http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/science/29angi.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=all
April 29, 2008
BASICS
Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
By NATALIE ANGIER
The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion
delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were two
brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what that
meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be slipping her
eggs into some other birds
nest, with the expectation that the na
ve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking, ravenous young at the
neglect and even death of their own.
Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily. That
feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like
the cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted
titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It
s for the hard-working birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own
families and look photogenic besides. It
s not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you. I rapped on the window
sharply but the birds didn
t budge, and as I stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare
them away, their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could
swear they were cackling,
Tippi Hedren must go.
In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent
and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of
which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life
forms that one finds offensive.
It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don
t suffer alone.
Throughout history there have been vilified animals and totemic animals,
said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the Wildlife
Conservation Society.
There are the animals you don
t like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose
attributes you absolutely want to own,
to be a tiger, a bear, lupine leader of the pack.
Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can hurt
or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or to fend
off traditional household pests like mice and roaches. Rather, it is the
dislike we direct toward creatures that live outdoors and generally mind
their own business, but that behave in ways we find rude, irritating,
selfish or contemptible. The squirrels are gluttons, the crows are
schoolyard bullies, the house sparrows are boring and look like mice when
they skitter along the ground. How we love those noble falcons and eagles
that lately have blessed us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges. How
we beg them to feast freely on the pigeons and starlings that curse us by
nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges.
Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an
interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the
University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the wildebeest
that the hyenas frequently prey on as
wildeburgers.
Why? Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist, it
just stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be torn
apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which will go down
fighting and kicking and cracking the predator
s jaw if it can.
Oh, we
re all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the things that we
see,
said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at
Harvard University and author of
Moral Minds.
I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli National Park to
study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed strong feelings about the
personalities of the monkeys
here were the great and brave ones, there were the lame ones that hid in
the bushes and acted pathetic.
At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes or thwart our
chosen goats, whose greatest sin, as a rule, is being exceptionally good
at their game. We try to squirrel-proof our bird feeders, yank weeds from
our flower beds, call Animal Control, and when all else fails, reach for
our guns. Stephen C. Sautner of the Wildlife Conservation Society cited
the case of a friend and avid birder who has a colony of purple martins on
his property.
He spends much of his time shooting and trapping starlings and English
sparrows,
said Mr. Sautner,
both of which he describes as
evil.
We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at
unwanted-animal control. The animal is an invasive species like the
European starling, and it doesn
t belong here. Or it
s a native species like the cowbird but its range has been unnaturally
extended through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy
parks and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures. Whatever
the self-exculpatory particulars, said Marc Bekoff, author of
The Emotional Lives of Animals
and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Colorado,
I see it as a double cross that we create a situation where cowbirds
spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds, and then we decide, well, now
we
ve got to go out and kill the cowbirds and the foxes.
Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several salient
human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often overactive theory of
mind
the conviction that those around you have their own minds, goals and
desires, and that it might behoove you to anticipate what they
ll do next. We spin elaborate narratives out of the slenderest of
observational threads: Look, the blue jay is trying to dislodge the
cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay know the cowbird is a nest parasite
and be trying to drum it out of town?
We interpret animal behaviors through a human lens and human morality,
said Mr. Fraser, the conservation psychologist.
Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the persistent
sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the right and the means
to control it.
In the past, when we talked about exploiting nature, that was seen as a
good thing,
Mr. Fraser said.
Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to human success.
Nowhere is our sense of droit du roi over nature more manifest than in our
paradoxical attitudes toward farm animals. On the one hand, they
re the beloved figures of our earliest childhood. On the other hand, many
of our most pejorative comparisons were born in the barnyard
you lazy pig, you ugly cow, you chicken, what a bunch of sheep.
Conservation groups, which keep track of public attitudes toward animals,
acknowledge that they are ever on the lookout for the next Animal Idol
an ecologically important creature that also happens to be large, showy,
charismatic and likable. If you have two important birds from the same
region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser, one a hyacinth macaw that looks
like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm
petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess
which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.
Not that public attitudes can
t be changed. Bats, for example, were long considered vermin, but
nowadays, in the wake of the wildly popular children
s book
Stella Luna,
they
ve taken on a magical air, as the mosquito-eating Tinkerbells that if you
re lucky will soon take up residence near you. Until then, step away from
that bat house, sparrow. Don
t make me shoot.