How Animals Grieve (21 page)

Visitors’ senses kick into high alert at Yellowstone for another reason too: even aside from the volcano, it’s a dangerous place for our kind.
Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park
by Lee H. Whittlesey is an oddly mesmerizing chronicle of the many ways one can perish in a gorgeous setting. Dotting the Yellowstone landscape
are
pools of brilliant color, sapphire blue and sunshine yellow. In them live extremophiles, tiny microorganisms that thrive on intense heat and that may cause an extreme death for the unwary or the impulsive.

In 1981 two twentysomething California men visited the park’s Fountain Paint Pot area. One of the men’s dogs leaped off the walking path into a 202-degree hot spring called the Celestine Pool. What began as a canine tragedy became a human one when one of the men, ignoring bystanders’ pleas, dived right into the near-boiling water. The man emerged without the dog. Already by that point, it was too late for either of them. The dog died inside the pool. The man staggered about, with eyes totally white (and blind). Another visitor tried to help by removing the man’s shoes, but the skin peeled off along with the shoes. Later, “near the spring,” Whittlesey reports, “rangers found two large pieces of skin shaped like human hands.” First taken to the clinic at Old Faithful, the man was soon transported to a hospital at Salt Lake City. He died there the following morning.

At the end of the size range opposite the hot-spring extremophiles are the iconic National Park animals, the American bison. Some people, Whittlesey notes, see the buffalo less as a potentially dangerous animal than as a romantic symbol of a vanished American past. “Many visitors,” he writes, “want to approach it, to touch it, to somehow establish a close link with it, as if that might somehow connect them to their own frontier heritage.” Unfortunately, a close approach to a buffalo is most likely to connect a person with a piercing set of horns. The Park Service warns people about this reality via posted signs and distributed brochures, but romanticism sometimes trumps common sense. Yellowstone’s first recorded death-by-bison occurred on July 12, 1971. A thirty-year-old visitor from Washington state yearned to photograph a solitary bull lying in a meadow, and approached within twenty feet of the animal to do it. The bison charged, tossing the man more than twelve feet with a powerful flip of the horns, which tore apart the man’s abdomen and injured his liver. His death unfolded in front of his wife and children, even as the family had in its possession a red “danger” pamphlet warning of too-close encounters with the park’s wild animals. Nowadays, maybe a print brochure isn’t enough; a YouTube video of bison-tossed tourists, sent to visitors’ cellphones, might do the trick more effectively.

But
it’s not just the foolhardy who are at risk in Yellowstone. During my visit to the Park in the late summer of 2011, all the talk was of grizzly bears. In a twelve-month period, three hikers had been mauled to death by bears who make their home in Yellowstone and who responded to a human’s presence, in what is essentially their living room, as a bear might be expected to respond.

The joy of Yellowstone, though, is that it invites a shift in perspective, away from ourselves and toward other creatures. Do any Yellowstone animals grieve when one of their numbers dies? Reading a travel article in the
New York Times
, I learned that bison sometimes fall into the boiling hot springs. Shimmering up from the hot depths, their bones tell a story of sudden, accidental death. Do other bison ever witness these scalding deaths and turn away in sorrow? We don’t know. But the bison, I think, hold a key to asking good questions about mourning patterns in Yellowstone.

On my first visit to Yellowstone in 2007, I fell hard for the bison, an animal of keen importance to humans for many millennia. Cave painters rendered bison in true-to-life images throughout Ice Age Europe, showing the acute perceptual powers of our ancestors in regard to the natural world. But bison weren’t represented only in realistic ways. A startling image in France’s Chauvet Cave, created by an artist living thirty thousand years ago, depicts a creature that is half buffalo and half human woman. Our hunting-and-gathering ancestors thought symbolically with animals in ways that remain beyond our ken but continue to stir our imaginations.

Observing the Yellowstone bison brought me back to my Kenya days. Following the Amboseli baboons on foot to collect data on their feeding patterns, I often encountered elephant, lion, leopard, hyena, warthog, rhino, and even the occasional Cape buffalo. Back then, I did everything I could to avoid proximity to the African buffalo (not to mention the big cats). I was a vulnerable biped on the savannah, in awe of massive horned beasts who could gore me or worse. But in Yellowstone, where I could ride in a vehicle—and deploy common sense when stepping out of it—I couldn’t take my eyes off the American version, the bison of the Great Plains.

Our
usual procedure when bison-watching is to drive out on Yellowstone roads to Hayden or Lamar Valley, sight a bison herd, and pull over to the side of the road. The bulls are shaggy, snorting, and solidly built. The females and babies, lighter of foot, move together in the timeless mammalian dance of suckle-and-wean: long after the mothers are ready to nudge them toward independence, the babies want to keep nursing. Bound by an invisible cord, these moms and youngsters remind me of baboons: a baby cavorts away from her mom, twists and jumps in play, then seems to suddenly realize she is out of her comfort zone, and zooms back to home base.

It is a thrill to observe the large Yellowstone herds. After the terrible toll inflicted by the slaughter of the late nineteenth century, only twenty-five bison survived—the sum total in the entire United States, and all located in Yellowstone. The Yellowstone Buffalo Preservation Act, introduced to Congress in 2005 but never passed into law, noted that those survivors’ offspring today “comprise the Yellowstone buffalo herd and are the only wild, free-roaming American buffalo to continuously occupy their native habitat in the United States.” Compared to ranched buffalo, whose genes have long been intermixed with those of domestic cattle, the Yellowstone buffalo are genetically unique: pure and wild.

Do these buffalo, killed in terrible numbers and in terrible ways by humans, respond with emotion to the natural deaths of their own kind—death by disease, by predator, by old age, by a stumble into a hot pool? Biologist John Marzluff, whose work on corvids I discussed in
chapter 8
, brings a glimmer of light to this subject. With a group of his students, Marzluff surveyed a recent wolf kill site at Yellowstone. Over the previous two weeks, terrestrial and avian predators had reduced to bone the carcass of an old female bison. Near the skeletal remains was a boulder, “split in half,” Marzluff writes, “by eons of freezing and thawing.”

As teacher and students stood at the site, in thundered a bison herd, heading right for the carcass. Not lacking common sense, the biology group retreated and watched from a distance. The bison stayed for nearly an hour. “Each of the three dozen animals walked up to their former companion’s bones and smelled them,” Marzluff reports. “They sniffed the remains and the soiled snow and dirt.” Departing, they made their
way
right through the split boulder and walked out of view. “These animals,” Marzluff concludes, “are still sensitive to a past event.” Marzluff’s account may remind us of the African elephants who caress the bones of loved ones. Given the emotional power entailed in such events we can grasp why Marzluff describes what he and his students saw as “sacrosanct.”

It’s our old refrain by now, but true still—there’s been little science done so far on bison grief. One segment of
Radioactive Wolves
, a television documentary about the thriving of wildlife in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, focuses on a pack of wolves approaching the remains of a bison calf. The wolves didn’t kill the calf—it was already dead on the ground. Scavengers as well as hunters, the wolves begin to tear into the small carcass. The bison regroup then, and chase the wolves off. I snapped to attention when the narrator stated that the adults were “mourning” the calf, as is “typical” for bison.

But where is the science to support this notion? One classic text on this animal is
American Bison
by Dale F. Lott. Nowhere in its thorough index do the terms “death,” “grief,” or “mourning” appear. The whole arena of animal emotion is tough enough to study in the wild, and the old bugaboo of anthropomorphism still prevents some scientists from even trying to collect the needed data. Look at what Lott calls the first section of his book, though: “Relationships, Relationships.” Bison are herd animals, living in social conditions ripe for the formation of strong social bonds and for mourning. Writing about the high drama of the breeding season, Lott has this to say: “Attraction, rejection, acceptance, competition, and cooperation within and between the sexes create vital, compelling, generally short-lived, and shifting relationships.” Short-lived: we aren’t talking about long-term monogamous bonds here. But male-female bonds do exist, and of course mother-infant bonds do too.

An interviewer once asked me what I’d do if I had unlimited funds to study animal grief. The short answer? I’d make my way to Yellowstone with those funds and a massive cache of patience. Death doesn’t happen in bison or other animal groups in front of a casual observer’s eyes; to be present at the right moment, or soon after, would take good fortune as well as persistence. But as we have seen, clues to bison mourning are already available. Moose behavior tantalizes too. Biologist Joel Berger
has
labored in some of the world’s most unforgiving (and cold) landscapes, from Yellowstone to the Russian Far East and Mongolia, in order to learn about animal behavior. In Yellowstone, he focused in part on moose. “Just as parents know the behavior of their children,” he writes in his book
The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World
, “my intent was to understand each moose.”

One frightened moose orphan ran for more than half a mile when Berger wanted to put a radio collar on her, then halted at the precise spot where her mother had died. Another moose, this one a mother, returned repeatedly to the spot where her calf had been struck by a car, “apparently searching for her missing calf.” What would happen if Berger, or other scientists like him, staked out the carcass of a moose who had died of natural causes, then watched over days and weeks what other moose did as the body gradually turned to bone? Would the moose detour to view the bones of a lost herd member, as Marzloff’s bison did and (see
chapter 5
) as elephants do? When bison, or moose or other animals, encounter bones of their own kind, do they inspect the bones in a detached manner, or do they feel something as they look? Could we humans tell the difference? Would an experienced observer of bison note clues to an emotional response in bison after a death in the group?

Do animals read bones on the ground like we read obituaries? Is that too fanciful a thought? I’m not so sure that it is. Well-written obituaries elegantly compress a life into a few descriptive passages. In a parallel but nonlinguistic way, the bones an animal leaves behind may do the same. The compression of obituaries may bring sadness or even a hint of futility to readers. Can eighty long years of a life really be reduced to eight short paragraphs? Vital force can be unleashed from these life haikus, though, as I have discovered by reading regularly the
New York Times
obituaries section. This habit might be thought elitist in that the
Times
skews its death reporting toward the famous, yet for me it affords a chance to learn about fascinating lives I otherwise wouldn’t encounter.

When a woman named Martha Mason died at age seventy-one, she had dwelled for six decades in an iron lung. Paralysis had struck Mason as a child, a result of polio; from that point on, her habitat was, as the
Times
described it, a “horizontal world, a 7-foot-long, 800-pound cylinder.” In the obituary photograph, Mason’s white-haired, bespectacled
head
juts from one end of the machine, which is lined with porthole windows and resembles some sort of deep-sea research craft. And from it, Mason did explore the world. While encased in the iron lung, Mason attended Wake Forest College, hosted dinner parties, and employed, in later years, a voice-activated computer to write
Breath
, her memoir.

When my impatience meter ratchets up in the face of some trivial annoyance, I sometimes think of Mason. Faced with anything but trivial challenges, she did more than just endure; she lived with courage and verve. In this way, reading obituaries can inspire me. It’s no surprise that I’m moved especially by the lives of people who loved animals. In Vermont, the artist Stephen Huneck built the Dog Chapel, where people and their dogs may seek moments of interspecies serenity. The church’s windows feature stained glass and dog images; blanketing the walls are handwritten notes of grief, describing pets sorely missed. Atop the steeple sits a winged Labrador. I only wish Huneck had found serenity of his own within the chapel. In despair at having been forced to lay off most of his art-business employees, Huneck committed suicide at age sixty-one.

At that same age, in 2012, Lawrence Anthony died of a heart attack. In 2003, shortly after the US invasion of Iraq, Anthony had saved the lives of thirty-five starving animals in the Baghdad Zoo. Of 650 animals who resided there at the start of the war, these were the sole survivors. Anthony also restored the zoo itself to decent condition. I had known a little about Anthony’s work before, but his obituary colored in the broad outlines of a famous life. Working for animal conservation in Africa, Anthony rocked out to Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple as he crisscrossed the countryside in his Land Rover. He forged a deeper connection with elephants than with any other animal, and his obituary concludes on a mystical note: “The elephants also survive him. Since his death, his son Dylan told reporters, the herd has come to his house on the edge of their reserve every night.”