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10 Happy Families
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter 10 Happy Families T he tour group gaping out of the parked Land Cruiser on the Kenya savanna was mesmerized by a small lion cub stalking a large resting patriarch through the short grass, stopping every meter or so to rise up and check his direction, then flattening himself again on the ground (Ross 2001). The big male turned his head slightly to watch the cub’s progress, displaying his yellow, worn teeth and drooping jowls. When the cub was just over a meter away from his prey, he paused, gathered together all his forces, and launched a deadly attack at the throat of the 200 kg (440 lb) male. To the group’s astonishment, the huge male was knocked flat by the weight of the 5 kg (11 lb) youngster, groaning loudly and taking the cub with him as he toppled over. The cub clambered triumphantly along his prey and, gaining a grip with his teeth, shook the patriarch’s neck as hard as he could. The massive male groaned again, pawed the air briefly, and then lay still. The cub slid to the ground and pranced on to find his next conquest. The male regained his resting stance and again gazed calmly into the distance. Every few years, pride males do battle with—and are often replaced as pride males by—a younger or a larger group of males, in which case they usually become aging nomads, wandering over the plains of Africa in search of food. But occasionally, elderly males, perhaps 10 years old or so, hold on to their prides and are able to play with their cubs, which is what had happened here. “Family” groups of animals contain females and, usually, their young, but this chapter discusses those that include males as well, or that are even made up solely of males (who are in general less sociable than females ). The individuals discussed come from highly social species—dogs, wolves, baboons, and gorillas. Even though we currently do not know if a male of these or other species recognizes a youngster he has sired, this has proved to be the case for wild chimpanzees (Lehmann et al. 2006). 100 Dogs Elizabeth Marshall Thomas decided to carry out a new study on the behavior of dogs. The scores of millions of us who have dogs as companions wonder what new things one can learn about them (Grandin and Johnson 2005), but dogs who live with people, especially as their only pet, behave differently than dogs in packs. Pet dogs often feel desperate to communicate with human beings, their only associates—barking hysterically at the postman, pawing a human knee for attention, frantically licking a human face because they have not, as they feared, been forsaken. In effect, people become members of their pack, so much so that dogs hate to be separated from them. Many stories attest to dogs’ loyalty to their people, lasting until the death of one or the other. Thomas’s ingenious idea was to find out how dogs behave toward each other in their own pack. In her book The Hidden Life of Dogs (1993), she recorded the social interactions among 11 dogs she knew intimately, 10 of whom lived with her as a happy family throughout their entire lives. It is the dogs’ final years that interest us here, when they had set aside their youthful exuberance and faced life with a quiet dignity. By that time, Thomas had become fully attuned to their world. She spent afternoons resting with them on a hilltop near the den they had dug in her backyard— sitting as they did in the dust, or lying as they did, on their chests, resting on their elbows, evenly spaced apart. They watched the trees to see if anything moved. They listened to a leaf as it rustled on the ground. They looked at the sun as it began to set, each happy to be there, quiet, and serene. Thomas wrote that “primates [such as herself] feel pure, flat immobility as boredom, but dogs feel it as peace.” When the last three dogs who lived with Thomas in New Hampshire were very old, she installed a dog door in her house so they could come and go as they pleased. There no longer were rivalries among the animals, who now spent most of their time together. Each morning they slowly trailed outside to urinate. The lowest in the hierarchy (owing both to parentage and to...