Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind

Praise for Tamed and Untamed

In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures.

—from the foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke, author of Elephant Company

Two kindred spirits treat animals as they ought to be treated, with understanding, knowledge, and humor. These well-crafted essays are a pleasure to read and make you marvel at our fellow travelers on this planet.

—Frans de Waal, author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Are humans the ultimate species? Nope, not according to these authors. Water bears are: They have been around for 500 million years and will survive after we destroy the planet. Will chickens in your backyard sooner or later give you a name? Do eels dream? Can an octopus have a sense of humor? Read and learn. This is an absolutely enchanting book that anybody who loves animals will not only want to own but also to give to good friends. It is full of precious lines and deep wisdom, and there is a delicious sense of humor throughout. The authors constantly bring us back to the recognition that we are just one among millions of remarkable animals, each one worthy of study and deep admiration, the kind these very authors accord them.

—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of Dogs Never Lie About Love; coauthor of When Elephants Weep

"Two of the most tuned-in people in the world have now given us these marvelous narratives of nonhuman beings living their lives on our shared planet. This is exactly what we need more of. We need to understand who we are here with. And, more and more urgently, to understand that we are not alone on our planet. As humans become more isolated and alienated, stories of other animals offer us our best chance for succeeding at being human."

—Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

I cannot recommend highly enough this memorable collection of essays about the secret life of animals from two of the most thought-provoking, animal-savvy writers of this time, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. A must-read for anyone interested in all creatures great and small.

—Nicholas Dodman, DVM, author of Pets on the Couch; professor emeritus, Tufts University

A beautifully written, fascinating compendium of essays about many species with whom we share our planet. Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas impart their insights into the behavior of a variety of nonhumans in this extremely informative and thought-provoking read.

—Irene M. Pepperberg, author of Alex & Me

"Tamed and Untamed is a beautiful duet between two of the world’s finest nature writers. These enchanting essays bring to life creatures both novel and familiar, from pink dolphins to domestic dogs, war elephants to garden slugs. Each chapter reveals a new animal mystery and adds to the menagerie of our minds."

—Abigail Tucker, author of The Lion in the Living Room

"Tamed and Untamed is a gem of a book. Written by two incredibly gifted writers, it’s a multicourse buffet of wonderful and thought-provoking stories about the surprising and wide-ranging intelligence, and deep and rich emotional lives of many different nonhuman animals. These eloquent authors weave solid science into their stories so that nonresearchers can well understand what is happening in the heads and hearts of the dogs, cats, rats, hawks, octopuses, and many other animals about whom they write. The bottom line is that we are not all that unique among the fascinating and diverse beings who are called ‘animals’ and with whom we share our magnificent planet. They, like this book, are gifts we must cherish."

—Marc Bekoff, author of Rewilding Our Hearts; coauthor of The Animals’ Agenda

Who but Sy Montgomery could describe a hawk’s eyes as having ‘an intensity stronger than rage and brighter than joy’? Who but Elizabeth Marshall Thomas would take in a wild mouse, ‘sort of like helping a relative’? This is a book to cherish, full of enlightenment, curiosity, and admiration for all things animal. I loved it.

—Patricia McConnell, author of The Education of Will

Also by Sy Montgomery

For adults

The Soul of an Octopus

Birdology

The Good Good Pig

Search for the Golden Moon Bear

Journey of the Pink Dolphin

Spell of the Tiger

Walking with the Great Apes

The Curious Naturalist

The Wild out Your Window

For children

The Snake Scientist

The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans

Encantado

Search for the Golden Moon Bear: Science and Adventure in the Asian Tropics

The Tarantula Scientist

Quest for the Tree Kangaroo

Saving the Ghost of the Mountain

Kakapo Rescue

The Tapir Scientist

Chasing Cheetahs

The Octopus Scientists

The Great White Shark Scientist

Amazon Adventure

Also by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Dreaming of Lions

The Hidden Life of Deer

The Old Way

The Social Lives of Dogs

Certain Poor Shepherds

The Tribe of Tiger

The Hidden Life of Dogs

The Animal Wife

Reindeer Moon

Warrior Herdsmen

The Harmless People

Copyright © 2017 by Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Editor: Joni Praded

Project Manager: Angela Boyle

Copy Editor: Paula Brisco

Proofreader: Laura Jorstad

Indexer: Shana Milkie

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing September 2017.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 18 19 20 21

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Tamed and Untamed was printed on paper supplied by Thomson-Shore that contains 100% postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Montgomery, Sy, author. | Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, 1931– author.

Title: Tamed and untamed : close encounters of the animal kind / Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas ; foreword by Vicki Constantine Croke.

Description: White River Junction, Vermont : Chelsea Green Publishing, [2017] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017023243| ISBN 9781603587556 (paperback) | ISBN 9781603587563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781603587730 (audiobook)

Subjects: LCSH: Animals. | Animal behavior. | BISAC: NATURE / Animals / General. | NATURE / Essays. | PETS / Essays. | NATURE / Animals / Wildlife.

Classification: LCC QL45.2 .M66 2017 | DDC 591—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023243

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

In deep, loving memory of Molly, Tess, Sally, Pearl, Sundog, Georgia, Shelah, Misty, Maria, Cokie, Suessi, Fatima, Windigo, Viva, and Miska.

Contents

Foreword

Part One: Animals and People

Animals as Teachers and Healers

Your Brain on Pets

Is ESP Possible?

Thunder

Animal Minds

Octopus Love

Bushmeat

Cecil the Lion

Discarded Animals

A Memorial Day Tribute to War Animals

A Failure to Communicate

Fear of the Dark

Fear of Snakes

The Spirits among Us

Part Two: Birds

Birds Rock the Beat

Puffin M

Chicken Indestructible

Hawk Migration

Bubbles Wrapped in Feathers

Part Three: Dogs and Cats

Pets with Disabilities

Breeding Dogs

Tiny Dogs

How Best to Educate a Dog

Cat Vandalism

Cat Tracker

Sleeping Dogs

Feral Cats and Stray Cats

Death of a Dog

Part Four: Wild Animals

Bears

The Dog We Love to Hate

Great White Sharks

Feeding Deer

The Lion

Hyraxes

Christmas Ermine

One Mouse

Pink Dolphins

Happy Rats: Playful, Ticklish, Optimistic

Part Five: Tiny Animals

Slugs

Worms: Lowly and Exalted

Amphibians

Bumble, Bee Happy, Bee Smart, Bee Safe!

Water Bears

Part Six: Animal Abilities

Abandoned Acrobats

What’s in a Name?

In the Snow

Music for Animals

Animals Who Imbibe

Do Animals Dream?

Window to the Wild

Different Information

Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?

Octopus: The MENSA Mollusk

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

Foreword

Outside of gothic works of fiction set in Transylvania, we rarely read of enduring friendships that have been initiated by a bite. But that is exactly how nature writers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—the two extraordinary, quirky, and iconoclastic women whose essays are collected here—formed their attachment to one another.

Liz and Sy met more than thirty years ago, within months if not weeks of Sy moving to New Hampshire, just minutes away from Liz. Sy was a journalist, writing often about wildlife and soon to embark on her first book, on great apes and the women who studied them. Liz had written classic accounts of life among the San (or Bushmen) hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert as well as novels set in Paleolithic times. As a keen observer of animals, she had also been helping researcher Katy Payne study elephant bioacoustics. So when Sy’s husband, author Howard Mansfield, saw an article about Liz in a local newspaper, he urged Sy to get in touch and, before long, Sy was interviewing Liz about the emerging knowledge of how elephants communicate.

As soon as Sy and Liz sat down together, the two women, who still live in neighboring towns, found common ground talking about the natural world. The discussion that day might have begun with elephants, but it inevitably moved on to lots of other species, including ferrets—Sy’s pet ferrets to be exact. Liz wanted to meet them in person. Sy, eager to oblige, escorted Liz to her house, though she worried that the timing wasn’t optimal. Sy was just back from six months in Australia, and the pet sitter had turned out to be allergic to ferrets. That meant they weren’t very used to being handled. Sure enough, one of the animals did, in fact, sink his pointy teeth into Liz. Sy apologized and started to explain, but she found her defense was completely unnecessary. Liz said—emphatically—that she didn’t mind at all. "She really didn’t mind being bitten by a weasel, Sy says. And that’s when it hit her. I knew we were soul mates."

Since that day in New Hampshire, Liz and Sy have traveled together to Costa Rica, where they mist netted bats with Bat Conservation International; to Maine, where they followed moose cows and calves on foot in the woods; and most recently to Tanzania, to track the wildebeest migration with another illustrious neighbor of theirs, ungulate expert Richard Estes. Liz and Sy are in each other’s lives and in each other’s thoughts. Ipso facto, the prolific writers are in each other’s books. Sy has a cameo appearance in Liz’s game-changing bestseller The Hidden Life of Dogs—as the two happily forgo souvenir hunting in the capital of Costa Rica in order to track a female dog in heat. Liz is a hero in Sy’s The Good Good Pig, when she figures out how to best comfort Sy’s distraught and ailing dog Tess during one of Sy’s absences, bringing an old barn coat belonging to Sy for the dog to cuddle up with. "I think I’ve quoted or included a scene with Liz in almost every book I’ve written for adults since we met, and she’s mentioned me in every nonfiction book she’s written since The Harmless People and Warrior Herdsmen. We read and critique each other’s drafts, and we talk almost every day."

The essays here are mostly collected and adapted from their joint column in the Boston Globe, the newspaper that brought me together with these remarkable women. It’s where I worked as an editor and writer starting in the late 1980s, when Sy was a regular contributor to our Science section. And it was for my own column there, Animal Beat, that I interviewed Liz several times. When I discovered somewhere along the way that they were friends, I wanted in. Lucky for me, inclusion comes naturally to them. In fact, it is a hallmark of their work and lives. They’ve always rejected any kind of reflexive exclusion, scientific or personal. Sweet as they are, there’s a real saltiness to their skepticism. They are, one might say, the kettle corn of nature writers.

And their concept of inclusion is pretty darn inclusive—stretching across life-forms. Both Liz and Sy are iconoclasts writing with rare insight and nuance about the many ways we humans have attempted to separate ourselves from nonhuman animals—in our language, in our taxonomies, and in our expectations. The two have rigorously poked holes in some widely held but flawed assumptions about human superiority, and they often do it with humor. When I first interviewed Liz in 1993, we talked about the stealthy power of language to reinforce old notions of other. Why is it that we humans experience love but allow nonhuman animals only pair bonds? How can a dog giving birth to puppies be an it, but a woman with a baby is a she? Some readers had objected to the fact that Liz referred to the relationship between two of her huskies, who were devoted to one another, as a marriage.

Liz was a pioneer. Excluding miracles, she told me at the time, consciousness is something we acquired through our long mammalian past.

Are we the only creatures to think and love and feel? I asked her.

She scoffed. As she had written in The Hidden Life of Dogs, then just released, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value. In other words, being able to learn means being able to deal with life’s variables more effectively. Then as now, Thomas insists that it is sheer arrogance for humans to assume we are the only mammals to have developed consciousness; the only mammals to love; the only mammals to feel empathy; the only mammals to possess morals.

Was she out of bounds with these thoughts, I prodded. She had one reply to those who would say so: Fiddle-dee-dee.

In this same talk with Liz, I asked her about the great ripples of controversy her rather slim book had set in motion. Well, she said, flashing that huge smile I love so dearly, I didn’t write the book to be artistic, I wrote it to be Messianic!

Sy shares this worldview that questions a human-centric sense of superiority. She’s expressed it often in writing and in person. In a conversation I once recorded with her, I asked her about it. She, too, spoke of evolution and the fact that we humans owe our emotions and morality to our fellow animals. Limiting our friendships only to other humans is as absurd as insisting on a poor diet made up of only one item, she declared: The idea that we’re only supposed to have friendships with one species among the thousands and thousands . . . that’s crazy. If somebody said, ‘I only eat one food. I eat nothing but nachos. I never eat anything else.’ It’d be crazy!

Well, those nachos bring us back to that long-ago bite of the weasel. Liz wasn’t being generous when she shrugged off the incident. It’s just that she understood. She saw the incident from the perspective of that other being. And the understanding Sy and Liz bring to their love of fellow creatures includes a deep and kind understanding of fellow humans. I can testify. And it is that unique understanding that shows up in the essays collected in Tamed and Untamed.

In their writing and in their lives and in their remarkable friendship, Liz and Sy break down false barriers and carry us closer to our fellow creatures. They help us see the connections. It reminds me of something Helen Macdonald said in her beautiful book H Is for Hawk: Wild things are made from human histories. If that’s the case, how lucky we are to read the work collected here, to let the braided essays of Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas help move us closer to being better humans—by making wild things what they should be: our soul mates.

—Vicki Constantine Croke

Part One

Animals and People

At the delightfully retro