Schaller & Bekoff reviews

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From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2007:

 

 

A Naturalist & Other Beasts: Tales From A Life In The Field

by George B. Schaller

Sierra Club Books (85 2nd St., San Francisco, CA 94105), 2007.

272 pages, hardcover. $24.95.

 

The Emotional Lives of Animals

by Marc Bekoff

New World Library (14 Pamaron Way, Novato, CA 94949), 2007.

214 pages, hardcover. $23.95.

 

 

" I was fortunate to have been part of the golden age of

wildlife studies, from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century,

when many large mammals--even such familiar and spectacular ones as

the elephant and jaguar--for the first time became the focus of

intensive research, " writes George Schaller.

Schaller also had the good fortune to be hired in 1956 as a

field biologist for the New York Zoological Society, and to work his

way up as it grew into the Wildlife Conservation Society, for which

he is now vice president and director of field operations.

Born in 1933, when Konrad Lorenz had barely begun to

differentiate ethology from other approaches to studying animals,

Schaller began his work at a time when behaviorism dominated

scientific thinking about how animals think and feel.

Anthropomorph-ism, or projecting human attributes into animal

behavior, was a scientific cardinal sin.

Ethology was coming into vogue. Wildlife photography, film

making, and the advent of television early in Schaller's career

developed new public interest in studying animals in their natural

habitat. That meant more funding for field research, and a much

larger audience for discoveries.

By the middle of Schaller's career, the audience for

wildlife documentaries had matured into the greater part of the donor

base and voting constituency for wildlife conservation, previously a

poor relative of managing wildlife to be hunted and fished.

The 19 essays forming A Naturalist & Other Beasts are

individually a combination of wildlife observation and travelogue.

Cumul-atively, they are a series of snapshots in the evolution of

the ethics of research, parallel to growing recognition that animal

behavior exists, just as Charles Darwin postulated, in a continuum

with our own.

Schaller seems to have mostly avoided the debate over what

discoveries about animal intelligence mean--or should mean--to how

humans treat animals. He left challenging the taboo against

anthropomorphism to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, and left raising

the major ethical questions to Donald Griffin, a much older

scientist with formidable credentials in traditional laboratory

observation.

Schaller insightfully discusses conflicts of values involved

in conservation, but his chief discussion of ethical duties toward

individual animals is in an author's note appended to his chapter

about observing Himalayan snow leopards. On the third of Schaller's

treks to the Himal-ayas, he was accompanied by the author Peter

Matthiessen, who based The Snow Leopard (1973) on their journey.

" I was, and still am, ambivalent about providing a snow

leopard with live bait, " Schaller writes. " I checked the goats

twice a day to make certain that they remained fed and watered and

were not distressed; they lacked only companionship. I could have

offered dead baits, as it still done by hunters for lions and

leopards, but that would have caused the death of goats needlessly.

Most of the live goats were not discovered by a snow leopard in the

few days they were tied out, and their was little chance that a cat

would find a goat carcass before it was stripped by vultures.

Furthermore, my heart is with the rare markhor, not the locust-like

domestic goat. Each meal of a domestic goat eaten by a snow leopard

saved the life of a markhor. "

Between staking out goats to attract leopards, Schaller and

Matthiessen bunked at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, but whatever

they learned about reverence for all life does not seem to have

trumped ideas about species conservation that assign greater moral

value to scarcity, rather than the capacity to suffer.

Marc Bekoff, 12 years younger than Schaller, nine years

younger than Goodall, initially did similar field studies, but

eventually moved from documenting what animals do to analyzing how

and why. Often partnering with Goodall in recent projects, Bekoff

tends to be identified with a much younger generation of scientists,

ethicists, and activists.

" Basically, I am an animal rights advocate/activist with deep

concerns about all animals, plants, bodies of water, the air we

breathe, outer space, and inanimate landscapes, " Bekoff wrote in a

recent autobiographical statement. " I am a vitalist and see and feel

life in everything, animate and inanimate...I am a vegetarian. I eat

a few animal products minimally, and strive to eliminate all animal

products as time goes on. My reasons for vegetarianism are ethical

and not health related, " although Bekoff--even in his sixties--is a

formidable bicyclist and runner.

The Emotional Lives of Animals, already perhaps Bekoff's

most influential book, is less entertaining than Schaller's

anecdotes, more argumentative, copiously footnoted, and addresses

much that Schaller might have seen, and in some cases even

documented, without actually perceiving.

" The plural of anecdote, " Bekoff often argues, " is data. "

His dispute with the scientific establishment is with a

self-protective scientific tendency to selectively and sometimes

unconsciously exclude from analysis any observations that may call

into question key presumptions about why and how the studies are

being done in the first place.

For example, Bekoff would point out that Schaller's

ambivalence about staking out the goats is a behavioral observation.

Why was Schaller uneasy? Why does he feel compelled to rationalize

the ethics of his action? Why does he retreat behind an argument

based on scarcity, which if extended one step farther would suggest

that since humans are more numerous than goats, Schaller himself

might have made the most appropriate leopard bait?

Schaller's feelings were an emotional response. Scientists

trained to exclude their emotional responses from their observations

tend to miss much information. In Schaller's case, his feelings

about staking out the goats might have furnished far more material

for study than his few glimpses of snow leopards--if he had allowed

himself to pursue that line of thought.

The Emotional Lives of Animals explains, basically, that we

know animals have feelings similar to ours for many reasons, not

least that we often respond to the feelings that animals project,

and are rewarded by responses similar to what ours would be if the

roles were reversed. --Merritt Clifton

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

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Fax: 360-579-2575

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