I am a primatologist who spends twelve hours most days in the company of a thirteen year old chimpanzee named Bow. I am also an editor with Inverted-A Press.
Yesterday was the day of the toad. But that same day, after lunch, when I went for my walk, I saw a turtle as well.
He was out in the open, his head held high, in the southern five acres not too far from the woods on the east and the overgrown pasture in the West.
Unlike the most recent turtle I saw, who would rather drown than let me see it moving, this turtle did not mind letting me observe it walking. It had no trouble coming out of its shell.
My friend Pam, who is a turtle expert, told me it was a male three-toed box turtle, considerably older than the one I saved from the dogs on the day when it rained. Pam thinks there is a large turtle population living on my land. She said I should consider putting out fresh corn and bread so that the wild turtles would come visit me.
The problem is I don't have any fresh corn and bread. I am trying to cut down on carbs. Why couldn't the turtles fill up on milk and bacon? Pam says reptiles can't drink milk, just because they are not mammals. But tell that to the snake charmers. I don't think milk was invented just for mammals. I think it must be a substance that pre-mammalians liked, or else we could not have gotten here from there.
Anyway, for the time being, the turtles on my land will just have to fend for themselves, and I will make do with chance encounters. It's actually more fun when seeing a turtle is a surprise.
Bow enjoyed his own outdoor time yesterday, mostly being lazy in the outer pen.
Last night, it rained, and now the outer pen is wet, and Bow does not want to go outside. I thought I would entertain him by showing him the video of the turtle on YouTube. But we got a 500 internal service error screen.
Bow thought it was his fault, so he kept randomly pressing keys, trying to correct the problem.
I had a very hard time explaining to him that there was nothing he could do to fix it.
Don't you hate it when it's not your chimp's fault, but YouTube is blaming all its technical problems on non-human primates? I told Bow it was actually the people at Google who were to blame. Eventually, he believed me.
This morning, I went outside to mow the lawn in the backyard. Bow watched me from the pens. The grass had grown considerably since the last mowing, and the skies were cloudy. It looked as if it might rain, and the air had a kind of greenish sheen, as in tropical weather.
I started to mow, but I spotted a little creature under the trampoline. It was a frog. No, actually not a frog. A Bufo Americanus or American toad, my friend Sena later told me. At first the dogs did not notice it, but as soon as they did, Brownie was eager to catch it. I had to tell him "No!"
Brownie is a chocolate lab and the sweetest, kindest dog you could possibly know. Some people, when they first see him, are taken aback, and say things like: "That's a very big dog. Does he bite?" Well, he certainly wanted to bite that toad. But when I told him "No", he backed off. You could see on his face how very much he wanted it, but he also accepted my authority, and he deferred to me.
Of the two, Leo, the smaller and younger, is currently more dangerous, because he is more rambunctious and less obedient. Not dangerous to us, but to frogs, certainly.
In yesterday's discussion of violence and dogs, I neglected to mention this fact: up until recently, dogs were entrusted with guarding the home. They were expected to show utter loyalty to the family they grew up with, while total ferocity toward intruders. They were never intended to be docile -- just loyal and obedient.
I transported the toad to the front porch, where I knew the dogs would leave it alone. I can trust our dogs with many things, but not eating a toad when I am not there to supervise them is not one of them. Everybody has limits. There are some temptations that are insurmountable. Understanding those limitations is part of managing the situation.
A toad is too big a temptation for a dog. A stranger crossing your property line is something a chimpanzee is very alert to. Not all creatures or all people enjoy the same privileges and protections.
On one level, all flesh is kin. We can look at a frog and see what we all have in common. We can feel empathy. But from a different perspective, anyone who is not a member of your family is a stranger. To conflate all violence into one handy category of undesirable activity is to fail to do justice to heroes like Jean Laffite and to consider the Karankawa cannibals, just because they ate some of their enemies. We should judge a man, a dog or a chimpanzee not merely on how kind they are to their friends, but also on how well they can neutralize their enemies. In today's culture, we forget that kindness without courage is impotent. Or that all life feeds on other life, but we should take care not to feed on our friends.
The difference between the in-group and the out-group is what distinguishes murder from hunting, terrorism from patriotism and lunch from manslaughter. Not understanding the limits of empathy is like thinking that you can live outside the inexorable laws of nature.
To make it up to Brownie for not letting him eat the toad, I played a couple of rounds of fetch-the-rock with him, before I went back to mowing the grass. This seemed to satisfy him.
And what did Bow think about all this? He understood. He knew exactly how Brownie felt about the frog, but he was happy when I came back into the pens to spend more time with him. He knows what I think about all this, because he has read parts of my new book, Theodosia and the Pirates: the War Against Spain. Or at least he has heard me read them aloud.
Today is Mother's Day, and I am being nostalgic. In the picture above, from nine years ago, you can see me and Bow inside the sun room, while Sword and her friend are out in the yard on the back porch. They are playing hopscotch on a chalk outline they made on the concrete. Bow was in his favorite pose, riding on my back. And, of course, there's a swing.
Today, the sun room has been transformed into the inner pens, the back porch is the floor of the outer pen, and the swing has been moved outdoors. It's Bow's swing, but today, since it is Mother's Day, Bow let me use it.
Bow was very unconcerned with my use of his swing, but Leo, who is a barker, kept trying to get more attention. If he were inside the pens, he would not feel so left out. Luckily, I do also interact with Leo at other times, so he's not entirely a neglected or a feral dog.
Which reminds me, offhand, of a discussion of chimpanzees, dogs and domestication I recently had with some friends and friends of friends on Facebook.
It all started with someone claiming that humans, even under conditions of slavery, cannot be domesticated, because they are so smart that they can cloak their tendency toward violence and thereby avoid having the violence culled right out of them. This, it was claimed, was in contrast to dogs who have been entirely domesticated, and can therefore be expected to be non-violent toward humans.
I took issue with this. I pointed out how many incidents of dogs killing humans we have in the United States each year. The killings are not breed specific. My point was not that dogs were bad or that certain dogs were violent, but simply that those dogs who do not choose to kill humans do so not out of some kind of genetic predisposition against violence, but because of the way they are brought up, the way they are treated and the positive relationship that they have with humans. I mentioned that chimpanzees, who have not undergone "domestication", have by contrast not killed any human in the US in decades.
Up popped some woman, a friend of my friend, and gave me a stern lecture. She told me that chimpanzees may seem cute when they are babies, but by puberty they are very dangerous, and I should have a plan in place to get rid of mine. (She assumed Bow was in the cute baby phase, or else I would be dead by now.) Then she explained that domestication is not the same as taming, in case I thought it was, but was a program of genetic selection for certain traits that dogs have undergone for tens of thousands of years and that foxes underwent more recently in a less lengthy process.
First of all, if domestication as a way to disarm populations were really a possibility, whether for humans, dogs or chimpanzees, don't you think it would be achieved by now? The biggest killers of other humans are humans themselves. Governments interested in eradicating resistance are plotting to take away our guns or to drug us, because they don't know of any sure fire way to make us docile.
Many people have their dogs neutered, and it is not just for purposes of birth control. If birth control were desired, why not just perform a vasectomy? The same people who claim dogs are domesticated also push for universal neutering of all domestic dogs. Why?Some of it is to control behavior.
Dogs don't always do what we expect them to. Neither do humans or chimpanzees. All of us are dangerous, whether armed or unarmed. Many different expedients are tried to neutralize the natural tendency to resist authority that comes built in to any intelligent being.
But even castrati can plot against the king, and neutered dogs and chimps have been known to do much damage. So neither "domestication" despite its centuries' long breeding program, nor other methods such as drugs and lobotomies, is a substitute for a relationship of trust.
Telling people their dogs are domesticated and hence cannot harm them is an invitation to having people treat dogs badly or fail to relate to them at all, and expect that everything will be fine. Everything can be fine, but first you need to earn respect.
I go into the pens every day, bare footed and bare handed, with only trust for a weapon. It works a lot better than domestication ever could. Nobody in my house is domesticated: not me, not my daughter, not the dogs and certainly not Bow. We all came down from a long line of carnivorous predators, and somehow we avoid killing each other every single day.
Amazing, isn't it? But I bet it's the same at your house, too! Happy Mother's Day!
When the weather is nice, Bow enjoys being outdoors so much that he chooses to stay out most of the day. Yesterday was warm, there was a gentle breeze, and the birds were serenading all day long. Bow came in for meals and snacks, but other than that, he just wanted to stay outside, even during nap time.
There are many health benefits to taking a nap. It's a way to recharge and de-stress, and if you take a short nap in the afternoon, then it will eventually also help you to sleep better at night. Bow does not need to be told this. He takes a nap every afternoon. But there is nothing like a nap outside in the very lap of nature!
When the birds are serenading, repeating the same line of music over and over again, this is the perfect ambient noise, the one we evolved to sleep to.
Even if you start out wide awake, eventually as the breeze caresses your face and the birds repeat the same flourish of notes, your lids will grow heavy.
You will be lulled into a sense of security, knowing that if any predator were to approach, the birds and the dogs who are keeping watch over you will sound the alarm.
There is nothing to worry about. You are safe and snug and loved and cared for. The birds are telling you that.
Yesterday afternoon was the perfect day for an outdoor nap. Conditions were optimal. There was nothing to worry about and nothing to fear, as the birds stood watch over Bow.
Bow took full advantage of the opportunity, as who wouldn't?
Today is another day. The skies are overcast and dark clouds are threatening. The birds in the front yard are still singing, but they are not saying "all is well".
Instead, they are chirping: "It's going to rain! It's going to rain!" I predict that Bow will take his nap indoors today. But while it lasted, yesterday was the perfect day for a nap in the lap of nature.
Everyone can see how much more mature an adolescent appears.
But how did the transformation come about? What were all the awkward little stages? If you read all my blog posts and articles about Bow and look at all the pictures, you can see it happen gradually. But usually when a child grows, we do not notice.
The same applies to flowers and fruit. Everybody notices the pretty cherry blossoms.
And who could fail to note when the cherries are ripe?
But how did they get that way? Lately I have been noticing some of the intermediate awkward moments, like a green cherry emerging from a pink flower cap.
The flowers on the cherry trees in my yard start out as white. But as they age, they become pink. Then the green fruit emerges, capped with a pink tuft.
Only later does the pink tuft disappear, and you see bunches of the green fruit, waiting to ripen.
Other awkward transformations are taking place all around me. For instance, the redbud blossoms have sprouted little miniature swords.
Those tiny, dagger-like protrusions will eventually become the well known seed pods. And guess what the dogwood is up to? Its blossoms -- the real ones -- have opened.
Remember that I mentioned the dogwood is a drupe? This means the four white petals are nothing but bracts, and the real action happens inside those little globe-like green things in the center. Those are the real flowers, and their tiny stamens and pistils are now open for business.
It has taken me a long time to notice some of these things. It has been twelve years since Bow was a baby and that's how long it took for me to get to the point of noticing when the little true blossoms inside the big false blossoms really open!
Yesterday I encountered another rabbit.
It was a pretty fast runner, so I was not able to observe any subtle details. It might take me another twelve years before I notice anything truly significant about rabbits. By then, Bow will be twenty-four.
The last few days have been rather cold. After the storms, we seemed to be hidden under a pall. And even when the clouds cleared and the sun was shining again, it was still very cold out for several days.
As long as the sun was shining, though, no matter how cold it was, Bow was happy to go out and bathe in its light.
The pea plants continued to prosper, more or less, and Bow did not appear to notice them at all.
Only every once in a while I would see that the plant had moved a little, and every time that happened the tendrils which had clung to grid were torn and the earth in the pot was a little disturbed. Up until today, I had seen no need to water the plants, because they had soaked up quite a lot of rain. But today is a bit warmer, and the dirt in the pot looked dry.
Bow did not want to help water, but he did want to be watered. He contrived to put his lips between the plants and the watering can and soak up most of the water. This was right after lunch, and he had had plenty to drink.
Have you ever known anyone to be jealous of a plant? I think Bow might be, just a little.
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