Frans de Waal Changed How We Think About Animals, Ourselves Included

The great primatologist Frans de Waal died last week, of stomach cancer, to the great sadness of his many admirers, myself among them.  His radically different view of primate behavior, and his gift for writing about it gracefully in a series of popular books, have placed him among the leaders of a quiet revolution in our ideas about the animal world and about ourselves. Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson credited de Waal with “moving the great apes closer to the human level than could have been imagined as recently as two decades ago.” Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, once a skeptic, later came to regard herself as one of de Waal’s “biggest fans” and said his description of the tactics primate societies use to stay together “in spite of their dominance-seeking and even murderous tendencies was terribly important, most especially if we want to understand humans.” 

I spent a few days with de Waal in 2003, researching a profile of him for Smithsonian Magazine. (Parts of it later turned up in my book The Ape in the Corner Office.) The first day in the observation tower overlooking his study subjects, I was watching de Waal closely, as any reporter would do in the course of note-taking. “You’re not paying attention to the apes!” he remarked.  “I’m paying attention to the main ape,” I replied. He laughed and we got along well thereafter, and of course I did also pay attention to his study subjects. Here’s that profile. I hope it brings back your own memories of an inspired and inspiring observer of the natural world.

By Richard Conniff

As in a good soap opera, chimpanzee life is anything but gentle, and, his interest in peacemaking notwithstanding, that suits de Waal just fine. On this lazy spring afternoon, he sits watching his study animals from a boxy yellow tower beside an open-air compound, part of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, where de Waal is a psychology professor. Below, one chimp strolls past another and deals out a slap that would send a football tackle to the emergency room. A second chimp casually sits on a subordinate. Others hurl debris, charge, bluff and displace one another. One chimp lets out an outraged waa! and others join in till the screaming swirls up into a cacophony, then dies away.

De Waal, now 55, going gray at the temples, in round, wire-rimmed glasses and a “Save the Congo” T-shirt, smiles down on the apparent chaos. “Growing up in a family of six boys, I never looked at aggression and conflict as particularly disturbing,” he says. “That’s maybe a difference I have with people who are always depicting aggression as nasty and negative and bad. I just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, it’s a little fight. As long as they don’t kill each other.’” And killing members of their own troop is something chimpanzees rarely do. Their lives are more like one of those marriages where husband and wife are always squabbling, and always making up.

“Growing up in a family of six boys, I never looked at aggression
and conflict as particularly disturbing”

De Waal got his start in biology as a child wandering the polders, or flooded lowlands, in the Netherlands, and bringing home stickleback fish and dragonfly larvae to raise in jars and buckets. His mother indulged this interest, despite her own aversion to seeing animals in captivity. (She was the child of pet shop owner and joked that the gene had skipped a generation.) When her fourth son briefly considered studying physics in college, she nudged him toward biology. De Waal wound up studying jackdaws, members of the crow family,which lived around (and sometimes in) his residence. Jackdaws were among the main study animals for de Waal’s early hero, Konrad Lorenz, whose book On Aggression was one of the most influential biological works of the 1960s.

Like many students then, de Waal wore his hair long, and sported a disreputable-looking fur-fringed jacket, with the result that he flunked a crucial oral exam. The chairman of the panel said, “If you don’t have a tie on, what can you expect?” De Waal was furious, but during the next six months preparing for his makeup exam, he got his first chance to do behavioral work with chimpanzees. This time he passed the exam, then threw himself full-time into captive primate studies. Eventually he obtained three different degrees at three different universities in Holland, including a PhD in primatology. He continued his research with chimps at the Arnhem zoo, then spent ten years studying macaques as a staff member at a primate center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Since 1991, he has divided his time between research at Yerkes and teaching at Emory. At Yerkes, the chimpanzee compound for de Waal’s main study group, FS1, is an area of dirt and grass half again as large as a basketball court, enclosed by steel walls and fencing. The chimps lounge around on plastic drums, sections of culvert pipe and old tires. Dividing walls angle across the open space, giving the chimps a chance to get away from one another. (The walls, says de Waal, “let subordinates copulate without getting caught by the alpha.”) Toys include an old telephone book, which the chimpanzees like to shred as a form of amusement.

It is, de Waal acknowledges, a completely artificial environment. Unlike chimps in the wild, his charges don’t spend seven hours a day foraging across their home range, they face no competition from outside groups, there are no immigrants or emigrants, and because of a worldwide surplus of captive chimps, birth control is mandatory. Captivity also reduces the power difference between males and females; females who live together defend one other against male aggression. “But the basic psychology of the chimpanzee and the basic behavioral repertoire are still there,” he says.

Captive studies also offer one crucial advantage: “You have control and you can see more,” says de Waal. In wild studies, it’s often a matter of luck whether you find the animals in the first place, “and it’s tricky to see when they have a fight, because they tend to run into the underbrush. So to follow what happens after a fight is almost an impossibility.” Students of captives used to say that research in the wild was anecdotal and unscientific; the wild researchers in turn said captive work had nothing to do with how animals really live. But the two sides now often collaborate. “I look at it that we need both,” says de Waal.

Cheer Up, Folks: It Ain’t So Bad

by Richard Conniff

For all of you who need cheering up in the time of plague (and apologies to those who have lost family or friends and are beyond cheering): I was randomly listening to Spotify when I heard someone named John Craigie singing, and this lyric leapt out, from the song “Dissect the Bird.”

It fits the moment:

So when the candle flickers, when the days get dark
They call them first world problems but they still break your heart
When the universe feels like it’s against you
Just take a minute to realize all it took to make you
Your parents had to meet, as random as that was
And hang out long enough at least, to make some love
And make a baby, and give it your name
And all your ancestors had to do the same
Exponentially backwards to the start of life
So much had to happen just exactly right
Sparks had to catch, oceans had to freeze
Billions of cells had to survive endless disease
Civilizations had to crumble, wars had to be fought

Good God! The Way We Talk to Each Other Sure Has Changed!

(Illustration: William Bramhall)

 

I happened to run across this piece this morning. It’s an “On Language” column I wrote for the September 18 1983 New York Times Magazine, and, holy crap, how much our culture has changed since then! It’s about a time, long, long ago, when Americans were excessively nice to one another. The headline was “The Case for Malediction,” and, America, I take it back.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times Magazine

Apple Computer ran an advertisement in various magazines early this year about the writing of a tricky business letter. The first draft of the letter began with the promising salutation ”Dear Mush-for-Brains.” But by the final version, the magic of word processing had transformed it, in effect, to ”Dear Valued Colleague.” The change may be good for business, but it is bad for the language, not to mention the blood.

Why not just come right out with something really wicked? It is the only healthy response to the terribly friendly times in which we live. The sharp word and the cutting retort are, moreover, commodities badly needed just now in American speech, which is becoming bloated and lazy with smile-button platitudes.

There are at least two ways to approach what might be termed the nice-nice crisis. It is possible, on the one hand, to take a sort of perverse sporting interest in the question of how much farther we can push back the boundaries of our national capacity for vapidness. Not long ago, I heard a television newscaster conclude her roundup of the usual atrocities with the earnest plea, ”Remember, you can make tomorrow a nicer day.”

Or, on the other hand, we can rebel. Tomorrow is almost certainly not going to be a nicer day, and what you’re going to need when you go out there is

Wilfred Owen on the Horror of War

Today marks the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first world war, and of the armistice that took place, in the mournful phrase seemingly designed for generations of sonorous broadcasters, “on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

It sent me back to re-read Wilfred Owen, the British poet who died a hundred years ago this past Sunday, and particularly to the poem where he asks the reader to join him as he watches through the panes of his gas mask as another soldier who did not get his mask on slowly dies:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Owen’s message is the same message almost every soldier unlucky enough to experience war and lucky enough to survive it brings home to whoever will listen:  Honor the dead. But do not glorify this horror.

Black Hound at Sunset

This isn’t quite the first piece I published in a national magazine, but it’s the first one that I felt good about. It ran in 1979 in Sports Illustrated, which back then took an interest in the world beyond Big Four sports.  I sent a copy to E.B. White, to thank him for some of the the things he had taught me about writing, and he replied, saying “when I got around to reading it, later, I could not put it down.”  This piece also appeared in my story collection Every Creeping Thing (Holt 1998).

by Richard Conniff

The sun was shining over the Atlantic when I arrived at the end of what had been a wet, stormy September day. I was staying the night at a hostel on Crohy Head about five miles from Dunglow, County Donegal. Inside, there was a turf fire and tea, and though I had already put in many miles on foot, the sun drew me out of doors again as soon as I had warmed myself a bit.

The hostel stood on a high spot with pasturage running down to the rocks and the water. Clambering over a stone wall, I walked slowly down through the grass. A stream babbled nearby, though the overgrowth almost hid it completely. Distracted by the murmuring water, I didn’t notice until the last moment the black dog racing down on me. It ran with a crazy, bucketing speed, and it leaped up at me almost before I had spotted it.

I have always been good with dogs, and I found I was particularly compatible with those in the West of Ireland. It was easy. The dogs there generally look alike and share the same quiet temperament; they are bred to herd sheep. “You seldom get a cross sheep dog,” a Mayo farmer had told me, as his dog rested its head against my knee. I hadn’t met a cross one yet, and so I didn’t panic when the dog

Animal Music Monday: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”

I probably first heard this song in the Kingston Trio version from 1959, because my older brother was a fan and their “.. from the Hungry I” album got played to ruin on the family’s monotone record player.

But the song dates from 20 years earlier, when a group called The Evening Birds stepped up to the microphones in a studio in Johannesburg and lead singer Solomon Linda, otherwise employed as a cleaner and packer for the record company, began to extemporize.  His song, call “Mbube,” or “The Lion,” became a hit in southern Africa.

In 1952, Pete Seeger and The Weavers introduced the song to the West, largely intact, based on a copy of the 78 rpm recording brought to him by the great musicologist Alan Lomax.  Seeger somehow misheard Linda’s “Mbube Uyimbube,” Zulu words meaning “the Lion, you are the lion” as “Wimoweh,” meaning absolutely nothing.  But his heartfelt, soaring falsetto caught some of the loneliness, fear,

Raid Frees Whale Sharks Illegally Bound for Ocean Theme Parks

A diver leads a whale shark out of the holding pen and safely back to the wild. (Photo: Paul Hilton/WCS)

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

In the latest episode in a remarkable crackdown on illegal wildlife trafficking in Indonesia, law enforcement officers there have staged a nighttime raid on a major supplier of large ocean species to the international wildlife trade. The raid revealed a scheme to illegally catch whale sharks—the largest fish species in the world, with the potential to grow to 41 feet in length and weigh 47,000 pounds—and export them to Chinese aquatic amusement parks.

Agents of the Ministry of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs found two whale sharks, each about 14 feet long, being held in submerged pens. Even fully grown, the sharks are harmless, slow-moving fish, typically swimming with mouths agape to filter-feed on plankton. Divers entered the pens and guided the sharks, which had been held for three months, back to freedom.

The raid was the result of a tip from Indonesia’s Wildlife Crimes Unit, a wing of the Wildlife Conservation Society. WCU had conducted an 18-month  investigation of the target company in the case. It was Indonesia’s seventh marine law enforcement action to take place this year with WCU support. In addition to those cases, which involved illegal trafficking in manta ray body parts, seashells, and sea turtles, the WCU assisted this year in the arrest of two poachers trading the body parts of endangered Sumatran tigers.

The raid was also part of an extraordinary campaign against wildlife trafficking by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Minister of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs Susi Pudjiastuti, a former seafood entrepreneur. Indonesia has been notorious as the scene of

I’m Really Hoping That’s Not a Bullet Ant on Justin’s Nose

Justin Schmidt being foolish.

I wrote about Justin Schmidt and the “Justin Schmidt Sting Pain Index” in my “intensely pleasurable” book Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals.  Here’s the opening to that chapter:

     One morning not long ago, an American entomologist named Justin Schmidt was making his way up the winding road to the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica when he spotted Parachartergus fraternus, social wasps known both for the sculpted architecture of their hive and for the ferocity with which they defend it. This hive was ten feet up a tree, and the tree angled out from an eroded bank over a gorge. Schmidt, who specializes in the study of stinging insects, got out a plastic garbage bag and promptly shinnied up to bag the hive.

He had taken the precaution of putting on his beekeeper’s veil. Undeterred, the angry wasps charged at his face, scootched their hind ends under in midair, and,

Why Predators Matter

There are no doubt plenty of contenders in the category “most destructive thing humans have done to Planet Earth,” but killing off predators has to rank near the top. And it is a continuing crime against nature.

Looking just at modern times, the list of predators we have driven to extinction includes North Africa’s Atlas bear, North America’s short-faced brown bear, the Caspian tiger, the thylacine (a marsupial carnivore in Tasmania), and the Zanzibar leopard, eradicated in the 1990s because of nonsense folklore about witchcraft.

We have pushed the few remaining big predators into a sad vestige of their old territory. Leopards are now gone from 66 percent of their range in Africa and 85 percent in Eurasia. Tigers are down to just seven percent of the territory they once ruled. African lion are on the brink of extinction in the wild, with just eight percent of their former range. Gray wolves, exterminated from the entire United States except Minnesota and Alaska, have in recent decades managed to slip back into a half-dozen or so other states, but only against the most violent resistance.

Why are we so terrified of predators? We are haunted by the ghosts of our evolutionary history, much as are pronghorn deer. They evolved to outrun North American cheetahs—and still run that fast even though the cheetahs went extinct 12,000 years ago. You might imagine that humans would be smarter than that, and yet we

No, Rachel Carson Was Not a Mass Murderer

My latest for Yale Environment 360:

Any time a writer mentions Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring or the subsequent U.S. ban on DDT, the loonies come out of the woodwork. They blame Carson’s book for ending the use of DDT as a mosquito-killing pesticide. And because mosquitoes transmit malaria, that supposedly makes her culpable for just about every malaria death of the past half century.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, devotes an entire website to the notion that “Rachel was wrong,” asserting that “millions of people around the world suffer the painful and often deadly effects of malaria because one person sounded a false alarm.” Likewise former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has declared that “millions of people, particularly children under five, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk science claims about DDT.” The novelist Michael Crichton even had one of his fictional characters assert that “Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.” He put the death toll at 50 million.

It’s worth considering the many errors in this argument both because malaria remains an epidemic problem in much of the developing world and also because groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, backed by corporate interests, have latched onto DDT as a case study for undermining all environmental regulation.

The first thing worth remembering is that it wasn’t Rachel Carson who banned DDT. It was the very Republican Nixon Administration, in 1972. Moreover, the ban applied only in the United States, and even there it made an exception for public health uses. The ban was intended to prevent the imminent extinction of ospreys, peregrine falcons, and bald eagles, our national bird, among other species; they were vulnerable because DDT caused a fatal thinning of eggshells, which collapsed under the weight of the parent incubating them. But the ban did nothing to stop