Reconnect With Nature Blog

Lessons from a Turkey

This is a post from Guest Author Randall Johnson, who has contributed a number of guest posts and comments to this blog.

A few weeks ago, I came across a news item that got me thinking about the extremes our current level of separation from the natural world can sometimes carry us.

It seems a small town in Massachusetts acquired an unofficial mascot a few months ago in the form of a wild turkey, which the townspeople named ‘Freddy’. He strutted around town freely, visiting local businesses, going in and out of stores, and getting hand-outs along the way. He became something of a local celebrity, having attracting local media attention through his ‘friendly’ behavior.

However, in early August, the local police found it necessary to apprehend and euthanize Freddy after he was declared a public safety hazard for having attacked motorcyclists and passersby. Afterwards, the town held a memorial service for its beloved bird, with mourners leaving flowers and notes. One resident even set up a Facebook page in Freddy’s honor with over 1,500 friends and counting.

What the townspeople may not have known is wild turkeys can be aggressive when they lose their fear of people and, after several months of urban living, Freddy had become pretty much fearless. As such, he wasn’t an ideal candidate for relocation, as was pointed out by local wildlife officials.

Now, there was nothing unusual or out-of-the-ordinary about Freddy’s behavior, considering he’d become habituated to humans and vehicular traffic. However, the fact that some of the town’s citizens organized and participated in a memorial service for him gave me pause for reflection. It struck me that the energy and emotion that went into this act of mourning was disproportionate to the situation.

Granted, wild turkeys are the official game bird of Massachusetts.

Granted, by 1851, they had been wiped out from the state as a result of hunting.

However, in 1972-1973, the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife launched a successful reintroduction program, starting with 37 turkeys. Today, the turkey population in Massachusetts is somewhere between 20,000-25,000!

So, they’re not threatened with imminent extinction, unlike the 16,300 or so plant and animal species that appear on the World Conservation Union’s 2007 Red List of Threatened Species.

Let’s put this into perspective even more.

Wild turkeys grow to be 4 feet tall and weigh around 20 pounds. Not exactly lightweights! Following their reintroduction, they surprised everyone—including wildlife officials—by being adaptable to residential, even urban, living, with thriving populations in Boston and Cambridge. They are opportunistic feeders, eating everything from bird seed to gutter trash, and then depositing large amounts of ‘scat’ all over the place.

Some residents report being happy to see a bit a nature strolling around, whereas others are wary, even afraid, of what these sometimes ornery birds might do, especially when children are around. More than a few people have even reported being terrorized by them, prompting local police to issue guidelines about what to do—and not to do—should people meet a wild turkey on the sidewalk.

It strikes me that reintroduction programs can be a double-edge sword. Yes, Massachusetts got its turkeys back after more than one hundred ‘turkey-less’ years. But now many of the state’s communities have a new public health and safety issue to deal with that the Fisheries and Wildlife biologists hadn’t counted on.

At the individual level, some people’s need for contact with nature leads to maudlin displays of sentimentality that make for good headlines but that’s about all.

There’s no question that we need to exercise a healthy dose of compassion in our treatment of other species. After all, humans are now the leading cause of extinction. But in addition to using our hearts, we also need to use our heads.

 

 

 

A Tribute To Washoe And Alex

They were pioneers, and they died within a few weeks of each other. Like all pioneers, they pointed the way to new discoveries and new ways of thinking. And like all pioneers, they bore the brunt of skepticism from the naysayers, the folks who do not want our vision of the world to change.

They did not ask to be pioneers. That job was thrust on them by others. But during their lives, they showed the world a different view, a different perspective, a different reality from the comfortable one that has lasted for thousands of years.

They were Washoe the chimpanzee and Alex the parrot.

Washoe showed that a chimpanzee can learn a number of signs in American Sign Language and use those signs to communicate with people.  Not only that, but she showed that she could teach these signs to other chimps, and could communicate with other chimps, using the signs.

Alex showed that he could tell the differences between shapes and colors, and could use perfectly-enunciated words to communicate these differences to the people around him.

Washoe and Alex were both taught by careful scientists who went to great lengths to remove subjectivity from their analyses. But neither Washoe nor Alex was merely a “lab subject,” taken out just for experiments but otherwise ignored. The people around them cared deeply about their welfare.

As pioneers, both Washoe and Alex showed that animals have the cognitive capacity to use language in meaningful ways.  Because the scientists were very careful with their studies, it is difficult for the skeptics and naysayers to discount the results, although it appears to be the nature of skeptics and naysayers to keep trying.

And as pioneers, Washoe and Alex pointed the way to a different world. A world where we humans acknowledge that animals could have sentience and cognitive capacities that could include language. A world where we see animals as intelligent beings, rather than as objects that exist merely for our convenience. A world where animals are no longer considered as things to be used, but fellow creatures to be respected.

Are We Unique?

     I recently read an editorial in the 03 March 2007 New Scientist that had the title, “We're not unique, just at one end of the spectrum.” The editorial pointed out that humans were long thought to be unique in their skills and accomplishments. Now, however, a variety of animals has been shown to use tools, to have some if not all of the elements of language, and to have cultural transmission of information. The editorial concludes that we are not unique, and this lack of uniqueness should give us more connectedness with all of life.

     I applaud the editorial. I think that this is an excellent re-orientation to our thinking. In the 1970s, humans were considered to be unique because we of all animals could make tools. Then along came Jane Goodall’s studies of chimps who could fashion tools that could be used to scoop termites out of their mounds. Suddenly there was a plethora of examples of animals using tools, including examples now of chimps using spears to hunt gazelles.

     Then in the 1980s, human were considered unique because we had culture, defined as information transmitted by learning from one generation to the next. But John Tyler Bonner’s book, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, showed that a number of animals could transmit information as well to other generations. The uniqueness of culture fell by the wayside.

     In the 1990s, language was considered to be just about the last bastion that separated us from the rest of the animal world. But then a variety of studies started to show that animals also had language. Vervet monkeys, Diana monkeys, and Campbell’s monkeys had different words for different predators. And lest you think that only primates were capable of this, studies have shown that prairie dogs have most of the design features found in human languages, and chickens have different calls for aerial and terrestrial predators.

     But I would like to add a word of caution about the interpretation that we humans are at one end of the spectrum. That smacks of the Aristotelian Scala Naturae or the Great Chain of Being, in which all animals were ranked in a linear chain, with humans (of course) at the top and the amoebas at the bottom. The Scala Naturae provided the justification for assuming that monkeys were incomplete copies of humans, and cats, dogs, rodents, and pigeons could be used to find out how humans learn and react physiologically. Yes, we all are related evolutionarily, and we all have certain evolutionary commonalities. But we each have our own species-specific differences, and if we humans were not writing with our anthropocentric perspective, it might be difficult to know where the end of the spectrum might lie.

     In fact, I argue that there is no end to the spectrum. We humans do some things extraordinarily well. But there are other things that we can’t do. We can’t hear in the ultrasonic range, the way that bats and dolphins can, and we cannot use ultrasonic information to form “mental pictures” of the objects that are out there in complete darkness. We can’t generate electricity the way that electric eels can, nor can we hear subsonic sounds the way that elephants can. We can’t even spread our wings and fly the way that a dragonfly can.

     Nature is a collection of unique species. Certainly, there are evolutionary connections, but there are specialized adaptations as well, that make every single animal and plant species unique. And where we draw the end of the spectrum depends on our point of view. Perhaps a better interpretation might be a cloud of points, like stars in our universe, with some points closer to others depending on their evolutionary connections, and no end to the spectrum, just like there is no end to the universe.

All Life Is Special

A few days ago, a story on NPR said that college students were more narcissistic and self-centered than they were in the past.  A recent study (see link) found that students’ scores have consistently risen on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test since 1982. The study suggested that this might be due to teaching children that they are special, and further suggested that children who think that they are special will have less empathy for others. 

Not having seen the actual study, I cannot comment on the details. However, it seems to me that having children think that they are special should not be a problem.  After all, every human being on this earth is special, in that no one has exactly the same genetic makeup. Each individual is unique, and in that sense is special. No one has exactly the same talents, beliefs, motivations, and appearance as any other human (identical twins perhaps come closest to this).

However, forgetting that each individual is unique, we often make broad generalizations about people and their behavior. At the extreme of this is the categorization of people into stereotyped groups or populations.

This kind of thinking carries over to the way that some people view animals. Some wildlife managers and other biologists think of animals not as individuals, but as populations.  I have had biologists tell me that individual animals do not matter, that it is the population that matters, so there is no point in trying to save or rescue single animals.  On this basis, some people feel free to “cull” animals to preserve the population, or to exterminate groups of animals as long as the populations are not seriously affected.

But whether they live or die matters to individual animals. Just as all humans are unique, so is every animal.  And all life wants to live.

People thinking of themselves as being special might be a good trend. Rather than having less empathy, perhaps children who are raised feeling special about themselves might have more empathy for others who are also special. If they think of themselves as special, perhaps they will realize that all living things on this Earth are also special, and deserve to live.