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When people ask me if cats are smarter than dogs, I always say, “Well, cats do what they have to do to be card-carrying cats, and dogs do what they have to do to be card-carrying dogs.” Sometimes, if people see chimpanzees do something that birds can’t do, people will say, “See, chimpanzees are smarter than birds,” but it turns out that birds can do a lot of things that chimpanzees can’t do. No one says, “Oh, you see birds are smarter than chimpanzees.” As a biologist, I think comparative questions can be misleading.
With respect to morality, though, I believe that there are no animals who have been or who are as evil as humans. I know people will cite Jane Goodall’s observations, that over two years she saw six male chimpanzees systematically chase down and kill six others, but that was only one observation in what is now 50 years of study. And people will say, “What about predators?” A wolf killing a deer or elk or a lion killing a gazelle really isn’t about being bad or immoral—that’s the way they live, and while I wish that the world didn’t evolve into predators and prey, it did. I don’t think that predators are evil.
It’s very rare to see surplus-killing. People ask, “What about the foxes who invade chicken houses?” My reply: “What about the innumerable foxes who haven’t?” You will sometimes see the “scapegoat animal”—an individual who others pick on without any obvious reason—in a pack of wolves or pack of coyotes or even at a dog park. But once again, they’re extremely rare. One of the points I make in the book Wild Justice is that really concentrating on the evil or the immoral removes us from all that is good.
In my book, The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons For Expanding Our Compassion Footprint, I follow the lead of the University of California, Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, who wrote a good and popular book, Born to Be Good. The argument: Not only are human animals born to be good, but other animals are also, and when we view the literature, it turns out that for all the studies that have been done across primates and other animals, more than 90 percent of their behavior is what we call “prosocial” or positive. What I and others like Frans de Waal are arguing is that animals do compete with one another, and they can do nasty things, but when we look at the data, it’s not nature red in tooth and claw; there’s a lot of empathy and compassion both within and between species.
Humans are basically big-brained, self-centered, and rather arrogant mammals, and we are pervasive. We’re ubiquitous; we’re all over the place. We’ve evolved a brain that allows us to do some of the horrendous things that we do, but also some of the wonderful things that we do. A wolf pack in Wyoming doesn’t have the ability to attack a wolf pack in, say, Utah. I don’t mean that facetiously. I think our mobility, our large brains, and technological “advances,” the fact that there’s far too many of us and we overconsume, and the fact that we live in very dense populations bring out the negative behavior.
Wild animals just don’t have the luxury and the time for being nasty. There’s a high price for being injured in “hand-to-hand” combat for wolves, whereas there’s no high probability of injury if I’m in America and I launch a rocket aimed at a distant foreign country.
Are there animals who are more moral than humans? I suppose if you cast it out in terms of things like invading other animal nations or other territories, animals don’t do that with the frequency or with the vigor that humans do. I’m still not sure that I want to say that they’re more moral; I want to sometimes just say, that’s part of how they live and who they are. The percentages of behavior will show that humans and nonhuman animals are rather cooperative and empathic, but you don’t find mass warfare in animals as you do in humans—I suppose, if you want to cast it that way, you could say animals are more moral.
