NYT
April 29, 2008

Basics
Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans

By NATALIE ANGIER

The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion
delicately seasoned with indignation. Pecking at my bird feeder were
two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what
that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be
slipping her eggs into some other birds’ nest, with the expectation
that the naïve hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking,
ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.

Hey, you parasites, get your beaks off my seed, I thought angrily.
That feeder is for the good birds, the birds that I like — the
cardinals, the nuthatches, the black-capped chickadees, the tufted
titmice, the woodpeckers, the goldfinches. It’s for the hard-working
birds with enough moral fiber to rear their own families and look
photogenic besides. It’s not meant for sneaky freeloaders like you. I
rapped on the window sharply but the birds didn’t budge, and as I
stood there wondering whether I should run out and scare them away,
their beaks seemed to thicken, their eyes blacken, and I could swear
they were cackling, “Tippi Hedren must go.”

In sum, I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the
persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those
species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and
other life forms that one finds offensive.

It was not my first episode of the disorder, and evidently I don’t
suffer alone. “Throughout history there have been vilified animals and
totemic animals,” said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the
Wildlife Conservation Society. “There are the animals you don’t like
and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose
attributes you absolutely want to own,” to be a tiger, a bear, lupine
leader of the pack.

Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can
hurt or sicken us, like yellow jackets, mosquitoes or poison ivy, or
to fend off traditional household pests like mice and roaches. Rather,
it is the dislike we direct toward creatures that live outdoors and
generally mind their own business, but that behave in ways we find
rude, irritating, selfish or contemptible. The squirrels are gluttons,
the crows are schoolyard bullies, the house sparrows are boring and
look like mice when they skitter along the ground. How we love those
noble falcons and eagles that lately have blessed us by nesting on our
skyscrapers and bridges. How we beg them to feast freely on the
pigeons and starlings that curse us by nesting on our skyscrapers and
bridges.

Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an
interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the
University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the
wildebeest that the hyenas frequently prey on as “wildeburgers.” Why?
Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist, it just
stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be torn
apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which will go
down fighting and kicking and cracking the predator’s jaw if it can.

“Oh, we’re all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the
things that we see,” said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology and
evolutionary biology at Harvard University and author of “Moral
Minds.” “I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli National
Park to study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed strong feelings
about the personalities of the monkeys — here were the great and brave
ones, there were the lame ones that hid in the bushes and acted
pathetic.”

At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes or thwart our
chosen goats, whose greatest sin, as a rule, is being exceptionally
good at their game. We try to squirrel-proof our bird feeders, yank
weeds from our flower beds, call Animal Control, and when all else
fails, reach for our guns. Stephen C. Sautner of the Wildlife
Conservation Society cited the case of a friend and avid birder who
has a colony of purple martins on his property. “He spends much of his
time shooting and trapping starlings and English sparrows,” said Mr.
Sautner, “both of which he describes as ‘evil.’ ”

We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at
unwanted-animal control. The animal is an invasive species like the
European starling, and it doesn’t belong here. Or it’s a native
species like the cowbird but its range has been unnaturally extended
through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy parks
and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures. Whatever the
self-exculpatory particulars, said Marc Bekoff, author of “The
Emotional Lives of Animals” and emeritus professor of biology at the
University of Colorado, “I see it as a double cross that we create a
situation where cowbirds spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds,
and then we decide, well, now we’ve got to go out and kill the
cowbirds and the foxes.”

Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several salient
human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often overactive theory
of mind — the conviction that those around you have their own minds,
goals and desires, and that it might behoove you to anticipate what
they’ll do next. We spin elaborate narratives out of the slenderest of
observational threads: Look, the blue jay is trying to dislodge the
cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay know the cowbird is a nest
parasite and be trying to drum it out of town? “We interpret animal
behaviors through a human lens and human morality,” said Mr. Fraser,
the conservation psychologist.

Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the
persistent sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the right
and the means to control it. “In the past, when we talked about
exploiting nature, that was seen as a good thing,” Mr. Fraser said.
“Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to human
success.”

Nowhere is our sense of droit du roi over nature more manifest than in
our paradoxical attitudes toward farm animals. On the one hand,
they’re the beloved figures of our earliest childhood. On the other
hand, many of our most pejorative comparisons were born in the
barnyard — you lazy pig, you ugly cow, you chicken, what a bunch of
sheep.

Conservation groups, which keep track of public attitudes toward
animals, acknowledge that they are ever on the lookout for the next
Animal Idol — an ecologically important creature that also happens to
be large, showy, charismatic and likable. If you have two important
birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser, one a
hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a
human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the
coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-
raising calendar.

Not that public attitudes can’t be changed. Bats, for example, were
long considered vermin, but nowadays, in the wake of the wildly
popular children’s book “Stella Luna,” they’ve taken on a magical air,
as the mosquito-eating Tinkerbells that if you’re lucky will soon take
up residence near you. Until then, step away from that bat house,
sparrow. Don’t make me shoot.