Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild

434 Pages·2005·1.21 MB·English

by  Susan Mccarthy

BECO MING A
TIGER
-
How Baby Animals Learn
to Live in the Wild
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SUSAN McCARTH Y
For Mary Susan Kuhn
With love, gratitude, and respect
Contents
Introduction: Why Learning? v
ONE How to Do or Know Something New:
Ways of Learning 1
TWO Learning the Basics: How to Crawl,
Walk, Climb, Swim, and Fly 31
THREE Learning Your Species 59
FOUR How to Get Your Point Across:
Being Vocal, Being Verbal, and
Otherwise Communicating 91
FIVE How to Make a Living 141
SIX How Not to Be Eaten 183
SEVEN Invention, Innovation, and Tools:
How to Do Something New, Possibly
with a Stick 209
EIGHT How to Get Cultured 245
NINE Parenting and Teaching: How to Pass It On 273
TEN What Learning Tells Us About Intelligence 311
Conclusion: Secrets of a Tiger’s Success 347
Notes 351
Bibliography 375
Acknowledgments 399
Index 401
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Susan McCarthy
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction:
Why Learning?
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SOMEHOW A F UZZY, ST UMBLING tiger kitten becomes a mon-
strously efficient killer. Somehow a big-footed fool of a raven fledgling
becomes an aerial acrobat and a masterful survivor in the north woods.
Somehow a wide-eyed spindle-limbed squirrel monkey infant becomes a
wily adult who eats a wholesome caterpillar and avoids a poisonous one.
Somehow a panda finds love, a spear-nosed bat joins a sorority, and a
bear who successfully holds a territory passes her hard-won gains on to
her ignorant cubs.
How do baby animals become competent adults? While part of the
answer is that cubs and kittens and chicks mature and come into their pow-
ers, another part is that they learn what they can do and how to do it.
Learning is the ultimate combination of nature and nurture, in which
a growing animal applies its powers of intelligence, curiosity, perception,
and memory to the world around it, again and again, and ends up with
knowledge and skills it did not have before. No newborn animal is a blank
slate and no newborn animal has a complete instruction manual.
Learning and intelligence are connected, but are not the same
thing. We often ask questions like “How intelligent is a chimpanzee?”
“How smart are pigs?” or “How dumb is my sister’s cat?” This book
looks instead at what a chimpanzee, a pig, or a cat can learn. This kind
of inquiry acknowledges change, examines the interplay between
nature and nurture, and lends itself to narrative. In the end, it is a
sneaky way of starting to answer the questions above.
vi - Introduction
Learning has an odd status in our esteem. We’re impressed with peo-
ple who know a thing without learning, who grasp it instantly. It’s not
unknown for animal behaviorists to dismiss an impressive performance
by an animal as “only learned behavior”—as opposed to intelligent
insight. Yet nothing seems dumber than being unable to learn.
(If you do much reading about learning and intelligence in animals,
you will come across references to “Einsteins among the herons,” “a raven
Einstein,” “an Einstein among macaques,” or “an Einstein of a Herring
Gull.” I hope not to succumb to such temptation.)
Learning is a process, not the static image provided by an intelligence
test. It’s an intrinsically hopeful process of improvement. As an animal, I
am also perpetually beguiled by the bumbling folly of baby animals,
while also understanding that what I see is not stupidity, but an early
stage of a journey toward grace, competence, and comprehension.
As an optimist I am all in favor of learning as much as possible. I
am idealistic enough to think we’re better off learning how sausage is
made, though I admit there are times when I regret having learned that
demonic form of solitaire my father plays.*
This is not a book about what the study of young animals can
teach us about child-rearing. But since we are animals ourselves, a cer-
tain amount of illumination is unavoidable.
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IN RESEARCH ING WHEN ELEP H AN TS WEEP , my coauthor Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson and I had to wrestle with a widespread scientific
reluctance to write of emotion. Researching this book didn’t present
that problem. That animals feel emotion is still anathema in some cir-
cles; that animals learn is not. How animals learn is often the contro-
versial part. Do animals imitate each other? (Is that true imitation?)
Do they pass on learning in the form of culture? (Is that really culture?)
Do they teach their children? (What counts as teaching?) I sifted the
research for animal stories that illustrate different kinds of learning.
Many stories in this book come from scientific journals and books,
but some come from wildlife rehabilitators. In wildlife rehabilitation
there are many cases of baby animals and birds who didn’t have natural
* “Used to play,” he says.
Introduction vii
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childhoods in the wild. As a result, what sometimes seems like the
effortless and neatly programmed progress of an animal from birth to
life as a grown animal is discovered not to be inevitable. Seams show.
Strange gaps appear. Unnatural liaisons are suggested. Wildlife rehabil-
itation is an occupation that seeks, among other things, to discover
what an animal needs to be exposed to and to learn in order to have a
normal life.
The reintroduction of endangered species, under the supervision
of scientists, draws on the skills of wildlife rehabilitation. The pitfalls
in reintroducing black-footed ferrets are not the same as the pitfalls in
reintroducing whooping cranes, but all throw light on the nature of
these animals. To save the species it may be vital to teach ferret kits not
to spend so much time on the surface of the prairie dog colony; to
ensure that crane chicks don’t get wrong ideas about romance and fam-
ily; or perhaps, someday, to provide mentors for tiger cubs.
The ability to learn is an adaptation of tremendous power, one
which has taken our own species a long way. We even go to the
extreme of learning about learning, as in this book.