Weak in comparison to dr.., p.7
Weak in Comparison to Dreams, page 7
“3. Pacing. This I saw in a tiger and a lion. The animal walks back and forth near one wall of its cage, like a businessman pondering a risky venture. It appears that if the animal was free, it would continue to walk in a perfectly straight line, like a falling star, indifferent to cliffs, rivers, or other natural impediments, impelled by its nature to trace a perfect line.”
“4. Figure eights. This is when the animal runs in figure eights. I have seen this in hyenas, jackals, dingoes, and wolves in the ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes and also in the Amsterdam Zoological Garden. The animals resemble ice skaters who compete to trace perfect figure eights. The animals do this for longer than I have patience to watch.
“5. Weaving. This is a peculiar kind of walking. The animal follows the path of a sine wave. Sometimes this is done in an irregular or drunken manner. Often the animal moves very quickly. The animal’s head may swing from side to side as it moves, as if it is hunting for mice or other small prey. This I have seen in a wolf. The motion resembles a skilled waiter walking between tables in a crowded restaurant.
“Those who maintain that animals share many traits of their inner or imaginative lives with humans are not wrong. I passed the better part of two weeks in these observations, and it was a delight to see these animals so occupied with their interests and concerns, whatever they might be.”
The next paper was by someone named Monika Woodapple. It was Xeroxed from the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, volume 2, 1939. Apparently Woodapple was not a scientist, because she didn’t list her institution or her degrees. There was an editorial note that her essay had been received on April 20, 1938, postmarked from Bern, Switzerland. She thanked some very professional-sounding people: a Professor Dr. J. A. Barend de Hühl, director of the Zoological Garden of Berlin and founder of the Animal Psychology Laboratory in Bern, and Mr. Inspector A. F. J. Portielje, Director of the Zoological Gardens in Amsterdam.
The first thing, Woodapple began, is to determine the animal’s “flight distance,” which is the nearest you can get before it will panic and run. Most zoo enclosures are narrower than an animal’s flight distance, which means the animal is in a perpetual state of panic. “It is important to know the flight distance,” she wrote, “if we are to understand how animals behave in cages. I illustrate this with a diagram of a fox cage, seen from above. The cage is wire mesh on three sides, and in back there is a door, labeled tk, which is kept closed.”
“Say that an observer stands at the point labeled a at the upper right and looks at the fox. The fox will retreat to the far end, labeled with the number 1. It will run madly back and forth along that side of the cage. Its fear will be palpable.
“Then say the observer goes around to where the fox is, and stands at point b. The fox will run to the closed door and go back and forth along line 2.
“Now say a second observer arrives and stands at point a, while the first observer moves to the left until he stands at point c. Then the fox runs along the diagonal line marked 4.
“Now say a third observer arrives and stands at point b. In that case the fox will move to point x and remain frozen in place. This behavior is because the flight distance is greater than the length of the cage. There is no place where the fox can be calm.
“The fox sits at point x and looks fearfully back and forth at the three observers. Let us call this flight in place. The animal wishes to run. Each observer frightens it, but it has nowhere to go. Forces impinge on it from all sides. Flight in place is a crushing fear that results in no movement whatsoever. If we look closely, we observe the animal is not actually sitting still. It is in motion, because all its muscles are working at once. It shakes and trembles, but it does not move.
“Let us now return to the initial case. A single observer stands at point a, and the fox runs back and forth along the line number 1. At the end of each brief run it will turn as rapidly as it can and run back along the same straight line. Its path, seen from above, will describe a straight line segment.
“Now say the observer steps back one meter. The fox will continue to run, but less frantically. Its path will no longer be a line segment but a segment with a small loop at each end, resembling the cotton swabs that are used to clean the ears of infants, or the batons, padded at each end, which are thrown by twirlers in parades.
“Now say the observer steps back two meters. The fox relaxes, and the turns at each end of the segment will open out into larger loops. The straight line segment between them will diminish, and the loops will meet. Voilà, the stereotypical figure eight is born. This may be observed in many animals. I am, as far as I know, the discoverer of this figure-eight repetitive path.”
A few pages later there was a dark black and white photograph of an animal’s pen, with bare trees and fences. It looked like the photo had been taken from the roof. It was a frigid morning, or perhaps an evening, and the zoo appeared to be deserted. The photo was captioned “Hyena paths in the snow, October 1937, Berlin.”
“This photograph,” Woodapple wrote, “shows portions of figure-eight repetitive paths produced by a male hyena. The photograph shows the farther loops. The nearer loops, closer to the animal’s bedding station, are not visible.”
Then there was a diagram of the hyena’s pen.
“This diagram depicts the hyena’s enclosure, and the paths that it chose during the second week of October, 1937. The principal figure-eight repetitive path is on the right. It consists of two loops. The outer loop is larger on account of the segmental form of this animal’s cage. A trapezoidal cage will result in larger loops at the wider end. If the cage is rectangular, and there no obstacles, the path will tend toward a perfect figure eight.
“The hyena completed a circuit of this figure-eight repetitive path in an average of sixteen seconds. It woke and began pacing between five-thirty and six-fifteen in the morning, and continued for an average of seven hours each day, until feeding time. For the first five hours, the hyena completed each circuit of its path in exactly twenty seconds, plus or minus a fraction of a second. After five hours, as feeding time approached, the hyena ran, completing a circuit in as little as seven seconds. Occasionally it took the alternative paths indicated by interrupted lines, but it quickly returned to the principal path.”
I ran my eyes over the diagram. Out from the inner cage, winding between the trees to where people would be, then back, hugging the fence. Out then back. Hour after hour. In the photo there were no tracks at the far end of its pen. It never went there, and why should it? There wasn’t anything to discover. The point was just to remain in motion. Its path was the shape of its unhappiness.
Under the heading EXPLANATION, Woodapple wrote “my studies indicate these figure-eight repetitive paths are not related to mental states. The hyena ran at the constant pace of twenty seconds per lap for an average of five hours per day before it sped up in anticipation of its dinner. During the five hours of constant pacing, the hyena required thirty-three strides (of four steps each) to complete the circuit. In approximately eighty percent of those figure-eight circuits, the hyena took exactly thirty-three strides, and it never took more than thirty-six nor fewer than thirty-two. The constant speed and gait indicate the hyena’s motion was dictated by the dimensions of its cage, obstacles such as trees, and its flight distance, and not by any psychological factor such as boredom or unhappiness, because such mental states are incompatible with constancy of movement.”
The paper then concluded with a NOTE ON METHODS: “In the autumn and winter of 1937, I spent a total of 210 hours of observation time in the Berlin Zoo, gathering the data for this study. My field materials included a folding chair, plans of the animals’ cages, pencils and notebook, stopwatch, pocket watch, hand and foot warmers, and a pair of opera glasses. In inclement weather I covered myself in a felt blanket. I do not believe my presence or appearance influenced the behavior of the animals because I remained well back from the edges of the roofs, and as far as possible I remained motionless for many hours at a time. In the case of the hyenas and dingo, I arrived before the animals were released from their pens to the open enclosures, so they were accustomed to the presence of my silhouette and seldom looked at me. Children pointed at me, but I did not move or answer. I thank the curators and staff of the Zoological Garden of Berlin for graciously providing me with access, and also for giving me Gestetner copies of the floor plans of the cages. The diagrams in this paper were drawn by Wolfram Pichler, Potsdam Observatory.”
I stopped at the name, Wolfram Pichler, and felt a shock of recognition. My mother had studied in Potsdam in the mid 1950s, not that long after Monika Woodapple wrote her essay. Tee and I had found a packet of letters signed Wolfram Pichler on our mother’s nightstand after she died. At the time, we decided they were private, and we threw them out. Whoever he was to her, he was part of her life that she never intended to share with us. When she was in Potsdam, she would have been about twenty. Wolfram and Monika would have been twenty years older, maybe less.
I pictured Monika getting up before dawn in her one-room apartment somewhere in the city, in the winter, and making her way to the zoo. The early morning trams would have been nearly empty. A watchman must have let her in. Then walking through the zoo, still in the dark, and up onto the roof of the hyena enclosure. Sitting there as the sun rose and the hyena was released to its outdoor pen.
Then all day in silence. The keeper who came by and threw in the horsemeat probably didn’t even glance up and wave hello. She’d sit in her folding chair as the sun made its way around behind the trees, until the zoo closed again. Then she’d make her way home, or perhaps to a café to see Wolfram.
Either she was independently wealthy or so poor she had time to spare. Meanwhile Berlin was gearing up for war. Perhaps she just couldn’t bear the noise, the violence. Things were especially bad in the years she observed that hyena. A month after she sent her letter to the editor, Germany and the Soviet Union sent their armies into Poland.
A second essay followed. It was titled “Obsessive Fixation in a Dingo.” There was the same photo, this time with a second one taken from another angle.
This photo was brighter, but it may have been the same shadowless winter day. There were spruce trees on both sides. The hyena’s paths seemed to be the same. Again there were no animals or people.
“The Berlin zoo,” she wrote, “keeps a dingo in the cage next to its hyena cage. The dingo enclosure is on the right in the photographs. The dingo was fascinated by the hyena. It spent all day pacing up and down the fence that separated it from the hyena. The dingo made a mud path. It can be seen in the second photograph. Its flank brushed against the wire mesh. The dingo required between four and a half and five seconds to walk out, and the same amount of time to return. It made no difference if the hyena was present. There was no variation, on any day I observed it, until an hour before feeding time.
“The dingo provides an example of fear-induced fixation. In an environment full of fear, an animal can become attracted to just one thing. That thing becomes precious to it. Like an infant with its blanket or a little girl with her doll, the dingo tried to stay as close to the hyena as possible. The hyena ignored the dingo. Although it was difficult to determine, I believe the hyena seldom glanced at the dingo even when the two animals were less than a meter apart. The hyena maintained its figure-eight repetitive path, as I have documented in a previous essay.”
She provided a diagram of the dingo’s paths, showing how it preferred to stay close to the fence separating it from the hyena, labeled C. It doubled back as quickly as it could, following the loops at H and H. She observed from the roof T.
“This back-and-forth path marked H-H is characteristic of fear-induced fixation,” she wrote. “Along half of its length the figure eight is compressed into a single straight line.”
“In mid-February, 1938,” she continued, “the dingo began to pace over more of its enclosure, as shown by the interrupted lines. Its strict back-and-forth route relaxed into figure eights resembling the hyena’s figure eights. By February 21, 1938, the loops had enlarged so that the dingo was using approximately three-quarters of the area of its cage.
“My first conclusion was that the dingo had become acclimated to its enclosure, and its fear-induced fixation on the hyena had diminished. On further study it became apparent that the dingo’s figure eights did not represent relaxation. Comparing the two enclosures side by side, I conclude that the dingo was emulating the hyena. In the following diagram, the hyena cage is on the right, and the dingo cage is on the left. This is a composite of all the paths followed in a week beginning February 26, 1938. The two sets of paths are highly correlated, allowing for the different sizes of the animals, the different shapes of their enclosures, and the uneven distribution of saplings and trees, indicated by small and large circles.
“I propose that the dingo was trying to associate itself with the hyena by mimicking it, and possibly attempting to attract its attention. Such behavior is not unknown in the animal world in mating ‘dances.’ For example, the male magpie goose bows its head in imitation of the female, and the male blue-billed duck swims back and forth in imitation of the female. The dingo’s figure eights may be understood as an attempt to communicate with the hyena. It is also possible the dingo thought it was a hyena or wanted to be accepted as one.
“The dingo was focused entirely on the hyena. Yet the hyena’s behavior never altered. It paid no more attention to the dingo than to the saplings, the fences, or the zoo visitors. I call that kind of behavior blind pacing because the world has in effect vanished and the animal is only aware of its neuro-motoric calculus, i.e., its pacing.”
If I were that hyena, I thought, I’d hardly notice where I was. I wouldn’t see the parents and children beyond the fence, I wouldn’t care about the animals in the other cages. I’d keep my eyes on the trail, on my own paw prints in the cold mud. I’d follow my track like a streetcar on its rails. If I was the dingo, watching that hyena, I would be doubly heartbroken. Once for the hyena and again for myself.
A man came in from the deck and my left side was doused by chill air. He stood a moment with his back to me, looking out to sea. His bald head had a bump on it.
“I define the dingo’s behavior as telescopic pacing because the animal is focused, like a telescope, on a single object that stimulates its behavioral responses. Telescopic pacing and blind pacing are superficially similar, but are actually strongly opposed. In blind pacing (the hyena) the animal is impelled by the need to avoid obstacles while maintaining a constant high speed. Telescopic pacing (the dingo) is determined by the desire to mimic the object of fixation as perfectly as possible, and it requires constant attention both to the object of fixation (the hyena) and to potential obstacles.
“These distinctions may be useful for zoo managers. Blind pacing and telescopic pacing are abnormal. Neither exists in wild nature, except, significantly, in the mating ‘dances’ of certain animals. Both sorts of pacing are reductions of the animal’s behavioral palette to just one color. The animal is living at the edge of behavior. Each path is the animal’s solution to specific constraints: the fear of the environment (people), the physical limitations of the cage, and attraction to another animal.
“It is possible that these paths might be modeled by mathematical equations. There are several figure-eight curves in mathematics that fit the data I have observed. One figure-eight is called the Devil’s Curve. Its equation is as follows:
y2 (y2 - a2) = x2 (x2 - b2)
For
- 1 ≤ x ≤ 1.
The nearest fit to the hyena’s path is when a = 2 and b = 4.
“This ideal figure-eight is also called the Devil on Two Sticks, because there is an Italian children’s game called Diabolo, which uses two sticks and strings to manipulate a figure-eight toy. If animals who pace follow this curve, it means they are manipulated by forces outside the curve. This is compatible with telescopic pacing.
“There is also the lemniscate, a figure eight that has the beautiful equation
(x2 + y2) = a2 (x2 - y2)2
The product of the distances of any point on the curve from the points
(-a, 0) and (a, 0)
is a2. If animals that pace follow this curve, it means they instinctively manage their distance from two fixed points that they avoid, one in each of its loops. I leave this for others to explore.
“It has been suggested to me that the closest parallel in the natural world is the figure-eight pattern known as the analemma, a slender figure eight that is traced by the sun over the course of a year. On each day at noon, the sun occupies a slightly different place in the sky, and if all of its positions at noon are plotted on a sheet of paper, through all four seasons, they produce an analemma. It is possible, therefore, that the behavior of confined animals and the ‘behavior’ of celestial objects might be linked. I am not competent to explore this possibility, and I only record it here so that others might consider it.
“These studies were completed in December 1938. The author thanks the astronomer Wolfram Pichler, Potsdam University, for assistance with the mathematics and for preparing the diagrams.”
The article ended with a letter from the journal’s editor.
“We have received from our correspondent, Miss Monika Woodapple, August 24, 1939, postmarked Bern, Switzerland, the following addendum: ‘The next spring, the hyena died from infections following from a foot inflammation, and its pen was empty from March to June 1939. The dingo continued to pace in the form of the hyena’s figure eight paths. Its telescopic pacing continued even when the object of its mimicry was no longer present. It did not settle, and showed aversion to its keepers. On June 12, two African wild dogs were introduced into the empty hyena pen, but the dingo was indifferent to them. It continued its pacing until June 27, 1939, when it was transferred to a smaller concrete enclosure.’”
