When making conclusions from a footage there are, beside the spectators experiences, three main concepts to take into consideration: the story itself, the actors intentions and their motives.
A movie conveys a story. When two people watch the same movie, two different experiences arise. It is not unlikely that they each have their own version of what the movie conveyed.
When we watch an animal clip, ‘story’ means a description in words of the filmed event, as precisely and impersonally as possible, without any kind of opinion or judgment being added. One simply describes what happens without any attempt at explaining or to valuate.
This is not to say that one must refrain from reading an intention into the animals that act in a story, but one must know when one is aimingb at an interpretation, and when one is reproducing the story itself. If you see a dog running after a ball, it is correct to say that the dog's intention is to get hold of the ball. But if you want to reproduce the story itself, you can just say that the dog runs after the ball and takes it in its mouth. If it does that.
An even more hidden concept is what motive the dog had for what he did. Fun to play with ball? For the fun of taking it in the mouth? To make whoever threw the ball happy? As a substitute for chasing a cat? Motives are hard to come by. Even as a conscious person, you don't always know what drives you.
To be aware of those concepts helps to clear away delusions, misunderstandings, deceptions, wishful thinking, to clear the stage so that it is as clean as possible when the human quality that matters most when it comes to relating to the world around us: emotions, empathy.
For far too long, the emotional life has been pushed aside by measurements, logic and tables of reason. Reason and thought are tools for analysis, but it is empathy that builds bridges and connects.
Here is a story: A toddler sits on his three-wheel bike on the garage driveway when a dog attacks him from behind, grabs him by a leg and drags him off the bike. Then a cat comes rushing and scares the dog away. A woman shows up and takes care of the child. This is a story. A story can be more or less consistent with what actually happened, it has the potential of being exact, at least roughly.
The story is hard to misunderstand. The dog attacks the boy, the cat scares the dog away, the woman takes care of the boy. The cat's intention is perfectly clear, to drive the dog away. However, we do not know the cat's motive. One would like to believe that it is to protect the boy, and perhaps it is, but maybe the cat is reacting to the dog's intrusion? No dogs on my backyard!
We can never be sure of motives. The newspaper hero that saved the boy from drowning, maybe it was just the prospect of being in the paper, who knows?. Or was it for atone for something that has happened in the past? Or a natural reaction of a caring human? Who can know for sure?
We can never be sure of motives, yet we deal with them every day. “She is so greedy.”—“Why do you say so? She donates large sums for charity.”
In the case of the young boy and the dog, what do one gain by questioning the cat's motive? You cannot know why the cat intervened. Does that make you abstain from pondering? The feeling has no difficulty seeing it as the cat attacks the dog to save the boy. The truth in that conclusion lies not least in that it brings us into closer contact with other animals.
While a story itself may seem clear, the title of a clip can be misleading. Here is a clip entitled Duck feeding fishes and shows a bird that stands and eats at the edge of a pond. A number of carp have gathered in the water. The carp gather where the bird dips its beak. Without the support of a reflective intellect to scrutinize the story more closely, the emotions probably accept the scene as birds feeding fish. It is so touching, the meeting between two species.
The bird is not a duck, but a goose—a Canada goose. One has to be careful with titles. It is not professionals who post online. When a well-meaning, romantic heart wants to see how animals help each other, the eye is easy to deceive.
The goose does not feed the carp; the carp try to catch any foodspills from the goose when it dips its beak into the water. Any relationship between the carp and the goose is difficult to discover; the goose seems almost surprisingly unaffected by the presence of the carp. (One of the comments on this clip dryly notes “this dude has chosen a title the same way media companies create journalism”.)
The following clip is from a bear enclosure at the Budapest Zoo on June 19, 2014. The female bear Vali, a concrete landscape and a pond in the foreground. A bear saves a drowning crow.
At the beginning of the clip, Vali steps down on a rock, bends down and pokes on something behind the rock. A crow flaps out. It has apparently been stuck in some way, has now come loose, and is flapping along the edge of the pool.
Vali looks down at the crow, eats some of the vegetables on the ground. Constantly watching how the crow swims along the edge of the pool. When the crow has reached a corner of the pool and will go no further, Vali leans down, gropes for the crow, but fails to get a good hold. Instead, Vali grabs the crow's right wing with her mouth and pulls the crow up on land. You hardly have time to see that the crow pecks Vali on the nose. Vali releases the crow, turns its back and continues to munch on the food laid out.
The crow lands on its back, lies still for a while, flaps to turn around, doesn't come around. Another pause and then another try. This time the crow ends up on its feet. Vali is lounging around and taking care of the vegetables on the ground. In the rest of the clip, Vali does not pay the crow a glance, from what we can see in the clip.
That was the long story. Here is the short story: Vali, brown bear at a zoo, pulls up a crow that ended up in the water and probably saves it from drowning.
Why would a bear care about a crow? Is she bored? Is it unique for an animal of one species to help an animal of another species? Does it show that animals that don't need to watch out for enemies and have food secured, can show sides that rarely displays in the wild? Questions, hard to avoid. Questions, but no answers.
A relevant question is how the crow ended up in the water. Did she mess around the bear's food until Vali got annoyed and swept her into the water? Is there anything going on here other than a bear helping a crow out of the water? Was Vali going to eat the crow, but recoiled at the taste of feathers? Here one of the major disadvantages of Youtube clips is revealed: the limited time windows, the sequences often lack important parts; relevant information is missing.
What if we simply state something that follows from the story: Vali's intention was to pull the crow out of the water. Then follows that Vali saved the crow which otherwise would surely have drowned. Then we can say this: Vali saved a crow from drowning. At least that is how far we can go. That the feeling easily fills in by giving Vali a noble motive does not in any case harm our relationship with other creatures.
Some comments on this clip claim that the bear does not see that it is a crow, but thinks that the crow is a fish, that the crow was intended as food. Other comments suggest that those who believe the bear really wanted to save the crow are sentimental soft-brains. Still other praise Vali and see the story as confirmation that there is empathy and care in nature and that bears are not cruel slaughtering machines. You have to take your own stand there, but the fact remains: Vali saved a crow that was drowning. Then you can understand this comment: “You really feel warm in the soul when you see things like this”.
The clip draw attention and several media published comments on it. The staff at the Budapest Zoo told us that gray crows have almost taken over the facility. They stole food wherever they could. This crow, they said, was lucky to hit Vali and not Defoe, the other bear, who probably had a different valuation of the crow's life. Someone at the Budapest Zoo even speculates about Vali's motive, that it was out of curiosity that she pulled up the crow. That speculation has a little more weight than other guesses since it came from someone who knows Vali a bit.1
Still, it is difficult to comment on someone else's motives. Why wouldn't a benevolent interpretation about a friendly bear be preferable to one that without insight means that the bear can't tell the difference between a bird and a fish? Too often, it is that kind of sceptical attitude that prevails. I personally think that it is a kind of comment that points out a civilizational defect, a damaged gene in Western thinking. The victory of the negative. Some call it scepticism.
The difference between Vali and Defoe points to something that is often overlooked when talking about animal behaviour—the individuality. Each species has its typical characteristics, but each individual within the species has its individual profile. Just as appearances vary, so do behaviours. Even in creatures as small as banana flies.2 We must get used to seeing animals as individuals. It can be a challenge when we may not even always be able to treat people from foreign cultures as individuals. But it would make the world better.
On August 19,1996 the then eight-year-old female gorilla Binti Jua at Brookfield Zoo, Illinois, performed a famous intervention that should be a compelling example of empathy and benevolence. A three-year-old boy had managed to get through the barrier and fell onto the concrete floor of the gorillas, a fall of just over seven meters. Binti Jua took care of the boy, carried him under her arm to the entrance where the attendants could come and take care of the boy.
More information about Binti Jua and the incident at Brookfield Zoo can be found in Wikipedia.
As if it were surprising that an animal shows empathic ability, explanations for her behaviour have been sought. Some say it was because she was raised by humans after have been abandoned by her own mother. Would one have asked as much for an explanation if a human had performed a similar act? Primate researcher Frans de Waal believes that what Binti Jua did was a natural behaviour and shows the empathic ability of animals. Additionally, gorillas are by nature friendly and good-natured.3
The matter might have been easier to understand if it was linked to a similar event that took place ten years earlier, in August 1986 in the Durell Wildlife Park in Jersey. Here too a boy, Levan Merritt, managed to fall down to the gorillas. Jambo, a twentysix year old silverback walks up to the boy, pokes him gently, keeps the young gorillas at bay, and sits down to guard the boy.
The following clips are a couple of scenes from Argo Films/National Geographic's film The Urban Gorilla.4 The first part shows Jambo protecting Levan, the second part shows an expedition in the early 1900. You could say that the clip as a whole shows differences in animal capacity for empathy.
The episode with Jambo and Levan has become legendary and has been clipped into many presentations on Youtube. As Jambo strikes the unconscious boy's back, he uses the back of his hand. Soft, gentle. He is very careful. In one of the clips, you can see how Jambo turns his gaze searchingly up towards the spectators.5
Notice that the audience behaves calmly. No yelling or hysterical screaming. Still, and despite Jambo's very clear body language, trust is fragile, and the public begins to express fear when the boy wakes up and starts howling. This seemingly worries Jambo, who runs away and takes the family indoors.
In one of the clips, the announcer's voice says that Jambo “appeared to guard Levan”, a comment that no one would ever make if a human behaved the same way. In another version, the announcer voice says “Jambo immediately stood guard”. It is to that kind of understanding we must reach.
A tragic example, the case of Harambe on May 28, 2016 at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, shows how people's fear can lead to death and misfortune. Here, too, a boy, three years old, has fallen to the gorillas.
Seventeen-year-old Harambe tries to protect the boy by putting himself between the boy and the screaming spectators. The situation is stressful, and in gorilla way, he drags the boy with him to a more secluded place. It certainly looks violent as Harambe drags the boy along the concrete wall, but that is how a female gorilla may drag her cub along.
The staff should have known Harambe well enough to understand that it was the audience that posed the danger. But that competence is not always available at parks that are eager to make money by exposing animals to a paying audience. It was missing, for example, at Furuvik, Sweden, when they murdered the chimpanzees that got loose.
No thought was given to the possibility of getting people to keep quiet, talk calmly to Harambe, and go in and get the boy. That solution should have been close at hand as Harambe was used to humans and had never shown signs of aggression. Harambe died the day after his seventeenth birthday.
The first version of the movie KingKong came in 1933. An American film expedition led by Carl Denham travels to the home of the giant gorilla, KingKong. They capture him and bring him to an alien world where he becomes a monster that must be killed. When the planes attack and King Kong falls from the Empire State Building, the same Denham says: “It wasn't the airplanes—it was beauty killed the beast”.
His words are typical of a civilization that has never been able to see itself. It wasn't beauty that killed KingKong, it was people's ruthlessness, their lack of respect and inability to empathize, their greed, ruthlessness, all bad sides paired with the power to turn the earth into an inferno.
The murder of Harambe sparked demonstrations and discussions where gorilla experts confirmed that Harambe had indeed tried to protect the boy. It also led to questioning of the responsibility and the safety of animals kept on zoos. In one clip, a comparative analysis of Harambe's behaviour is made.
Scared dogs can be dangerous. Aggressiveness is born out of fear. With all the means of power available, fearful people—filled with greed and ignorance—are one of the most dangerous animals on earth.
In one of the comments on one of the Jambo clips (1986) it is said ironically “If this happened in the US today they would have pumped all the gorillas full of bullets, probably the child too, and then placed a gun in the hands of the dead gorilla and said that the gorilla shot the boy” Thirty years later, Harambe's death would prove to be a prediction of the future. Like the murders of the chimpanzees at Furuvik.