"Humans think of themselves as the only moral animals. But what about the elephant who sets a group of captive antelope free, the rat who refuses to shock another to earn a reward, and the magpie who grieves for her young? Cognitive animal behaviorist Bekoff and philosopher Pierce argue that nonhuman animals also are moral beings—with not just building blocks or precursors of morality but the real deal. The research gathered here makes a compelling case that it is time to reconsider yet another of the traits we have claimed as uniquely our own."

Wild Justice

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

Let's get right to the point. In Wild Justice, we argue that animals feel empathy for each other, treat one another fairly, cooperate towards common goals, and help each other out of trouble. We argue, in short, that animals have morality.

Both popular and scientific media constantly remind us of the surprising and amazing things animals can do, know, and feel. However, when we pay careful attention to the ways in which animals negotiate their social environments, we often come to realize that what we call surprises aren't really that surprising after all. Take, for example, the story of a female western lowland gorilla named Binti Jua, Swahili for "daughter of sunshine," who lived in the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois. One summer day in 1996, a three-year-old boy climbed the wall of the gorilla enclosure at Brookfield and fell twenty feet onto the concrete floor below. As spectators gaped and the boy's mother screamed in terror, Binti Jua approached the unconscious boy. She reached down and gently lifted him, cradling him in her arms while her own infant, Koola, clung to her back. Growling warnings at the other gorillas who tried to get close, Binti Jua carried the boy safely to an access gate and the waiting zoo staff.

This story made headlines worldwide and Binti Jua was widely hailed as an animal hero. She was even awarded a medal from the American Legion. Behind the splashy news, the gorilla's story was adding fuel to an already smoldering debate about what goes on inside the mind and heart of an animal like Binti Jua. Was Binti Jua's behavior really a deliberate act of kindness or did it simply reflect her training by zoo staff?

Even in the mid-1990s there was considerable skepticism among scientists that an animal, even an intelligent animal like a gorilla, could have the cognitive and emotional resources to respond to a novel situation with what appeared to be intelligence and compassion. These skeptics argued that the most likely explanation for Binti Jua's "heroism" was her particular experience as a captive animal. Because Binti Jua had been hand raised by zoo staff, she had not learned, as she would have in the wild, the skills of gorilla mothering. She had to be taught by humans, using a stuffed toy as a pretend baby, to care for her own daughter. She had even been trained to bring her "baby" to zoo staff. She was probably simply replaying this training exercise, having mistaken the young boy for another stuffed toy.

A few scientists disagreed with their skeptical colleagues and argued that at least some animals, particularly primates, probably do have the capacity for empathy, altruism, and compassion, and could be intelligent enough to assess the situation and understand that the boy needed help. They pointed to a small but growing body of research hinting that animals have cognitive and emotional lives rich beyond our understanding.

We'll never know why Binti Jua did what she did. But now, years later, the amazing amount of information that we have about animal intelligence and animal emotions brings us much closer to answering the larger question raised by her behavior: can animals really act with compassion, altruism, and empathy? The skeptics' numbers are dwindling. More and more scientists who study animal behavior are becoming convinced that the answer is an unequivocal "Yes, animals really can act with compassion, altruism, and empathy." Not only did Binti Jua rescue the young boy, but she also liberated some of our colleagues from the grip of timeworn and outdated views of animals and opened the door for much-needed discussion about the cognitive and emotional lives of other animals.

WILD JUSTICE: WHAT ARE WE REALLY TALKING ABOUT?

Even a decade ago, at the time that Binti Jua rescued the injured boy, the idea of animal morality would have been met with raised eyebrows and a "surely you must be joking!" dismissal. However, recent research is demonstrating that animals not only act altruistically, but also have the capacity for empathy, forgiveness, trust, reciprocity, and much more. In humans, these behaviors form the core of what we call morality. There's good reason to call these behaviors moral in animals, too. Morality is a broadly adaptive strategy for social living that has evolved in many animal societies other than our own.

Our argument relies upon well-established and mostly uncontroversial research. We simply suggest that the many parts, taken together, represent an interesting and provocative pattern. Our most controversial move, of course, is to use the label "morality" to describe what we see going on in animal societies. This jump is controversial not for scientific reasons so much as philosophical ones, and we will keep these philosophical concerns in the foreground of our discussion.

Let us take you through the evidence. We invite you to enter into the lives of social animals. We show that these animals have rich inner worlds-they have a complex and nuanced repertoire of emotions as well as a high degree of intelligence and behavioral flexibility. They're also incredibly adept social actors. They form and maintain complex networks of relationships, and live by rules of conduct that maintain a delicate balance, a finely tuned social homeostasis.

LOOKING FOR THE BAD, LOOKING FOR THE GOOD: THE MORE WE LOOK THE MORE WE SEE

Here's a common distillation of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Natural selection, to borrow a popular metaphor from biology, is an evolutionary arms race. Life is a war of all against all, a ruthless and bloody battle, usually over sex and food. Mothers eat their young and siblings fight to the death against siblings (a phenomenon called siblicide). When we look at nature through this narrow lens we see animals eking out a living against the glacial forces of evolutionary conflict. This scenario makes for great television programming, but it reflects only a small part of nature's ineluctable push. For alongside conflict and competition there is a tremendous show of cooperative, helpful, and caring behavior as well.

To offer a particularly striking example, after carefully analyzing the social interactions of various primate species, primatologists Robert Sussman and Paul Garber and geneticist James Cheverud came to the conclusion that the vast majority of social interactions are affiliative rather than agonistic or divisive. Grooming and bouts of play predominate the social scene, with only an occasional fight or threat of aggression. In prosimians, the most ancestral of existing primates, an average of 93.2 percent of social interactions are affiliative. Among New World monkeys who live in the tropical forests of southern Mexico and Central and South America, 86.1 percent of interactions are affiliative, and likewise for Old World monkeys who live in South and East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Gibraltar, among whom 84.8 percent of interactions are affiliative. Unpublished data for gorillas show that 95.7 percent of their social interactions are affiliative. After about twenty-five years of research on chimpanzees, Jane Goodall noted in her book The Chimpanzees of Gombe, "it is easy to get the impression that chimpanzees are more aggressive than they really are. In actuality, peaceful interactions are far more frequent than aggressive ones; mild threatening gestures are more common than vigorous ones; threats per se occur much more often than fights; and serious, wounding fights are very rare compared to brief, relatively mild ones." These don't appear to be animals whose social lives are defined only by conflict.

The social lives of numerous animals are strongly shaped by affiliative and cooperative behavior. Consider wolves. For a long time researchers thought that pack size was regulated by available food resources. Wolves typically feed on prey such as elk and moose, both of which are bigger than an individual wolf. Successfully hunting such large ungulates usually takes more than one wolf, so it makes sense to postulate that wolf packs evolved because of the size of wolves' prey. However, long-term research by David Mech shows that pack size in wolves is regulated by social and not food-related factors. Mech discovered that the number of wolves who can live together in a coordinated pack is governed by the number of wolves with whom individuals can closely bond (the "social attraction factor") balanced against the number of individuals from whom an individual can tolerate competition (the "social competition factor"). Packs and their codes of conduct break down when there are too many wolves.

As we begin to look at the "good" side of animal behavior, at what animals do when they're not fighting each other or committing siblicide, we begin to take in just how rich the social lives of many animals are. Indeed, the lives of animals are shaped at a most basic level by "good"-or what biologists call prosocial-interactions and relationships. Even more, it seems that at least some prosocial behavior is not a mere byproduct of conflict, but may be an evolutionary force in its own right. Within biology, early theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism have now blossomed into a much wider inquiry into the many faces and meanings of prosocial behavior. And, it seems, the more we look, the more we see. There's now an enormous body of research on prosocial behavior, and new research is being published all the time on cooperation, altruism, empathy, reciprocity, succorance, fairness, forgiveness, trust, and kindness in animals ranging from rats to apes.

Even more striking, within this huge repertoire of prosocial behaviors, particular patterns of behavior seem to constitute a kind of animal morality. Mammals living in tight social groups appear to live according to codes of conduct, including both prohibitions against certain kinds of behavior and expectations for other kinds of behavior. They live by a set of rules that fosters a relatively harmonious and peaceful coexistence. They're naturally cooperative, will offer aid to their fellows, sometimes in return for like aid, sometimes with no expectation of immediate reward. They build relationships of trust. What's more, they appear to feel for other members of their communities, especially relatives, but also neighbors and sometimes even strangers-often showing signs of what looks very much like compassion and empathy.

It is these "moral" behaviors in particular that are our focus in Wild Justice. Here is just a sampling of some of the surprising things research has revealed about animal behavior and more specifically about animal morality in recent years.

Some animals seem to have a sense of fairness in that they understand and behave according to implicit rules about who deserves what and when. Individuals who breach rules of fairness are often punished either through physical retaliation or social ostracism. For example, research on play behavior in social carnivores suggests that when animals play, they are fair to one another and only rarely breach the agreed-upon rules of engagement-if I ask you to play, I mean it, and I don't intend to dominate you, mate with you, or eat you. Highly aggressive coyote pups, to give just one example, will bend over backwards to maintain the play mood with their fellows, and when they don't do this they're ignored and ostracized.

Fairness also seems to be a part of primate social life. Researchers Sarah Brosnan, Frans de Waal, and Hillary Schiff discovered what they call "inequity aversion" in capuchin monkeys, a highly social and cooperative species in which food sharing is common. These monkeys, especially females, carefully monitor equity and fair treatment among peers. Individuals who are shortchanged during a bartering transaction by being offered a less preferred treat refuse to cooperate with researchers. In a nutshell, the capuchins expect to be treated fairly.

Many animals have a capacity for empathy. They perceive and feel the emotional state of fellow animals, especially those of their own kind, and respond accordingly. Hal Markowitz's research on captive diana monkeys strongly suggests a capacity for empathy, long thought to be unique to humans. In one of his studies, individual diana monkeys were trained to insert a token into a slot to obtain food. The oldest female in the group failed to learn how to do this. Her mate watched her unsuccessful attempts, and on three occasions he approached her, picked up the tokens she had dropped, inserted them into the machine, and then allowed her to have the food. The male apparently evaluated the situation and seemed to understand that she wanted food but could not get it on her own. He could have eaten the food, but he didn't. There was no evidence that the male's behavior was self-serving. Similarly, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, discovered that captive chimpanzees would help others get food. When a chimpanzee saw that his neighbor couldn't reach food, he opened the neighbor's cage so the animal could get to it.

Even elephants rumble onto the scene. Joyce Poole, who has studied African elephants for decades, relates the story of a teenage female who was suffering from a withered leg on which she could put no weight. When a young male from another group began attacking the injured female, a large adult female chased the attacking male, returned to the young female, and touched her crippled leg with her trunk. Poole believes that the adult female was showing empathy. There is even evidence for empathy in rats and mice.

Altruistic and cooperative behaviors are also common in many species of animal. One of the classic studies on altruism comes from Gerry Wilkinson's work on bats. Vampire bats who are successful in foraging for blood that they drink from livestock will share their meal with bats who aren't successful. And they're more likely to share blood with those bats who previously shared blood with them. In a recent piece of surprising research, rats appear to exhibit generalized reciprocity; they help an unknown rat obtain food if they themselves have been helped by a stranger. Generalized reciprocity has long been thought to be uniquely human.

The presence of these behaviors may seem puzzling to scientists or lay readers who still view animals from the old "nature red in tooth and claw" framework. But puzzling or not, moral behaviors can be seen in a wide variety of species in a spectrum of different social contexts. And the more we look, the more we see.

WHAT IS MORALITY AND WHAT MORAL BEHAVIORS DO ANIMALS EXHIBIT?

Before we can discuss the moral behaviors that animals exhibit, we need to provide a working definition of morality. We define morality as a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups. These behaviors relate to well-being and harm, and norms of right and wrong attach to many of them. Morality is an essentially social phenomenon, arising in the interactions between and among individual animals, and it exists as a tangle of threads that holds together a complicated and shifting tapestry of social relationships. Morality in this way acts as social glue.

Animals have a broad repertoire of moral behaviors. It's sloppy business trying to squeeze these diverse behaviors into structured categories, but we need some way to organize and present a picture of moral behavior in animals. We envision a suite of moral behavior patterns that falls into three rough categories, around which we have organized our book. We call these rough categories "clusters," a cluster being a group of related behaviors that share some family resemblances, and we identify three specific clusters: the cooperation cluster, the empathy cluster, and the justice cluster. Wild justice is shorthand for this whole suite.

The cooperation cluster includes behaviors such as altruism, reciprocity, trust, punishment, and revenge. The empathy cluster includes sympathy, compassion, caring, helping, grieving, and consoling. The justice cluster includes a sense of fair play, sharing, a desire for equity, expectations about what one deserves and how one ought to be treated, indignation, retribution, and spite. We devote separate chapters to exploring each of these clusters in detail (cooperation in chapter 3, empathy in chapter 4, and justice in chapter 5).

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Excerpted from Wild Justiceby Marc Bekoff Jessica Pierce Copyright © 2009 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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