Asking for a Rabbit

Yesterday after some time in the outer pen, Bow came in and asked for a rabbit . "תני לי ארנב "  "Give me a rabbit." A rabbit?? Usually he asks for a snack or a drink, but this time he wanted a rabbit. I went all over the house looking for one to give him. Finally I found this one, which had been a gift to me from Sword. (Bow has not wanted to play with stuffed animals in years.) I brought it in, explained it was mine, but he could play with it. He sniffed at it and threw it aside. He didn't want "a rabbit", after all. So I told him he had to pose with it, since I had gone to all the trouble to find it for him. And he understood and agreed to pose. Yes, these are posed shots. With Bow's cooperation!

Bow posed for a good long moment, giving me both  a nice en face pose and a profile.

To me, that was a proof of personal growth on Bow's part, in that he was willing to cooperate and hold the stuffed rabbit, even though he had lost interest in it and had no earthly use for it. It was not so much about language use as about cooperation. But then I posted the photos on Project Bow's Facebook page, and I got a lot of engagement. The questions were very interesting to me, for a number of reasons. So I will share some of these here, as well as my answers.

Someone asked whether I was trying to teach Bow the Hebrew word for rabbit. I answered that Bow already knew that. He already is fluent in Hebrew. Then they asked whether I wasn't using those letters on the glass to teach Hebrew. I explained the letters were for Bow to spell with, but he acquired both comprehension and production a long time ago, as well as literacy.

One person asked whether Bow was obsessed with rabbits, the way Koko is with cats. I had to admit that he was not. This was an unusual request on Bow's part. Somebody else asked whether Bow might have seen a wild rabbit and was asking for that. I said it was possible for Bow to see wild rabbits over the fence.  Then the first person asked whether perhaps Bow wanted meat, implying he might want  to eat a rabbit.  I answered that we were having chicken for dinner, and if Bow wanted meat, he knew how to ask for that.

Then somebody else asked a really interesting question: "Can chimps understand that the plush animal represents the real one, and is 'the same thing'?" I answered: "Bow is an enculturated chimpanzee, so what I know about him does not necessarily apply to other chimpanzee individuals. It also varies over the lifespan, as it does with humans. I believe that at this point in Bow's life, he associates photos, drawings and playthings shaped like rabbits with the word for rabbit, as well as live rabbits. He's 15 years old and literate."


All of that got me to thinking about the language-related implications of this incident, and also what I may not have gotten across to our audience very well before. First of all, Bow understood Hebrew and English long before he could read and write in those languages. He had total immersion since he was a month old. Here is a link to an article about that:

http://www.pubwages.com/18/a-young-chimpanzees-growth-and-development

So what knowledge does Bow have about rabbits, real, imaginary and plush? When he was a baby, he had a stuffed rabbit.

Bow has seen rabbits outside, and I have also shown him video of rabbits I have seen outside, such as this one:

He has also seen the word for rabbit written and has had storybooks containing that word read to him, including my own In Case There's a Fox.

The word we normally use for rabbit in Hebrew is ארנב. While in many storybooks another word,  שפן is used, on the page shown above, both words appear. You can listen to me reading from the Bilingual Edition of the book to Bow in the video below.

Bow was following along on that page, and at just the right moment he pointed at the word for fox,  שועל just as I was saying it. It was one of those spontaneous events that just happened, and it might not be possible to get him to do it again. You can see that happen at 0:38 of the video above. It was a magical moment!

Of course, "fox"( שועל) is the more salient word in the book. But if Bow was following along closely enough to point to the words at the end of the verse as I said them, he probably was paying attention also when I read the word ארנב (rabbit).

So yes, Bow knows what a real rabbit is, he knows the spoken word for rabbit, and he knows how to spell that word.  And yes, he also knows that rabbits can be eaten, because he has seen our dog Teyman catching and eating them.

But we great apes in the Katz family have never had rabbit meat for dinner, so it is unlikely that Bow wanted to eat a rabbit. He identifies more with the primates in our family than with the canines, so he does not try to imtate the behavior of dogs, even when he understands it.

Are all chimpanzees just like Bow? Do they know what he knows? No. No more so than all human beings are just like me. Most humans do not know what I know. They live different lives, and each one has his own knowledge base, which may or may not overlap with mine.

Not all chimpanzees have the same experience with rabbits, with total immersion in Hebrew, or with literacy and picture books about rabbits. What Bow knows is what Bow has experienced. He knows all of those very different things can be referred to as ארנב because he has seen and heard this done many times before. This is true of all of us. You might as well ask whether every human being knows that rabbits, stuffed animals intended to represent rabbits, pictures and paintings of rabbits and the written word ארנב are associated. They do not all know it. It is not some kind of innate inheritance. Language is learned. Bow knows more about the way to represent the concept of a rabbit in Hebrew than anyone, human or chimp, who does not happen to know Hebrew.

All of the above is so obvious to me, that I sometimes forget that I need to explain it to other people. To me, what was so great was that Bow was willing for a moment to put aside his own desires so as to cooperate with me in taking those posed pictures.

Why is that so important? Because it is Bow's lack of cooperation in doing things just for show that is keeping me from proving what he knows and what he can do.

In a recent conversation with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, she shared with me that the reason Kanzi was the superstar of all the bonobos she worked with is not that he was smarter than all the others. The others were very smart, too.  It's that Kanzi  was willing to take on the role of showing what he could do for the camera. He was patient. He was willing to do it slowly and more than once, and beyond what was reasonably interesting to him, just so that the humans filming the video could see.  This is something Bow and I need to work on.

Bow is very smart. But he does not like to do things just for show.

Bow Gives a Facial

"You keep wandering out in the wilderness!" my daughter said to me. And somebody else corrected her to say that we hardly live out in the wilderness, since all we have is a ten acre hobby farm. Well, compared to the big city where Sword will be going to college in the fall, this is the wilderness. What's more, compared to the fields on either side of my property, this is also more of a wilderness. I neither plow nor sow, and wild things grow here.

For Bow, this means a very peaceful atmosphere when he goes outside.

When we get the moat dug for Bow's island, then he too will get to come face to face with some of the wildlife here. Like the armadillo I saw just before I went to my daughter's freshman orientation in the big city.

Armadillos are so easy to sneak up on.

Rabbits, on the other hand, are not easy to surprise.

But sometimes they act as if they were statues in the hopes that we will just pass them by, as this rabbit did soon after I came back from the big city.

When I got back, I was disappointed to see that all the purple milkweed flowers were gone. Even the one in the field, surrounded by poison ivy, no longer sported any flowers. No more milkweed, I thought. But then I spotted a splash of orange!

The butterfly milkweed had suddenly bloomed, attracting small sweat bees.

Being away for a couple of days, while Lawrence stayed with Bow, gave me a chance to appreciate anew how lucky I am to live here.

The big city is exciting, but also frustrating. Here everything is calm and quiet.

And also, Bow gives excellent facials!

Mutuality versus Reciprocity

Bow is very sweet, All unbidden, he notices the dry skin on my hand, and he volunteers to groom it.

His touch is very gentle, but the grooming he gives me is thorough.

You might think that this kind treatment is in return for something else that I have done for him, but in fact it's not. This is not quid pro quo or one hand washes the other. Bow feels an inner compulsion to groom my hand, and he only does it when he feels like it. It is neither planned nor solicited.

I have been preoccupied by the concept of mutuality, which is why whatever flower is in season that attracts the most pollinators has been topmost on my list of things to photograph. Just before the trip to Bloomington, that flower was the purple milkweed, and I even took risks trying to get close to the butterflies. I got a touch of poison ivy in one elbow capturing those photos.

Right now, the plant attracting the most insects is the Virginia Mountain Mint.

But there are other beautiful flowers that are blooming now, too, and yet they attract no insects. Take the Tall Phlox.

These flowers are beautiful and fragrant, yet no bees or butterflies visit them.

Maybe it's because the phlox grows back from the root every spring that it does not need to attract pollinators, and not needing to do so, it just naturally doesn't.  Where there is no mutual benefit, the unplanned exchange just does not seem to take place. However, I have spotted rabbits within sight of the phlox, placidly grazing on the lawn.

The rabbit will not tell me where the predators are; it just runs off if I get too close. Does the rabbit realize that the culling effect of predators on the rabbit population is responsible for its own good health?

Meanwhile, when I least expect it, the kitten emerges from a field full of wildflowers.

Its every move says; "I am a mighty hunter. I am king of the beasts!" Then it meows to imply that I should feed it. Will it ever catch a mouse to earn its keep, I wonder?

This afternoon I picked another ripe wild plum, and I gave it to Bow.

He took it out of the bowl and stared at it intently.

Then he slipped it unceremoniously into his mouth and ate it.

In the end all that was left was the pit. 

Now lots of people would misunderstand. They might think: there's reciprocity for you! He groomed her finger, so she gave him a wild plum. But I would have given him that plum, whether he had groomed my finger or not. And he would have groomed my finger, regardless of whether later in the day I'd discover a wild plum to give him. What we have here is a relationship of mutuality, not reciprocity  -- the same kind of relationship that the butterflies have with the mountain mint, or the wild plum tree has with the animals that eat its fruit.

Something Else

When Bow was a very little fellow, and we were still using lexigrams, he had menus for food that would go something like this: "BANANA, GRAPES, APPLE, JUICE, MORE, ENOUGH, LATER, SOMETHING ELSE". We had to include the label "SOMETHING ELSE" because while we were doing language research, we were also just a family, eating whatever foods happened to be available that day. and I could not always print out a new menu every time a new food was introduced. We would verbally tell Bow what the food was called, but if he wanted it at that meal, he would point to "SOMETHING ELSE."

In the stand up menu on the table the top right corner says "SOMETHING ELSE"
משהו אחר

To this very day, if Bow is too lazy to spell out "What is that called?" he will just ask for "something else." It means "that thing that I don't have a name for". Bow remembers the good old days when he used to eat in the kitchen and point at lexigrams. In fact, that's what he misses the most about his childhood outside the pens. It's not our long walks in the woods or the trips in the car that he longs for. He wants to eat in the kitchen. The one time he was out of the pens briefly after his confinement, he headed straight for the kitchen and swiped a muffin.  And when he complained to me early on about being locked up, what he said was: "Let me eat in the kitchen."

Bow looking over the fence on a wet day

These days, Bow is quite resigned to our living arrangement, and when I go on my long walks, he also surveys the property from his perch atop the bench on the outer pens.

Lately, I have been seeing these flowers all over the pasture, and some friends assure me that they are Missouri Primroses. But when I look up Missouri Primroses, they don't look the same. They don't even have the same number of petals. So until I know what they really are, I am going to just call them Something Else.

Now the blossom itself resembles a wild rose or a prairie rose, having pink petals and a yellow center, but it is bigger than the wild rose blossoms that we have all over my property. It can't be a Missouri Primrose because those flowers have four petals and a different center. But it is also not a Prairie Rose, even though the blossom is very similar, the body of the plant is not.

These flowers grow in ones and twos and can be seen all over, and the only time they do not have five petals is when they have been damaged, because something has eaten some of their petals.

There are many insects that like these flowers, and not all of them are pollinators.

The flowers are so pretty now. They seemed to have increased their color saturation in the past twenty-four hours, because they started out pale pink, but now they are bright pink almost to the point of lavender.

Until I know what they are, I am going to stubbornly insist that they are Something Else!

So far, I do not have this problem when I see a rabbit. I do not ask myself what kind of rabbit it is. But I would feel kind of gauche reporting that I saw a flower today, as there are so many obviously different kinds of flowers that I see every day.

I need a good way to distinguish a daisy from ... well, from something else!

The Tortoise and the Hare

This is the time of year when all the wildlife seems to come out from wherever they were hiding. The day before yesterday, Bow told me there was something going on in the front yard and encouraged me to go outside and look.

From the yard I could see a deer in the pasture. Then it was joined by another, before they both bounded off.

It has been raining a lot. I missed several walks in the past few days after lunch, because it started to rain just when I wanted to go for a walk. Everything is soaked, even the peony.

Yesterday, to make up for the missed walk after lunch, I went out in the late afternoon when the sun was high in the sky, just before dinner time. It was hot and muggy. The air was full of moisture. On the way to the barn, I saw a turtle moving in the distance, so I went to investigate.

Though the turtle had been moving along at a good pace, for a turtle, it stopped dead in its tracks when it saw me approach.

Evasive maneuvers for a turtle seem to be to stay very still. I was lucky that it did not withdraw completely into its shell.

There were tiny little flies and other insects buzzing right in front of the turtle's head, and I wondered whether it wanted to eat them.

My turtle expert friend, Pam Keyes, identified this as a female three-toed box turtle who is rather old -- at least fifty years old, she said, if not older.

The turtle has had some sort of traumatic encounter with a predator in the past, as there are bite marks on her shell.

I wanted to get to know her better, but really what can you say to a turtle to elicit its life story?

I also wanted her to start walking again, so I could get some footage of that, but it was clear that as long as I kept staring at her, the turtle was not going anywhere. So I decided to walk away for a while to give the turtle a chance to get going. My plan was to come back and film her from behind as she walked away, because that seems to be less disruptive for turtles.

As I walked away, in the direction of the lagoon and the peony, a rabbit caught my eye.

The evasive maneuver of the rabbit is to sit still until you approach a little closer, then to lead you on a merry chase.

The rabbit loves to run in zigzags to try to confuse its pursuer. After it had led me all around a pine tree and zig-zagged across the lawn, it went straight to the fence-line. I decided not to pursue any further, and just go back to check on the turtle's progress. But when I returned to the spot, the turtle was long gone. That fifty year old female box turtle  had taken a lot less time than the rabbit to move on. This reminded me of the fable of the Tortoise and the Hare.

Reading the Signs

After the rain, the first thing I noticed when I walked out the door was that the wild roses had bloomed.

The anthers in the center of the bloom were looking all bedraggled and bunched up, either because they had just now opened, or because they had been rained on.

Little insects that looked  a lot like bees, but were much smaller, began to exploit the blossoms. I was surprised by the appearance of the flowers. Hadn't these been pink last year?

After the rain, the tulip tree leaves were covered with raindrops, and inside the blossoms there was water to drink.

Tiny little insects had gathered inside the blossoms, but I could not tell if they were after pollen, nectar or just water. A bee who was resting on one of the bracts of the flowers backed out and began to approach the blossom.

It seemed to be asking itself: Will all the other insects mind if I join them?

Gingerly, it came in for the landing.

But once it entered the flower, it did not stay long.

Later in the evening, after visiting the kitten in the barn, I was examining some berries in the woods, when I saw a rabbit by the lagoon.

The rabbit saw me, too, but it allowed me to come in for a closer look, before it bounded away.

 I have seen a lot fewer rabbits close to the house this year, and this too might be an indication that the cat is still around.

I wanted to ask the rabbit if it had seen the cat, and this reminded me of the children's book I wrote for Sword many years ago. Wild animals do not snitch on other wild animals, even when they are natural enemies.  That's why the best I can do is just try to read the signs.

Keeping Things in Balance

Yesterday I finally surprised the rabbit by the blooming phlox. It must have been right there underfoot when I went to look at the flowers. I didn't see it flee, but I felt a big whoosh close by. Had that been a bird? No, too big for a bird. So I looked, and there it was in the underbrush between the flower beds.

This is a cropped version of the original  picture. My friend Jerilee helped me crop it.

The rabbit stood stock still for a good long while. It gave me enough time to both snap a picture and also shoot a very brief video.

Notice that after the rabbit hopped away, it did not go far. It was still there in sight, just a little deeper into the underbrush. I decided the wise course of action would be not to try to follow. I panned the camera so you could see just how close we were to the blooming phlox.

My house is surrounded by fields and woods, and lately we have been seeing lots and lots of rabbits. "There are too many of them," my daughter recently remarked, as several of them ran away on either side of our long driveway when we were going for a drive. "Someone should go hunting."

Someone probably will go hunting. It might be a coyote or better yet a fox.

In Case There's a Fox

I have never seen a fox on my property in all the years that I have lived here. But that does not mean that there isn't one. In fact, by making my land so hospitable to rabbits, I am inviting a fox to come live here. Why? Because foxes love rabbits. They are delicious!

Do I say this because I dislike rabbits? Not at all. One of my favorite books is Watership Down. I can very well imagine myself living the life of a rabbit. But then I can turn around and also imagine being a fox. I think the presence of the fox is as much a service to the rabbits as the presence of the rabbits is a service to the fox. We all need each other, and the circle of life depends on a delicate balance between predator and prey.

Without rabbits and other small prey, the foxes would starve, Without foxes and other predators, the rabbits would get fat and sick and overpopulate the land and die of starvation. They need each other, as all living things on this planet do.

Some people think they are very enlightened because one day when they are fully grown they suddenly  realize that the burger on their plate used to be a cow. But I think that someone who did not find this out until he was an adult must have led a very sheltered life. True enlightenment is the realization that the cow would never have existed at all, would never have been out in the field grazing and experiencing mother love or companionship or any other joyful  aspect of life, if not for the people who were raising it as food.

Balance is a difficult concept. It requires countervailing forces. It is based on conflict of interest. It means there will never be total peace, but a delicate balance of power prevents all out war from destroying everything.