It’s good to manage expectations early, so I want to be clear that this isn’t a book about Aesop. If you’re hoping to learn more about the man behind the fables, this probably isn’t the book for you. If, on the other hand, you have idly wondered whether foxes or crows are cleverer, if wolves really are deceptive or a tortoise could ever actually beat a hare in a race, then read on!
One of my favourite courses in my first year of university back in the 80’s was Ethology — as I remember it, it was a broad look at animal behaviours and how they mirrored or illuminated human behaviour — and to my delight, Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables reads very much like an introductory textbook to that course. Zoologist Jo Wimpenny, prompted by the anthropomorphised characteristics attributed to the animals in eight of Aesop’s fables, examines, through the recounting of years of animal behaviour experiments, whether or not these are true characteristics (Is a fox a sly manipulator? Is a donkey stupid? Can a dog be fooled by its own reflection?). Filled with fascinating quotes, experiment results, and animal facts, I found myself an eager student once more; a thoroughly satisfying experience. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
How we represent animals in fictional stories reveals our attitudes towards them and our treatment of them.
And this is pretty much the point of this book: So many of the traits that Aesop attributed to his animal characters have endured, unexamined, through the millennia, and these traits influence how we value the animals around us. The idea that wolves are bloodthirsty deceivers (further maligned in the Middle Ages in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood) led to their extermination in most of Europe. The picture of donkeys as slow-witted plodders has seen their decline from a time when they were given royal burials alongside Egyptian pharaohs to their current status as overworked beasts of burden in (primarily) developing countries (and Wimpenny shares a saddening tale of donkey hides’ current use in a high-priced Chinese medicine, ejiao, that has prompted the opening of donkey abattoirs across Africa and the resultant thefts of these essential animals from families who can’t afford to replace them). On the flipside, the more positive idea that male lions are noble and majestic (and Wimpenny explains the huge metabolic cost a lion pays for a full, dark mane — the more impressive, the less he is able to move around in the hot sun, forcing the females to feed and care for him, which they are programmed to do for the promise of genetically superior cubs) has made such lions the ultimate test of human prowess, from gladiators to big game hunters. In order to confront the stereotypes, Wimpenny relates one of Aesop’s fables at the beginning of each chapter, explores how the featured animals display the traits attributed to them (often surprisingly accurate on the surface), tells the story of other animals that might better fit the stereotypes, and finishes each section with a “Fact or Fiction?” summary.
At its heart, this is the story of the history of animal behaviour study and in this regard Wimpenny states, “It’s only in the past 30 or so years that a concerted effort has gone into studying the cognitive abilities of animals other than primates.” It was only after the time that I was in university that the scientific community began to accept that there was anything deeper to learn from studying the behaviour of birds, insects, and non-primate mammals (in particular, there was a big pushback against studying domesticated animals like dogs and horses because they weren’t “natural”) because if they don’t look like us, they can’t tell us anything about us. Wimpenny stresses that every species is inherently valuable and worthy of study for its own sake, and although she shares many intriguing studies that demonstrate what looks like “intelligence” in various animals (novel tool use, future planning, self-consciousness), she also warns that behaviours that look like they demonstrate human intelligence need to be interpreted through each animal’s own “toolkit” of behaviours and the evolutionary pressures that created them. And on the flipside of that, it’s unfair to say an animal is not intelligent when they can’t perform particular tasks as well as humans do: In order to test whether animals have a “Theory of Mind”, the classic test involves a mirror and most primates can connect their reflection with their own bodies. Dogs, however, don’t pass this test and Wimpenny explains that that’s probably because dogs aren’t primarily visual animals; the results are more impressive when experimenters have developed tests that involve the dogs’ superior sense of smell. The results of all of these experiments seem to impact how we regard and treat the animals around us and the history of animal behaviour testing seems to have also been an ongoing, unwitting, test on humanity all along. A sampling of interesting animal facts:
• One in 10 of us can’t detect the almond-like smell of the highly poisonous gas, hydrogen cyanide; and it’s thought that as many as 60 percent of us are unable to detect the pungent, sweet, sulphur odour of metabolised asparagus in urine. *
• The Argentine ant is a species with the largest recorded societies of any multicellular organisms. The imaginatively named “large supercolony” (which may number over a trillion individuals in California alone!) covers 1,000km of the western United States, from San Francisco to the Mexican border, as well as 6,000km in Europe, 2,800km in Australia, 900km on New Zealand’s North Island and growing areas on Hawaii and Japan. Remarkably, even though it stretches over multiple continents, it is a single society. The evidence is in the chemical make-up of the hydrocarbons on their cuticle and the way in which ants from different sites behave towards other ants. Take an ant from the colony in California and drop it into the heart of the same colony in Japan, and the Japanese ants will rub antennae with it and treat it as if it is one of their own. But take an ant from a different colony in California and drop it into the large supercolony (in California, Japan, or anywhere else) and the unfortunate creature will be ripped apart in minutes.
• Larvae of the green lacewing show a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” strategy to live among their prey, the woolly alder aphid. Woolly aphids, as their name suggests, look like tiny sheep because they are covered in white “wool” (in reality, waxy strands produced by the aphids for protection) and they are usually fiercely guarded by ants.The lacewing larvae have taken the role of the wolf quite literally: they disguise themselves by stealing some of the woolly wax and covering their own bodies with it — and as a result they can walk straight past the ants and feast on the aphids. The lacewing larvae are manipulating the ants’ visual and olfactory systems in order to misrepresent the world to them, an incredible evolved strategy for sneaking an easy meal.
(*I often eat asparagus and just smile weakly when people joke about it making their pee smell funny. After reading this and polling my family, I can report that most of us can’t smell the “sweet, sulphur odour” but one daughter apparently developed the ability as an adult. Interesting to me anyway.)
I find myself wondering again what Aesop would think about all this — would he be surprised to learn the truth about his animals? Would he have chosen different characters if the science existed then? And how would more scientifically accurate portrayals have altered our world view? Stories are essential, powerful tools to entertain, inspire and teach, but to improve our understanding of our world, perhaps it’s time that we melded the facts with the fables.
Wimpenny shares a story from British news reports about patrons at a pub who were too terrorised by the presence of a fox in the parking lot to exit the premises, and while she suggests that this represents a kind of unfair conditioning from tales like Aesop’s (which I’m not sure about; unless it looked rabid, I don’t think I’d be scared of a fox), she also adds that this seems to be a symptom of people not having enough contact with nature and wildlife. Whether we are misinformed by popular culture or simple ignorance, if learning facts about animal life causes us to treat them better, books like this one go a long way toward improving the world. Just my kind of thing.
