When animals go to school

Maybe we can save endangered species, but can we teach animals to be wild? Salon contributor Susan McCarthy talks about her new book, "Becoming a Tiger" -- and debunks the 100th monkey theory along the way.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Aug 31, 2004 | With so many of the world's big cats and other great predators facing extinction, it's comforting to hope that captive breeding and cloning could stave off their end.

But producing ready-for-the-wild tigers takes a lot more than generating a living specimen from a test tube and letting it go in a suitable preserve. If you can kill but not disembowel your prey, you won't make it as a tiger in the wild. And who exactly will teach you the finer points of quadruped food preparation if you grow up in a lab?

In "Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild," Susan McCarthy explores the ways that innate and learned behaviors interplay in the lives of elephants, zebra finches, otters, leopards, tigers and other wild things. She finds that despite the irrational yet oddly tenacious human fantasy that animals "just know" how to thrive in their natural habitats, there's much that baby animals have to learn to survive, including skills and knowledge apparently as basic as foxes are not my friends. Even some invertebrates, such as the octopus, have the ability to acquire new skills over the course of their short, solitary lives.

The coauthor of "When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, " with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, McCarthy is a frequent contributor to Salon, who has tackled everything from grease rustling to the search for immortality, in our pages. In an interview at Salon's San Francisco headquarters, where she also keeps an office and worked on this book, McCarthy explained why it may be easier to breed and raise many animals in captivity than to equip them for life in the world their parents came from.

What animal behavior were you most surprised to find is learned and not innate?

Recognizing water. Baby chicks can be insanely thirsty and standing in a puddle, and not realize that they are ankle deep in a substance that would quench their thirst. This never causes a problem, because chicks instinctively peck at specks, so they soon peck at a speck floating on water, get a beak full, and instantly realize what great stuff water is.

What is the biological advantage to learning versus being "hard wired"?

Learning is a much faster way to get behavior that tracks a changing environment than evolution is. In Oakland [Calif.], there's a market with a big fish department, and black-crowned night herons have taken to perching on the awnings by the dumpster, waiting for fish to be discarded. Awnings and dumpsters are recent features of the environment, and if herons had to wait to evolve a dumpster-recognition module in the brain, they'd be missing out on a great food resource.

Instead they learn -- and noticing where other night herons are perching is probably part of their learning process. They learn and eat.

How hard is it for wildlife rehabilitators to really teach orphaned animals what they need to know to function in the wild while trying to keep them from becoming habituated to humans?

Wildlife rehabbers do it out of the goodness of their hearts. And when you're doing something out of the goodness of your heart for a darling baby animal, it's really hard not to become friends with that baby animal. But in many cases, that's the worst thing you can do for that baby animal if you're planning for it to be an adult animal living in the wild. So they really have to fly in the face of their natural inclinations.

And if you're trying to teach a baby predator how to disembowel another animal...

If you're trying to teach a great big predator how to kill prey, that's a pretty difficult thing for a human being to teach. Because we don't have those skills and tools. We're terrible at disemboweling antelope.

Next Page: The lion who learned how to herd antelope instead of killing them

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