Dale Peterson - The Moral Lives of Animals

A Mad Peoples History of Madness

Big Things from Little Computers

Genesis II

Intelligent Schoolhouse

CoCo Logo

The Deluge and the Ark

Visions of Caliban (with Jane Goodall)

Chimpanzee Travels

Demonic Males (with Richard Wrangham)

Storyville, USA

Africa in My Blood (editor)

Beyond Innocence (editor)

Eating Apes

Jane Goodall

Elephant Reflections

The Moral Lives of Animals

DALE PETERSON

Copyright 2011 by Dale Peterson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury
Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Peterson, Dale.
The moral lives of animals / Dale Peterson. 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59691-424-7 (hardcover)
1. Animal psychology. 2. Animal behavior. 3. Ethics. 4. Moral motivation. I. Title.
QL785.P375 2010
156dc22
2010024662

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Press in 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-364-6

www.bloomsburypress.com

This book is dedicated to:
Jarold Ramsey
Thomas C. Moser
Peter Matson

Contents

Part I: Where Does Morality Come From?
Concepts

Part II: What Is Morality?
The Rules

Part III: What Is Morality?
The Attachments

Part IV: Where Is Morality Going?
Assessments

Where Does Morality Come From?
Concepts

Vengeance on a dumb brute! cried Starbuck,

that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!

Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,

Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Elephants can be dangerous . I remember thinking those very words with an unusual concentration one afternoon, while being chased by wild forest elephants in an impenetrable thicket in Ivory Coast, West Africa.

Well, the thicket was impenetrable from my perspective. From the elephants perspective it must have been a minor nuisance, and, in truth, that contrast in perspectives was what made me so anxious.

I would like to say I ran, but really I was just trying to push and drag my suddenly weak body through a stubbornly resistant barrier of vegetation.

Chased? It seemed so at the time. In retrospect, the elephants may not have been chasing me. I saw nothing. I heard the thudding of big feet hitting the earth and the crackling and crashing of large bodies hurtling through vegetation. But since Im still alive and able to write these words, it may be that instead of chasing, they were, as I was, fleeinghaving just sensed strange people creeping into their private thicket.

Dangerous? Heres how an elephant is likely to do it. He or she might knock you down, or maybe just toss you down with a grab and flick of the trunk, then stab you with a tusk, pin and crush you with a foot, or press down with that boulder-size forehead until you pop open like a piece of rotten fruit. Being inside a car is better, but an adult elephant, male or female, can run a tusk right through the door of your car or use a few tons of body weight to crush down from the top. It cant be a pleasant experience sitting inside that car, and in the end youll consider yourself lucky merely to be alive and still able to articulate the words that tell what happenedassuming, of course, that you are.

Still, no one is particularly surprised to hear that an elephant or any other wild animal is dangerous. Wild animals are supposed to be dangerous. It is surprising, though, when a wild animal deliberately seeks you out, seems to be pursuing you not out of some irrational explosion of rage, not from dumb and blind instinct, not according to an automatic, machinelike sequence of predatory behaviors, but rather with what looks like real intent and even, possibly, focused calculation.

Such may have characterized an encounter biologist Douglas Chadwick experienced one evening at the edge of the Nilgiri Reserve in southern India. In his book The Fate of the Elephant (1992), Chadwick describes the start of that evening in idyllic terms. After visiting the distinguished elephant expert Raman Sukumar, Chadwick began a pleasant late-afternoon hike with two young students who served as Sukumars research assistants.

Sukumar had warned Chadwick about the Nilgiri elephants, who were known to be particularly aggressive toward people. But the three hikers were passing along the edge of the reserve, a relatively open area where the trees thinned out and mixed with grass and shrub, and where, at the moment, many flowers were brilliantly blossoming in response to recent rains. Chadwick saw numerous chital (dappled Indian deer) and a couple of blackbucks. And as the cool of the coming dusk descended, the insects rose and, with them, the birds: cuckoos, hoopoes, magpies, mynahs, peacocks. Yes, it was all very lovely, but soon the fading light reminded the trio that they were still four miles away from their intended rendezvous, a spot on the road where a friend would be waiting with a car. They picked up the pace.

By the time they approached the dim strip of road and a dark hulk that seemed to be the waiting car, evening had arrived. Chadwick was carrying a flashlight, which he now flicked on as a friendly beacon to the driver. Immediately, however, a great burst of trumpeting shattered the peace. Chadwick turned off the light, heard and felt the thudding of heavy feet, and he and his two companions ran for their lives. They tried veering back in the direction of the road and caronly to be cut off by another burst of trumpeting and more pounding footfalls. They kept running. One of Chadwicks companions shouted at him to move in a zigzag pattern among the trees. (Because of their great mass, elephants have trouble making quick turns.) The American began zigzaggingly tripping among the denser shafts of darkness that must have represented trees, while still listening to, indeed feeling , that heavy thudding behind him. After a time, the pounding in the earth became indistinguishable from the pounding of his pulse. He stopped to listen and heard nothing. Of course, elephants, with their thickly padded foot-bottoms, can be extremely quiet when they want to be, and the biologist began to think he was being not chased so much as tracked. He began to feel, as he put it, like elephant prey.

He and his companions were afraid to return in the direction of the car, so finally they ran across to a different part of the road, flagged down a late-running bus, and in a small village tavern persuaded an inebriated car-owner to ferry them back to their waiting friend on the road. The friend was shaken, upset. The elephant had moved up beside the car in complete silence, so the driver inside, sitting next to his open window, had been about as startled and alarmed by the first explosive burst of trumpeting as Chadwick and his companions had been.

I will never know what that elephant had in mind that night, Chadwick writes, but upon reflection, I have to credit the animal with giving us fair warning. If it had really been out to smoosh us, it could have merely waited where it was and let us bump right into it.

So that was an interesting encounter one dark night between a smart biologist and an apparently determined elephant. Of course, most of the elephants behavior will forever remain as mysterious as the night itself was. Were not even sure Chadwick faced a single animal. Maybe there were two or three or even more, emerging from the murk at different times.