Nature Notes: Tender Loving Care
A recent study published in The New York Times observed that the female and male humans’ brains were identical in anatomy, yet males and females are so different behaviorally and physiologically in so many ways. How is it possible the brains are the same?
It has to do with hormones, namely, progesterone, but also other vital factors.
One thing that differentiates females from males in almost all mammalian species is that females look after the young from birth until they are weaned and then some. In the marsupial mammals, such as the opossum and kangaroo, females have pouches on the front of their abdomen where newborns nurse and reside until they are ready to ambulate on their own.
In birds, with few exceptions, it is the female that incubates the eggs. The phalaropes that breed on the tundra are one exception — males do most of the incubating. Another is the piping plover, which breeds locally; males will spell the females off and on. When it comes to feeding young, in the majority of species both males and females take part. Males, however, compensate for non-incubation by bringing food to the incubating female.
Even in some reptiles, for example the crocodile, the female exhibits motherly care. She hangs around and watches the nest where she has buried the eggs and often helps the young out and into the water during hatching. Male sticklebacks guard the young in their nests, while male seahorses raise seahorse young in their marsupiums, or pouches.
Now that more women are in the work force between 9 a.m. and 5, there are an increasing number of men who stay home and care for the children. But in most species of vertebrates, it is the female who provides the bulk of infant care.
In matriarchal mammalian cultures, as in elephants and whales, the females lead the pack, i.e., they collectively care for the young. If an elephant mother is hurt or shot or otherwise incapacitated, an elephant aunt will take over the nurturing and protective duties.
As a young boy, if I woke up in the night from a bad dream, my mother was there beside me in an instant. I always wondered why my mother worried so much as I and my siblings grew up. Later, I discovered that my wife was equally inclined to worry and still is, even though her son and stepson and stepdaughter are long matured and two of them have children of their own.
It’s part of being a human. But now it turns out, as we probe further and further into the secret lives of wild animals without being able to converse with them audibly, that practically all female mammals and birds are in a perpetual 24/7-care state of mind even after their young have grown to maturity. The female deer, or does, that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation would have us selectively cull along with their fawns, are just as caring as your mothers were when you were growing up. They are rarely far from their young. So it is with many mammals and birds.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo supports the D.E.C.’s position on eliminating mute swans. Have you ever witnessed a mother or father more dedicated to protecting their young while simultaneously teaching them the facts of life? The adult swans even go so far as to swim while carrying the babies on their backs when in danger from, say, snapping turtles lurking below the surface.
Scientists were always after us college students in wildlife biology to not be anthropomorphic and to maintain a strictly objective view when studying mammals, birds, and the rest. Then ethologists and animal behaviorists came along and, lo and behold, told us that these subhuman creatures weren’t so different from us in many respects. Although they still preached objectivity, they often treated their objects of scholarship anthropomorphically, something that the Humane Society and, later, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals knew from the beginning: Treat animals with the same respect that you would treat your fellow humans.
In grade school all of my teaches were women. Practically every kindergarten teacher in these times is female. Grade school and kindergarten teachers are filling the ranks of elementary levels not because it’s the only job they can get; they, themselves, are natural-born teachers. The education courses they took in college are extra. What they do with their children at home they do with the pupils in school.
It turns out that many autistic children who have a hard time relating to their human peers, relate on a one-to-one, almost instantaneous basis with chickens, goats, sheep, ducks, and other poultry and livestock. Little by little we are learning, but at what a cost to humanity and wildlife?
Tender loving care is what the nurses call it. The question is: When will we all learn to practice it?
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Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].