The Better to Eat You With

The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World
by Joel Berger

Joel Berger knows that most humans consider nature the way Alfred Lord Tennyson described it: “red in tooth and claw.” That is, we think all nature is made-for-TV nature – brimming with bloody combat, predator and prey acting out predetermined parts. But nature is more nuanced than that, Berger shows. In fact, it might even contain full-fledged animal cultures.

As Berger explains, predator and prey relationships aren’t entirely innate. Hunt and flight can be taught and forgotten, depending on changes in species populations and environment. (Humans and human civilization might be one of the biggest factors in spurring such change.) Naturalists from Charles Darwin to Teddy Roosevelt observed an absolute lack of fear of humans in animals who had never crossed paths with us. Caribou in frozen northern Norway are fat and content, having never met a wolf. Moose in Wyoming don’t respond to the smell of bear dung – which Berger packed into snowballs and threw 40 yards, though he claims to be “no Roger Clemens.” But moose in Alaska flee from the scent.

Berger’s goal here is to understand how animals learn to fear each other, and whether fearless animals can survive an encounter with a carnivore species, or whether they’ll go extinct. He asks if fear varies geographically within the same species, and how long an animal species keeps a memory of past predation. Those are key questions when considering human decisions on ecosystems, particularly the reintroduction of long-gone predators into nature. Perhaps less practical but no less intriguing a question is whether the way fear is transmitted between animals – and the diverse responses they develop – constitutes a full-fledged “culture.”

The pursuit of the answers takes Berger to freezing cold climates in deep Canada and Alaska, Siberia and Mongolia, and to the warmer places too, in the American Midwest, Africa, and Argentina. Between field study notes, Berger offers historical descriptions of landscapes through the ages – when, for instance, North America was a lot like Africa, packed with ecological diversity. He pauses philosophically to discuss culture and fear in brief epigrams (“fear spellbinds”). He also catalogs his travel adventures, like shaky plane rides, a moose suit that got him in News of the Weird, and charmingly typical fellow field biologists – sturdy scientists with a fondness for adventure and vodka. Berger doesn’t skimp on discussing his own sense of fear when facing bear-eating tigers and stern immigration officials in Russia, falling through ice into freezing water, nearly catching frostbite, or eating mystery foods in new lands.

He comes close to answering his questions – finding that animals tend to relearn fear in a generation, and that much behavior is transmitted from mothers to children – but they aren’t fully resolved. But Berger does capture the vast complexity of nature, recalling a time when all lands were home to a “spectacular diversity” of animals of which humans were a part, intimately knowing wild beasts the way we know our pet puppies today, and acknowledging how alike all animals are because we fear.

Excerpt: “How fast do animals acquire information about predators? Do cultures of fear exist, and if so, for how long? Do young imitate the behavior of their parents, or that of group members? If sociality promotes learning, then how do solitary species like moose acquire information – merely through trial and error? Indeed, what is culture? Among people, variation occurs geographically…. Chance factors also affect how behavior develops. That only some, but not all, macaques learned to wash potatoes is no different than some cowboys who learn to play horseshoe or football.”

Further Reading: Hunter and Hunted: Relationships between Carnivores and People and Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone


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