ENHS Nature Trails March 2005 Article 3

Wolves and Man
by John Fentress

I suspect that many readers share my own childhood game of making animal images out of clouds. The fun was in comparing what we saw with what was reported (often to our surprise) by others. We learned an important lesson: Our perceptions and interpretations of nature reflect our relations to the outside world. In that sense, inner and outer worlds are never really separate. This applies not just to the arts and childhood games, but also the sciences. As scientists we measure our relations to the "objective" physical world. Our perceptions depend upon our measuring devices, what we choose to see, and our learned cognitive sets. No surprises here (I hope), but the implications are often ignored.

In recent years our wolf research group in Canada has had fun playing with this concept of perceptions. We showed standardized wolf videotapes to both "expert" and "novice" viewers, and simply asked what they saw. The responses differed by training and by individual predispositions. To cite one example, so-called expert responders tended to utilize both facial and body cues in deciding whether the observed events were friendly or aggressive; naive observers tended (to our surprise) to concentrate upon facial characteristics more or less independently of what "the rest of the wolf" was doing. Data for this were obtained by showing videos in which the animals' faces were or were not readily visible. It would be interesting to get chimerical wolf (or other animal) cartoons into the game. In earlier work we found that background music could alter reports that were supposed to be based upon visual cues alone. In some of our laboratory rodents we found most human observers felt that the animals were keeping time with background music via rhythmic movements, such as facial grooming. Remarkably, this occurred even when the same video clips were shown with different musical backgrounds. In some sense, then, the observers' ears were guiding interpretations of information that came in the eyes.

These are potentially amusing stories. They can be thought of as visual projective tests that nature gives us—better than inkblots! But, the observations also raise two interesting cautions. The first is that in fields such as animal behavior, it is more difficult than one might want to believe to be objective in one's observations, not to mention interpretations of behavior. A potentially disturbing correlate of this is that if we train observers to look at events in a certain way (grad school), the variations in reported perceptions are likely to shrink, but potentially so in an circumscribed way. Would observers trained differently also form a relatively cohesive, (so-called "objective") group, but one that varied from the first, also "objective"? The second thought that comes to mind is human prejudice. Individuals can select stories as well as observations to reinforce preconceptions. Wolves have long suffered that fate as have minority groups in our society. People as well as animals can be hurt when individuals/society delude themselves into a sense of false "objectivity"; intentionally directed, harm can follow.

Maybe we as both individuals and society don't really see the world as it is. Humans should develop a base of understanding that we are coparticipants in both nature and society. We could then change our perceptions, and our actions. We could see an elegance where before there was none. Then we could celebrate. Not a bad deal.

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