed tunas they stole from fishing lines; some killed seals; some didn't do a lot of active killing. They just swallowed the fish whole. One pod had even figured out how to kill penguins, bite a hole in one end of the bird, and then squeeze on the other end until the insides came out of the feather “wrapper” so they could eat them. It was like squeezing toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube.

But one pod had become killers for sport. The cameraman filmed the pod separating a baby whale calf of another whale species from
its mothers and killing it. They crashed their bodies on top of it over and over again, pushing it underwater repeatedly until finally it drowned. It took them six or seven hours to kill the baby. Then they ate the tongue and nothing else. It was horrible.

The report didn't say whether the adults were males, but I expect they were. We do know that most of the violence seen in killer whales is done by adolescent males, just as it is in humans. Sociologists have found that boys and young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are most likely to be engaged in violence compared to other age groups. That makes me think that the kind of killing those whales were doing
isn't
evolutionary. Maybe it's a negative side effect of immature brain development.

With dolphins, researchers have pretty much reached the conclusion that much of the killing they do serves no evolutionary purpose. Dolphins will slaughter hundreds of porpoises at a time. The only imaginable evolutionary reason for this would be if porpoises compete with dolphins for the same scarce resources, like food. But they don't. Porpoises eat different food than dolphins do. Killing a porpoise doesn't increase a dolphin's chances of surviving and reproducing in any way. The only conclusion is that dolphins kill porpoises because they want to.

I don't know why animal violence happens, but when I read through the research literature I'm struck by the fact that the animals with the most complex brains are also the ones who engage in some of the nastiest behavior. I suspect people and animals probably pay a price for having a complex brain. For one thing, in a complex brain there may be more opportunities for wiring mistakes that will lead to vicious behavior. Another possibility is that since a more complex brain provides greater flexibility of behavior, animals with complex brains become free to develop new behaviors that will be good, bad, or in between. Human beings are capable of great love and sacrifice, but they are also capable of profound cruelty. Maybe animals are, too.

W
HY
D
OGS
D
ON'T
B
ITE
P
EOPLE

All animals have ways of managing their aggression. This is one place where evolution has to come in: it might be good for an individual
animal to murder his rival, but it wouldn't be good for the species if it was normal for animals to fight each other to the death. Few adult animals apart from humans ever attack each other so violently that one of them dies.

Dogs have an inborn guard against excessive killing called
bite inhibition.
A typical dog learns bite inhibition through puppy play. Dr. Michael Fox of the Humane Society of the United States has found that prey killing and head-shaking movements first occur in four-to-five-week-old puppies during play, and if you watch two puppies playing it's incredibly violent. They'll snap and snarl and lunge at each other's throats—I've seen one puppy grab another puppy's throat, bite down, and shake his head violently, just like he'd do in a killing bite. But the minute the other puppy gives the tiniest squeak the biting puppy lets go. That's how they train each other that it's okay to bite “this hard but no harder.” There are probably mechanisms to inhibit biting in all predators, because animals who are armed with teeth need to be able to stop biting before they rip each other apart.

Dogs have another method of teaching each other what's an acceptable level of aggression. When one puppy is getting too rough, the other puppy will suddenly stop dead in its tracks and stand stock-still facing the rough one. That always stops the other puppy, too. It's like a time-out. You'll see it a lot if you watch a younger, much smaller puppy roughhousing with an older, bigger puppy. They're both puppies, and they're both young, but one puppy is getting the worst of it thanks to size and age. It's amazing how fast the two puppies will adjust to each other's relative size and age. The smaller puppy will get lots rougher, and the larger puppy will get gentler.

Owners who play rough with their dogs are relying on their dog's bite inhibition to keep from getting mauled. Trainers say that's not a smart thing to do, because happy play can escalate to angry play if they get too aroused. That's one of the problems with having a multiple-dog household; the fun can turn violent and two playing dogs can suddenly bite each other for real. Still, even though all trainers tell owners not to play rough with their dogs, owners almost never listen, and I haven't read about people getting mauled by their pets in the middle of roughhouse play.

Roughhouse play is normal between dog friends, and it's probably normal between people and their dogs, too. I
have
seen people play too roughly with their dogs, though. I saw an owner one time play so roughly with his dog that it stopped being play to the dog, and it made her yelp. He was grabbing her loose skin too hard, and she finally growled at him. That's wrong.

I want to lay to rest one standard piece of dog trainer advice. Playing tug-of-war is probably not as bad as people think. Most trainers will tell you that playing tug-of-war with your dog encourages him to think he's your equal, which is bad. Other trainers take a slightly different view, which is that if you let your dog win a game of tug-of-war he'll be less obedient, but if you win he'll be more submissive.

However, a study of fourteen golden retrievers in Great Britain a couple of years ago found that neither of these things was true; at least neither was true with the fourteen golden retrievers the experimenters tested. The researchers had people either win or lose a series of tug-of-war games with the retrievers, and then watched how the dogs behaved. The losers
were
more obedient after playing the game—but so were the winners. All the dogs were more obedient after playing tug-of-war with humans! And none of the dogs suddenly got more dominant. The winner dogs didn't display any dominance behaviors like raising their tails up high or trying to stand over the person they'd beaten.
¹⁶
One study doesn't prove anything, but I think it's probably both safe and fun to play tug-of-war with your dog, and it might even be good for him. Just remember one thing: the study also found that the dogs who lost every time were a lot less interested in playing any more tug-of-war. Apparently a dog doesn't like losing all the time any more than a person does.

T
HE
B
OAR
P
OLICE

Pigs have a mechanism for managing their own aggression that I call the
boar police.
Pigs can be really vicious. Any child raised on a farm gets warned repeatedly to stay away from the mama pigs especially. That's good advice, because pigs don't have a bite inhibition mechanism that I can see, possibly because pigs are more chewers than biters. When I visit a pen of pigs they'll start nibbling on my boots; then grad
ually they'll work up to chewing harder and harder until I say “Ouch!” They don't take a social cue like that, either. If the chewing starts to hurt I have to really get on them to make them stop.

When pigs
do
bite, it's bad. Fortunately, the presence of a mature dominant male in the group will inhibit fighting, something that's probably true of many other species, too, although it isn't well researched. We do know it's true of elephants. Marian Garai, a zoologist in South Africa, has observed aggressive behavior in young but fully mature bull elephants being kept under control by older dominant males.
¹⁷

I did an experiment at a pig farm in Colorado to determine whether placing mature boars in a group of juvenile pigs would reduce fighting. Pigs can be nasty fighters and when strange pigs are mixed in together they will often injure each other as they fight to determine the new dominance hierarchy. I already knew this from earlier research by John McGlone at Texas Tech University.
¹⁸
He found that just spraying the scent of a mature boar reduced fighting, so I wanted to see what would happen if you actually put a live boar in there with them.

Having the mature boar present in the pen worked even better at controlling the fights than just the scent. With the boar there, both his scent and his behavior inhibited the younger pigs. When two pigs started a fight the boar would walk over toward them. That's all he did, just walked toward them. The only intervention was his commanding presence and his attention.

When the younger pigs saw him coming they stopped fighting. It was exactly like a bunch of young hoodlums who see the police and instantly stop what they're doing. The younger pigs acted so much like young human males they would even look around to see where the boar policeman was
before
starting a fight. If he was nearby they didn't start fighting, but if he was over in the other end of the pen they were more likely to attack.

S
OCIALIZING
A
NIMALS TO
O
THER
A
NIMALS