Review: Becoming Wild, by Carl Safina (Updated)

Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace

By Carl Safina

Henry Holt, 2020, 384 pp (hardcover)

Dr. Safina throws out a challenge to our thinking with just the title: Animal cultures? Creating beauty? Achieving peace? They’re wild animals!

Yes, they are, but they are far more complex than we used to think, and the reader will learn a lot on these topics and others in this fascinating follow-up to Beyond Words. The book tells of Safina’s travels and observations of three species, with asides about many more, and offers information and speculation on what ties their societies together.

At the core of Safina’s ideas is animal culture. We all know that many animals learn by watching their parents. Safina documents that this is not always a simple “monkey see, monkey do” process.  Adults often spend a great deal of time tutoring the young, and the sum of what goes on here, as each population passes down (or changes) its ways over generations, is culture. Chimps in one territory crack nuts a certain way: chimps a mile away do it differently, and both pass down their own approaches. Chimps (the biggest section on specific animals is devoted to chimps) have different social structures, too: in some the aggression of the alpha male, his acolytes, and his rivals creates tension that can explode into bloody fights and straight-up murder.  In other populations, the female hierarchy is more important, and internal fighting is less common.   In all populations, Safina learns to his own surprise, a lot of time is spent in behavior that promotes peace and moving on from spats. Why do differences exist within the same species, with the same genes, in adjoining territories? Culture.

Culture requires a body of knowledge and behavior that must be taught and the intelligence to teach/learn it. The sperm whales, chimps, and scarlet macaws of this book display self-awareness, affection toward some individuals and indifference/hostility to others, and do many “human” things (chimps even have human-like wars, although that hasn’t driven the invention of complex weapons, so good for them).   As Cicero put it two thousand years ago, “What an ugly beast is the ape, and how like us.”

Safina spends time with three examples.

Sperm whales: The most surprising item, for me, (and I’m decently well-read on sperm whales) was the breadth and intricacy of sperm whale society. Recent and rapidly-developing knowledge shows pods not related by blood are connected by clan ties that span oceans and include different behaviors than other clans.  A “coda” sent by a whale on interspecies acoustic transmissions is like the header on an internet data packet, in this case identifying the sender’s “name” and clan.   Sperm whales’ language is complex, evolving, and makes it easy for whales and humans who’ve listened long enough to identify individual voices. What, Safina wonders, did they say when whaling ships arrived and started harpooning them?

Scarlet macaws: For anyone (like myself) who hasn’t been studying birds, the richness of these South American birds’ individual lives and personalities is startling.   The differences extend to group matters such as using particular salt-rich clay sources in different ways for no apparent reason. Like whales and chimps, macaws have distinct dialects. While their “spoken” communications are not as sophisticated as the whales’, they and the chimps can gesture with bodies, limbs, and heads in ways whales can only do when they are close together. 

Safina makes his most interesting leap of all from watching these birds. He thinks they don’t develop flashy colors just to be noticed by the opposite sex: it goes deeper, to the point where they appreciate beauty much as we do.  Beauty, he believes, can drive behavior and even speciation. 

This takes some thought. It’s a fascinating idea, and I wish he had explored a bit further (if sufficient knowledge yet exists to do that) how far this idea of beauty reaches. Birds may find beauty in their own species and in their elaborate dances, songs, and bowers, but are we the only ones finding beauty in the rainforest dawn and the symphony of animal sounds, to mention two examples Safina uses, or do, say, elephants notice it too?  Ray Bradbury wrote a poem (yes, he was a poet, at times a superb one) about how animals may notice or navigate by stars, but they don’t see the beauty and promise  “of looking at those fires / our soul admires.”   He concludes “we’re first, the only ones / whom God has honored with his rise of suns.”  Too anthropocentric, or spot on?  And can what animals may find beautiful really differentiate them to the point of speciation? The answers are elusive, but credit Safina for opening the door.

Third come the chimps.  One more note on them: they can take cultural teaching to a quite unnerving level.  Captive chimps teach each other the wholly unnatural learned behavior of sign language.  The original chimp champion of sign language, Washoe, was seen teaching how to ask for a treat, not just by demonstrating, but by grasping a younger chimp’s hand and moving his fingers into the correct position, repeating this until she was satisfied he’d gotten it.      

Safina closes, as he always does (and must, really), with the point that a lot of this intelligent, cultural, learned behavior and the body of knowledge involved is going to vanish along with the animals that knew it.  (To add a thought of my own, imagine a future where signing is the primary chimp language because the only survivors are captives.) We are still learning how much we affect the environment. While people knew human-created noise could bother and hurt whales, for instance, we didn’t know until recently what it did to their sound-dependent culture. Safina ends by mentioning one human distinction: only we can ask what’s ahead for the planet, and only we can decide on the answers.

Safina’s written a beautiful and important book. I haven’t mentioned, because the details are so interesting, how lively his language is: you don’t need to be a biologist to appreciate the way macaws appear “like dancing flames.”  The reader departs the book with, not only knowledge, but impressions, the kind that linger in our brains and are harder to create and convey that “Chimp A did X.” 

I was left with two questions. One, described above, is about beauty. The other is whether the author may be taking some speculation too far, misinterpreting instinctive behavior (whatever that term really means) for cultural learning.  I sometimes felt he was getting into fuzzy territory. Does a chimp teaching a juvenile how to crack nuts actually form the thought, "This is important and he needs this for survival, so I will do it," or does she do it with no conscious idea why?  Safina does note, especially with the sperm whales, that there’s a lot we don’t know about what he called in the subtitle of Beyond Words “how animals think and feel.”

Read this book. Give it to friends. Give it to your kids, if they’re old enough. It’s that compelling.

If you want to know more or donate to The Safina Center, see https://www.safinacenter.org/

UPDATE: I asked Dr. Safina about my question of whether animals were making conscious decisions to teach the young or just acting out of habit or instinct without thinking it over.  His response: "The answer to the question about teaching is, when they show a youngster what to do (something they don't always do), no explanation fits except that they do it in the spirit of helping. I don't think they think "It's important to survival." Culture is the answer to the question: "How do we live here, where we happen to live?" It doesn't need to be more or less than that."