THE OLD MAN AND THE CHIMPANZEE
Fear, anger, joy. Surprise, sadness, love. Any emotion a human can feel, animals can feel too.
So says Frans de Waal, one of the world’s top experts on chimpanzees. His TEDMED talk, The Surprising Science of Alpha Males, has racked up more than two million views.
De Waal is now making the rounds talking about his new book, Mama’s Last Hug. As he explains to a standing-room-only crowd in New York, Mama was the alpha female of her chimpanzee colony for an impressive twelve years. Even when she was sick and heartbreakingly frail, right up until her death from old age at fifty-nine, she was the heart and soul of the colony. True, she was no match physically for the dominant males. But then, she didn’t have to be.
It was Mama, rather than the alpha males who came and went during her long tenure, who really ran the colony, de Waal says. She was its moral center, the point on which it turned. Since her death, it has fallen into strife and disorganization, as the new alpha female just doesn’t have what Mama had.
For the better part of an hour, de Waal presents video after video of animals displaying emotions that some experts would deny they have: disgust, for instance, and a sense of humor. Finally, he shows a video that opens with what appears to be, at first glance, an old shaggy carpet thrown any which way on the ground.
This, he says, is Mama. Nearing the end of her life, she’s curled up in a fetal position on a fluffy bed of what looks like clean, shredded paper. Patches of bare skin shine through the thinning fur on her emaciated frame.
The door of Mama’s enclosure opens, and a man enters. He is, de Waal tells us, eighty-year-old Dutch biologist Jan van Hooff, a co-founder of the chimpanzee colony where Mama has lived since 1972.
“You never go into an enclosure with an adult chimpanzee!” de Waal suddenly exclaims. “Never!” They’re so unbelievably strong that no human would have a chance against them. So you don’t go in.
But Mama was dying. And besides, “Van Hooff had known her for more than forty years,” de Waal says, as if speaking of two humans. Looking around the lecture room, I realize that that was before many of de Waal’s listeners were born.
I said earlier that de Waal’s TEDMED talk has generated more than two million views. The video he’s now showing has garnered more than ten million. Because, you see, it’s a love story.
At first, we see van Hooff only from the side: a tall man wearing eyeglasses and a maroon windbreaker. Softly, he strokes Mama’s bony arm, and holds a morsel to her lips. Staring empty-eyed at nothing, she makes only the smallest movement of her head to reject the food. Then, looking up at last, she sees who it is.
What happens next causes gasps throughout the room. Her emaciated, lethargic face bursts into a glowing smile as she struggles to lift herself onto an elbow and gently reaches out a bony arm. “Ya, ya, ya,” von Hooff croons to her. “Shoo, shoo, shoo.” Taking off his eyeglasses, he bows his head to let her stroke his face and run her fingers through his thick white hair. As she wraps her arm around him, he bends down to lay his head on her bony shoulder. They embrace. He turns to say something to the camera operator, and for the first time we see how deeply wrinkled his face is.
The video ends as Mama, her energy spent, relaxes back into her fetal curl. Von Hooff, visibly reluctant to leave, goes on stroking her. She died a few days later.
“We can’t prove that animals experience emotions the same as we do,” de Waal says at the end of his lecture. True, we can see how they display emotion, but not what he calls “the feeling state.” So even if you and your dog are both acting scared, it’s possible that your internal experience of fear is different from the dog’s. “We cannot prove that they feel as we do,” de Waal repeats. Perhaps I’m wrong, but something in his voice seems to suggest that under his careful scientific language — he thinks they do. Frozen on the screen behind him, an old man bends over his dying friend as they say their last goodbye.
