Animal Families and Fatherhood with Jeffrey Masson by Celeste Adams

In his book The Emperor's Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood, Jeffrey Masson describes the vast and stunning diversity of paternal behavior among different species of animals. He explains why albatross, petrels, geese, swans, barn owls, and Adelie penguins make good fathers, while other animals like lions, langurs, and bears do not.

We can learn to be less like bears, lions, male elephants, and Hanuman langurs, and more like penguins and mallee fowl, wolves and foxes, beavers and sea horses, marmosets and tamarins, prairie dogs, and tropical frogs. For these fathers, parenting is a profound, all-encompassing experience that involves the entire being. These animals demonstrate the fact that for some species there is nothing, after all, that could be more real than being a father.

Adams: What do we mean when we say we have a good father?

Masson: We mean that he was there and was tolerant. Wolves are so tolerant of their cubs. No animal punishes an infant so that it is hurt, and that is something for us to learn as well.

Adams: What animals do you consider to be excellent fathers?

Masson: The Emperor penguin of course, but wolves also make very good fathers. That was somewhat of a surprise to me. They're very tolerant and amazingly playful with their young. They let them do just about anything with them.

Another hero of mine, just because they are so odd and unusual, is the seahorse. The male seahorse actually gets pregnant and gives birth. It's the only animal that does that. The female has the eggs, but she takes the eggs and deposits them in the male's pouch. That is something worth studying in great detail.

Adams: What animals make the worst fathers?

Masson: There are a lot of candidates for that, but I think the human father is the worst.

Statistics tell a dire tale: The average daily amount of one-on-one father-child contact in the United States is less than thirty minutes, and for dads who have divorced, more than 40 percent of them are no longer seeing their children five years later.

Even worse, studies suggest that in the mid-1960s fathers spent, on average, 37.7 seconds per day interacting with their infants in the first three months.

And yet in a large poll recently conducted by Newsweek magazine, 55 percent of men interviewed felt that parenting was more significant to them than it had been to their own fathers, and 70 percent said they spent more time with their children than their fathers did with them. In one generation, in other words, a major change in parenting is possible.[1]

Adams: Which animal has the most interesting family life for you?

Masson: I suppose it has to be the whale. Whales stay together their entire life. When you have a pod, it often consists of the original mother and all of her descendants. Even the males are there. That's quite remarkable. There are cases where you will see 25-year-old males still nursing from their mother. Their family bonds are probably much closer than ours.

That's clearly what stranding is about. It's the refusal of the family to leave one another even though they know it's going to lead to death. I think that whales are a good example of animals having more powerful emotions than we do, including loyalty.

Adams: You write that monogamy is only occasional among the four thousand or so mammalian species, while 92 percent of the 8600 species of birds are primarily monogamous. Do you believe that monogamy is important in raising children?

Masson: Until I started studying animals, I didn't really believe that it was. But every animal that is not monogamous seems to pay very little attention to its children. For example, the male bear is not monogamous and plays no role whatsoever in the cubs' lives. It's only in those species where the couple mates for life, especially birds, that the father seems to play a very large role in the life of the child. This definitely suggests to me that monogamy is important for the children, if not their parents. I know men don't like this — I certainly didn't.

But the evidence seems to suggest that if we're going to take care of our children, we have to love our wives. A man who claims to be very involved in the life of his children but refuses to be monogamous is going against all the scientific evidence about other species as to whether that is really possible or not. I suppose some men who are not monogamous are good fathers, but it's very rare.

Adams: In our culture, the role that fathers play in the lives of their children has changed radically over the years, maybe since the feminist revolution. How does this kind of change relate to animals? Can they experience a cultural shift in their attitudes toward child rearing?

Masson: I think that's where we have one advantage over animals — we are capable of altering our nature. Our nature is more plastic than that of any other animal. You don't find some bears who are good fathers. None of them have a role in raising their cubs. However, it's also true that within, say, the Emperor penguins, although they are all good fathers, some may be better than others.

In the case of humans, the diversity is much greater. We can have fathers who say they want nothing to do with their kids, and we can have others who are completely involved in their lives. This diversity allows us to learn from other species. Penguins can't study humans to see what makes a good father, but we can study Emperor penguins and ask what we can learn from them. We have that advantage over other animals.

Adams: I asked about cultural effects among animals because in your book you made such an interesting observation about dogs. You said that they take on human cubs as their own children. So isn't this an example of a domesticated animal that has been affected by its social dynamics?

Masson: The key point is that for dogs, we are the pack, so the human family replaces the wolf pack. Wolves are very good fathers. Dogs are not good fathers of their own species, but a male dog is very protective of human children. So my speculation is that the wolves' instinct to fatherhood has not been entirely eradicated in dogs, but has merely been transferred to our species. Just as dogs will sometimes behave like our children, they will also sometimes behave like our children's parents.

On the other hand, even though they've been with us for a long time, you don't hear much about good cat fathers.

Adams: Do you believe that animals feel love?

Masson: Scientists have always been afraid of saying that animals have an ability to love, but the same scientists also are frightened of using the word love for humans. But that's changing in regard to both people and animals. There have always been people who believed that animals felt love, but now scientists are much more willing to consider that animals also may feel love. It's becoming almost fashionable for scientists to use the word love.

We have to give credit here to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and her book, The Hidden Life of Dogs. She made a very strong case that dogs feel love for one another.

Adams: For so long scientists have not been inclined to speak of animal emotions. Is it a distortion to assume that animal emotions have a similarity to human emotions?

Masson: When we ascribe human feelings and emotions to animals, scientists call that "anthropomorphism," and they think of it as a sin — a scientific error. When Elizabeth Marshall Thomas said this dog fell in love, it was very much a human concept. The question is, Can the word love apply to dogs? I think her point is that you can't reject it out of hand. You can't say no dog can fall in love.

You have to look at it critically. It's important to know something about the individual animal, and it's important to keep an open mind.

People who have an open mind generally don't know much about animals, and the people who do know a lot generally don't have an open mind. We need a generation of scientists who are opened-minded, who say, I don't know about this but I'm not going to close my mind to this possibility.

Adams: Would you ever say that animals marry for life and mourn the loss of a partner?

Masson: Yes, clearly there is something similar to marriage in the animal world. Some of them seem mated for life and they mourn as we do when a partner dies. A lot of scientists find it hard to accept that an animal can go into a depression when its partner dies.

Conrad Lorenz has to be credited with talking about how geese can mourn when a fellow goose dies, and how that can affect the rest of their lives.

Jane Goodall reported that when one chimpanzee's mother died, the young chimpanzee was in such a terrible state that he finally died himself. Goodall's observation would not have been accepted from another scientist, but because it was Jane Goodall, the finest expert on chimpanzees, they paid attention.

Adams: How prevalent is homosexuality in animals, or same-sex parenting?

Masson: Animals, like people, form deep attachments to other animals and other people, often of the same sex, for reasons that have nothing to do with genetic advantage and everything to do with emotions — in particular, the emotion of love. It has taken two hundred years for biologists even to begin to recognize these same-sex attachments among animals. This is a comment on our own species. We are the only species that humiliates, ridicules, tortures, and even murders members of our species because they love individuals of the same sex.[1]

There's a huge amount of homosexuality in the animal kingdom. Scientists just haven't talked about it; maybe they were embarrassed or they didn't notice it, or they didn't care — who knows? There's a great deal of homosexual behavior on both sides, both male and female, in the animal world.

Bears, cats, and some birds have been known to be same-sex parents. There are females raising an animal together and loving each other while they do it.

Adams: Has anyone done an intensive study of animals adopting other offspring into their family?

Masson: That's another fascinating area. I think there's more adoption that goes on than we recognize. Elephants, cats, and bears will adopt. There are lots of animals that probably adopt, but we don't get close enough to them to know. How often it happens is not clear, but it would be a great book for someone to write.

Adams: How did your studies in Freudian psychoanalysis help or hinder you in your studies of animal families.

Masson: I don't think it helped me at all. As for hindering, it probably did hinder me, although I never bought the official version of it. I think one thing that might have been helpful, at least in terms of what I thought psychoanalysis was all about, was the study of emotion. There was a great deal to learn about human emotion, and it occurred to me at the time that the way to learn about human emotion was to study animal emotion.

From the time I was a child, I knew that animals were more direct than we are in expressing their emotions. I knew this from living with dogs and cats, since I never really had to wonder what they were feeling. In psychoanalysis, we try to understand human emotions, while at the same time the humans we study are trying to hide those emotions. We're probably the only species that tries to hide its emotions.

Adams: The problem that I've had with the field of psychology is its need to classify human experience. As a writer, I'm interested in a celebration of individuality, the unique qualities in each person. I really appreciate that you are cautious in generalizing about different species of animals, but stress the uniqueness of each individual animal within a species.

Masson: I loathe classification. I think it's a terrible thing to classify humans into different types with different psychologies. There are certain systems of psychology that divide every human being into either an introvert or an extrovert. I think that's a stupid way of looking at people, although it's not necessarily harmful. But when we say that someone is either sane or insane, then of course that's very harmful to everyone who is not considered sane.

The criteria are always in the eyes of the beholder, not only of that particular culture, but of that culture at that moment. What we regard in the West as sanity might be regarded in some other culture as the opposite.

At the same level, there is no such thing as a species. Every animal is a unique individual. If some Hanuman langurs commit infanticide — even if a majority do — there are some that do not. Perhaps they even choose not to.

Male lions are protective of their own children, even if murderous toward the children of other male lions. And not every lion kills cubs.

The Nunamiut Eskimo, who live in Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska, are fond of saying that there is no such thing as "wolf," only individual wolves. They often refer to an individual wolf or to wolves under particular environmental conditions, but they use the collective "wolf" much less often than does the modern wolf ecologist.[1]

Adams: I notice that you carry your critique of psychology into the way you study animals.

Masson: Absolutely. I try to carry it even further. People are always asking what species is more intelligent. Is a cat more intelligent than a dog? Are pigs more intelligent than cows? These are very foolish questions, because of course these animals have evolved to be intelligent in different ways in order to survive, and that's equally true of humans.

Adams: How has the scientific community responded to your theories on the emotional life of animals?

Masson: At the time I was writing, there wasn't much interest among hardcore scientists in the emotional life of animals, though there was an interest among the general public. It was considered a soft topic, not worth discussing. There was nothing you could know about it. Scientists were very critical of my work.

But I understand that in the latest issue of Nature magazine, which is the premiere scientific magazine in the world, published in London, there was an editorial asking scientists to take more of an interest in animal cognition and animal emotions. So this is the first time that the scientific world has publicly acknowledged that animals do have feelings and that these feelings are important for us to know about.

Adams: Do you see a change happening in our perspective that humans are the pinnacle of creation and superior to all other life forms?

Masson: Yes, I think there is a major paradigm shift happening, where just about everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. It's a good thing to start realizing that we are not the be-all and end-all, not the apex of creation. There are areas, in fact, where we are clearly inferior to creatures that share the planet with us.

We have no problem in recognizing that some animals have physical gifts greater than ours. They can run faster or swim faster. They can fly. They're stronger. People are perfectly willing to acknowledge those kinds of superiority. But when it comes to something like intelligence or emotion, we find it threatening to realize that some animals might be superior to us in these areas.

Adams: Isn't it the more technologically advanced cultures that are reluctant or unable to recognize the possibility that animals might have certain types of emotional superiority? In other words, isn't it true that indigenous cultures are more willing to accept this possibility?

Masson: That's a good point. I think you're right. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the higher you rise in the hierarchy in so-called intelligence, the harder it is to recognize that other beings may have intelligence greater than your own. It's true that native cultures have a different perspective. I'm not sure of the reason. It may be that they are more aware because of what they feel in killing these animals. For them, relationship to animals may be a much more personal process than for those in technological societies.

When animals are killed by indigenous people, it is done personally. It isn't done someplace where you can't see them being slaughtered. When you have this personal relationship with animals, you have to realize that they suffer and that they feel a lot of the things that we do.

Adams: What is the best way to study animal behavior without overlaying our own emotions on them?

Masson: I think it's critical for a new generation to go out into the field, as Jane Goodall and many other women have done. Male researchers are more likely to bring animals into a cage or laboratory. But it's important to go out and live with them in natural conditions, so I think women have a tendency to be better at this than men. Men like to be in charge of a situation, while women are more willing to be patient.

Adams: In terms of the crisis that we're in on this planet, is there anything we can learn from animals about peacekeeping?

Masson: Yes, there are a lot of things we can learn.

Almost no animal kills its own kind; that behavior is extremely rare in the animal kingdom. Certainly, no animal tries to exterminate other animals. There's no such thing as genocide, and you rarely find anything like a serial killer among animals. If you ever do, it's always an animal that has been domesticated and abused.

And there's no such thing as sadism in the animal world. We're the only species that is deliberately cruel.

The watering holes in Africa have always impressed me. There, all these animals that are otherwise enemies come together. Animals have learned to live in harmony in their environment in a way that we have not. I don't know if you'd call it instinct or wisdom, but they've learned how to coexist with immense diversity.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson received a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard. He completed a full clinical training program in psychoanalysis at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and served for one year as projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London.

Masson has written many books, including: Dogs Never Lie About Love: The Emotional World of Dogs; Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser; When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (with Susan McCarthy); My Father's Guru: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion; Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychoanalyst,, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing, and A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality and Psychiatry in the 19th Century.

His website is at JeffreyMasson.com, and he may be reached by email at Jeff@JeffreyMasson.com.

Masson lives with his wife, Leila — a pediatrician — and their son, Ilan, in Berkeley, California.