Preserving Animal Culture

Emily Gertz

October 21, 2004 11:00 AM

As Alex wrote in August, a couple British conservation groups announced plans for a Frozen Ark, containing the DNA of animal species that are on the verge of extinction.

Admirably, these groups stress that this is just to save the genomes for future study--not to regenerate some long-lost fauna in a more wildlife-friendly future. But it's tempting. There is something almost calming in thinking that with a little more application of our big evolved brains, a little more Enlightenment elbow grease, we can sidestep both culpability and the stress of the fundamental social and economic changes (however bright-greener things will be on the other side) that will go along with preserving endangered species.

But what makes an animal is not all stored in the double helix. This was brought home to me in a new way as I listened to Susan McCarthy speak at the American Museum of Natural History this past Tuesday evening. She's the author of Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild. As she explained what a tiger cub learns from how Momma Tiger deals with hunting, reacts to what she hears, sees and smells, how she vocalizes, it came clear that reconstituting a tiger from saved genetic material would not restore the tiger's culture.

Susan McCarthy told Salon,

[There is] a very interesting way in which innate stuff and learned stuff interact. The little cats we live with and the big cats that live in the wild, like the tigers, have hard-wired behaviors involving being interested in little sneaking, scuttling things. They crouch, stalk, sneak up and pounce. But it's really quite another matter to put that together into a whole suite of behaviors where you've identified creatures that are good to eat and not fatal to attack, and then put all those behaviors together, and actually kill the animal, and kill prey often enough to make a living.

There's a story of the orphaned lion who was raised by rangers in a South African game preserve, and who took as his role model their Australian cattle dog. And was very, very interested in wild antelope and learned to herd them.

His interest in wild antelope was hard-wired. He had lots of innate behaviors, like sneaking, crouching and pouncing. But he had no idea at whom to direct that, so he pounced on his friends when he was playing with them -- the dog and the people. He was very interested in impalas, but the dog, his role model, herded them, so he herded them, too. Not a good way for a lion to make a living.

Decades of limited progress on saving wild animals and habitat suggest that the notion of intrinsic value is a nonstarter for most people, and that we're better off--from a conservation perspective--in affirming people's instinctual understanding that there is some sort of utility to humanity in preserving these species. I came away from Susan McCarthy's talk encouraged that in comparing our mutual habits of learning, there may be more opportunities to bridge the gap between human and animal needs.

I can easily imagine some sectors latching on to Frozen Zooz as a way to weasel out of the hard work of stopping the sixth great extinction--preserving habitat, transforming agricultural practices, creating economic justice, curbing global warming, and more.

McCarthy's exploration of animal culture shows that there's more to it than a sequenced genome.