There are reports of dolphins coming to the aid of whales giving birth. When sharks are menacingly near, the dolphins take up positions around a mother whale and her female “attendants,” forming a ring around the helpless mother during her labor and delivery. Should the sharks attack, the dolphins bump them away with their bottle-nosed beaks.
There are so many cases of dolphins saving lives—both human and non-human—that we should really think of them as the “lifeguards of the seas.” We should. But we don’t. Instead, we often treat them with utter contempt.
One type of dolphin, called the Dall’s porpoise, often swims in the water above salmon and tuna schools. Current salmon- and tuna-fishing methods use huge nets that trap the salmon and tuna—and the dolphins. In the past 10 years, according to official figures, 1,649,189 were killed in the course of tuna fishing. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 required fishermen to gradually reduce their porpoise kill to zero. However, in September 1981, President Reagan’s administration convinced Congress to exempt the U.S. commercial tuna fleet, resulting in the continued use of purse seine, which trap and kill thousands of dolphins along with the tuna. Thus 50 dolphins will be killed in the time it takes you to read this chapter. Two have been killed while you’ve been reading this page, and this rate of massacre goes on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The huge corporations that own the fishing fleets tell the public they have modified the nets to permit the porpoises to escape. But they don’t tell the public that many of the animals are netted and released, netted and released, until they are mangled and dead. The Reagan administration has also allowed the Japanese to kill porpoises while fishing for salmon in the U.S. waters of the North Pacific. Over a million dolphins have died in their huge nets, which also trap and kill seals and birds. As a result, organizations like Friends of Animals Inc. have called for a boycott of all tuna and salmon products.
The more I’ve learned, the harder it has become to avoid the conclusion that animals are capable of a respect and reverence for life that cuts across species boundaries. One veterinarian reports:
I have six cases on record of pet dogs and cats becoming depressed and calling mournfully when a companion animal in the same house has been taken away to be put to sleep because of some incurable disease. In all cases, at about the same time that the companion pet was being destroyed, the surviving animal showed a sudden and obvious change in behavior. In one case, the owner did not know that the vet had put the other pet to sleep until he called an hour later, and for an hour before, her cat had been calling frantically and showing distress.23
I find it difficult to dismiss these cases by attributing them merely to instinct. They speak to me rather of a thread binding all creatures in the great web of life.
A Guide Duck for the Blind
One of the most marvelous examples of animals caring for each other is recalled by Cleveland Amory in his lovely little book Animail. He tells of a scientist named Dr. Arthur Peterson, who lives in DeBary, Florida. A few years ago, Dr. Peterson noticed some odd activity by ducks on a lake on his property. Becoming extremely fascinated with what he saw, Dr. Peterson began to study the ducks and soon realized that a male duck (whom he called, for the sake of clarity, John-Duck) was uncannily and persistently attentive to a certain female duck (whom Dr. Peterson called Mary-Duck). It was not mating season, so there was no apparent explanation for this behavior, but he was terribly curious and kept observing the ducks, looking for clues. One day he noticed that John-Duck had left Mary-Duck alone for a minute, and he quickly approached her, slipped a net over her, and examined her. To his astonishment, Dr. Peterson found that Mary-Duck was completely blind.
Touched by the implications of his discovery, Dr. Peterson released the unseeing Mary-Duck. Moments later, John-Duck reappeared and went immediately over to her. Then this “seeing-eye duck” gave a loud series of reassuring quacks and guided her off.24
The Trapper and the Beaver Cubs
Animals with whom humans have little contact also have the potential for kindness and friendship. One man who came to understand something of the spirit of such animals was the Englishman Archie Belanie, who later became known as Grey Owl when he turned his back on his past and totally adopted American Indian ways.25 A prodigiously successful trapper, he fell in love with an Iroquois woman named Anahareo. One day the two of them came upon a female beaver who had been killed in one of Grey Owl’s traps. They were about to leave with the fur when two small heads appeared above the water. At Anahareo’s urging, Grey Owl rescued the little beavers, whose mother had been killed in his trap, and took them home. Getting to know these two little beaver kittens was such a powerful experience for the great trapper that he never trapped animals again. He wrote movingly of
their almost childlike intimacies and murmurings of affection, their rollicking good fellowship with not only each other but ourselves, their keen awareness, their air of knowing what it was all about. They seemed like little folk from some other planet, whose language we could not quite understand. To kill such creatures seemed monstrous. I would do no more of it. 26
You Reap What You Sow
All animals—including those we have been taught to fear—can respond to love and give it. Nowhere has this been proven more profoundly than by Ralph Helfer and his wife, Toni, two of Hollywood’s foremost wild-animal trainers. Helfer operates an animal park and training center in Buena Vista, California, where he handles and trains the fiercest of animals. Conventional wisdom has it that training these wild animals for show business requires instilling fear in the creatures and breaking their will. But Helfer is successful with a radically different approach. He says the idea first came to him in a hospital bed:
Violence begets violence, I mused, as I lay in my hospital bed 25 years ago after being mauled by a 500-pound lion. The big cat had been “fear-trained,” with whips, chairs, and screams, as animals in captivity traditionally are; and though he performed his tricks well enough, he had no love for humans. Just as a battered child grows up to be a child abuser, a battered animal awaits its chance to do unto others as has been done unto him. I had been done unto royally by that lion, and I had plenty of time during a long convalescence to figure out why. That lion had attacked me, as so many other animals have attacked humans over the centuries, not because he was “wild,” but because he was unloved. Your dog or cat is no different, nor is your horse or fish or pig or bird.
The idea of affection-training was born in that hospital bed. Animals respond to their lives emotionally, I reasoned. If an animal could be trained by addressing its negative emotions (with threats and punishment), he could probably also be trained by appealing to his positive emotions. Surely the results would be even better with love than with pain, for the animal would be motivated to cooperate. Where pain might get the horse to water, love could induce him to drink.
Since that time, I’ve proved my theory with almost every animal known to man. I’ve traveled from the jungles of Africa to the forests of India, working with everything from hippopotami to tarantulas.27
When I first heard of training wild animals through affection, I was skeptical. But Helfer’s success record, “with everything from hippopotami to tarantulas,” is hard to discount. His animals have been used in many television shows, movies, and commercials. There is one thing, however, that affection-training cannot accomplish.
There are some circus tricks that animals can be forced to perform through threats and fear but that they cannot be coaxed to perform through positive means. The reason for this is simple: the tricks we see in circus rings are often in violation of the anatomical structure and deepest instincts of the animals. Horses dancing on their hind feet, bears roller-skating, dogs walking