Word: bekoff
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Many animal-behavior experts also oppose zoo confinement for giraffes, gazelles and other animals designed by evolution to run freely across miles of savannah. "What you see in zoos is just completely unnatural," says Marc Bekoff, an animal behaviorist at the University of Colorado. But most of all, Bekoff and his colleagues oppose the constraints imposed on elephants. "The only place I have seen truly happy elephants in captivity," says Hancocks, "is in the two elephant sanctuaries in the U.S. [in Tennessee and California]. Once you've seen how wonderful their lives are there, you realize whatever zoos...
While some behaviors are obviously instinctive, Bekoff is convinced that others are not. "If you study animals in the complex social environments in which they live," he says, "it's impossible for everything they do to be hardwired, with no conscious thought. It really is." And once again, he cites play as perhaps the most obvious example. Play between dogs involves extremely complex, precise behavior, he says. "They're really close, they're mouthing, but they don't bite their own lips; they almost never bite the lip of the other animal hard, nor the eyes, nor the ears...
...meant more than just "Let's play" turned out to be correct. "It says, 'I want to play with you' but also 'I'm sorry I bit you so hard' or 'I'm going to bite you hard, but don't take it seriously.'" It even works between species: Bekoff has seen wild coyotes bow to dogs--and vice versa--before they engage in something like play. "At least they don't fight," says Bekoff. "The play bow changes the whole mood...
Meanwhile, dishonesty is punished across all canid species. "I know coyotes best," says Bekoff. "Coyotes will signal play and then try to fight or mate with others, but if they do that enough, they can't get other animals to play." Does that behavior rise to the level of ethics or morality? If morality is simply living by the rules of a society, says hyena expert Christine Drea of Duke University, then yes, animals do that. But just because animals have rules and bad things can happen when those aren't followed, she says, "doesn't mean they're ethical...
...while animals may not possess true ethics or morality, Bekoff, De Waal and a growing number of their colleagues think fairness and cooperation may be the forerunners of those qualities, just as the apelike brain of our distant ancestor Lucy was the forerunner of our own, much more sophisticated minds. After all, Lucy was no Einstein-but without her, the leap from the tiny brains of primitive mammals to the subtle intelligence of an Einstein could never have occurred. --Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Wendy Grossman/Houston