[book_info title=”Wildhood: The epic journey from adolescence to adulthood in humans and other animals ” author=”Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers” publisher=”Scribe”]
A king penguin. A spotted hyena. A north Atlantic humpback whale. A European wolf. What could these four animals possibly have in common? Could they be experiencing the same life events? After all, all animals are born and all of them die. We are all hungry sometimes, for food or a mate.
How far can we push this idea of a common experience? For some years, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, and Kathryn Bowers, an animal behaviourist and writer, have been looking for “horizontal identities” across species boundaries.
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They borrowed the term from Andrew Solomon’s 2012 book Far from the Tree, which contrasts vertical identities (between you, your parents and grandparents, say) with horizontal identities, which are “those among peers with whom you share similar attributes, but no family ties”. In their new book Wildhood, Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers have expanded Solomon’s concept to include other species. “We suggest that adolescents share a horizontal identity,” they write, “temporary membership in a planet-wide tribe of adolescents.”
The heroes of Wildhood – Ursula the penguin, Shrink the hyena, Salt the whale and Slavc the wolf – are all, loosely speaking, “teens”. Like teens everywhere, they have several mountains to climb at once. They must learn how to stay safe, how to navigate social hierarchies, how to communicate sexually and how to care for themselves. They need to become experienced, and for that they need to have experiences.
Well into the 1980s, researchers were discouraged from discussing the mental lives of animals. That changed largely thanks to the video camera. Suddenly it was possible for behavioural scientists to observe, not just closely, but repeatedly and in slow motion. Soon they were making discoveries that couldn’t possibly have been made with the naked eye.
An animal’s supposedly rote, mechanical behaviours turned out to be the product of learning, experiment and experience. Stereotyped calls and gestures were unpacked to reveal a kind of language, not in the human sense, but communication nonetheless, much of it of dizzying complexity. Animals that we thought were driven by instinct, turned out to be lively, engaged, conscious beings, scrabbling for purchase in a confusing and unpredictable world.
The four tales that make up the bulk of Wildhood are more than “just-so” stories. “Every detail,” the authors explain, “is based on and validated by data from GPS satellite or radio collar studies, peer-reviewed scientific literature, published reports and interviews with the investigators involved.”
Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers are right to look for ways in which animals are like us– after all, we share an evolutionary tree with them and a common environment, albeit one that each creature uses differently. And in Wildhood, the authors nail many similarities in a field that is becoming powerful and interesting – especially after all those years of dismissing behaviour that looked astonishingly like, well, ours.
But there are dangers of going too far. Despite solid evidence, with all those flavours of human-like behaviour identified in Wildhood, right now I baulk a little at using words like “adolescence” to create “horizontal identities” between humans and other animals. This is because, despite the similarities, the differences are still large, too. The danger of anthropomorphising the creatures around us is that we become less sensitive to the precise details of those differences.
That said, in the meantime we can at least recognise a little of ourselves in something the authors recount in the first couple of pages when we meet California sea otters, swimming up to sharks one moment then fleeing from a plastic boat the next. Which of us could help but recognise, in the animals’ overly bold and overly cautious behaviour, the gawkiness and tremor of their own adolescence?
