The Fear Factor Read online

  Despite how bizarre it might seem for a wild lion to tenderly nuzzle and care for a baby antelope or baboon, this behavior is not difficult to explain in the context of allomothering. To effectively allomother each other’s young, lions must maintain a relatively relaxed threshold for what sets off their “baby!” alarm and triggers their urge to provide protection, affection, and care. And just as is true for rats, both the threshold and sensitivity of the “baby!” alarm and the energy with which maternal care is provided inevitably vary among individuals, just as surely as individuals vary in size and coat color and countless other individual traits. Extreme variation in maternal sensitivity appears to lead some unusually motherly lions to adopt baby oryxes and baboons, both of which do resemble lion cubs in many respects: they’re of similar size and coloration and have infantile features that are common to most species, like large eyes and foreheads and small noses and jaws.

  Although perhaps only the very most motherly lionesses engage in cross-species adoption, this behavior is near-normal for species that are even more allomotherly, like domestic dogs. Stories abound of dogs who have of their own accord taken up the challenge of mothering infants of diverse species, including those that are dogs’ natural predators or prey. One of my favorites is Mimi, a grizzled ten-year-old female chihuahua owned by a Florida woman named Jeanette Young. In 2007, Young took in a litter of four squirrel pups that her son-in-law had found in a downed nest. Initially she didn’t let Mimi near them, which seemed reasonable—there may be no wild animal that elicits more crazed canine hunting behavior than squirrels. But, as Young told CNN, Mimi became progressively more obsessed with the pups, continually approaching them and whining and, as Young put it, “carrying on.” So finally, although still somewhat fearful that Mimi might try to attack or eat the pups, Young put the nest on the ground to see what Mimi would do. To her surprise, Mimi almost immediately adopted the pups as her own. Right away she began licking them vigorously, and soon she became protective of them, refusing to venture far from them or to allow Young to approach them. Most spectacularly, after a short while watching over “her” pups, Mimi began producing milk for them and allowing them to nurse. This despite not having given birth to pups of her own for four years!

  This is one of roughly a billion stories about domestic dogs caring for animals of other species. In some zoos, it’s actually protocol to give orphaned animals like tigers or cheetahs to dogs to raise. An Australian shepherd named Blakely has been designated the “resident nursery companion” at the Cincinnati Zoo, where he (yes, he) has helped to raise dozens of zoo animals that were abandoned or orphaned, including cheetahs, a warthog, and a skunk. His primary job is teaching his charges mammalian social behaviors by gently roughhousing and playing with them. In other zoos, female dogs nurse orphaned baby animals of various species; for instance, a golden retriever named Izzy at a Kansas zoo raised three newborn Bengal tigers along with her own pups. The first time they were introduced, the cubs took immediately to their foster mother, and Izzy to them, and she nursed and nurtured them successfully until their first birthday approached and zoo owners finally separated them. But at no point did either dogs or tigers exhibit hostility toward each other. On what would be their last day together, photographs show Izzy nuzzling the face of one of the 140-pound tigers she raised. Many other examples abound of domestic dogs nursing or otherwise caring for infant tigers, lions, cheetahs, red pandas, deer, wild dogs, pigs, ducks, owls—you name it. There seems to be no limit to the kinds of animals that dogs will allomother.

  Although carnivores like lions and dogs can be surprisingly good allomothers, primates are, as a group, even better. From tiny tamarins and marmosets to siamangs, many primates are wonderful allomothers (although, interestingly, great apes like chimpanzees and orangutans allomother relatively little).

  But the real allomothering superstars are humans. As the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy describes in her classic book Mothers and Others, we humans owe our survival as a species to the vigor and promiscuity with which we nurture each other’s children. Whereas other great ape mothers are jealously possessive of their newborns, human mothers traditionally have sought and received sustained help with their babies right from the start. Hrdy and other anthropologists have studied members of modern foraging societies throughout Africa, Asia, and South America for clues as to how our ancestors most likely lived—and hence how our species evolved. They have found that at the low end of the human allomothering spectrum are the !Kung of southern Africa, among whom infants are in the care of someone other than their mother roughly one-quarter of the time. In other societies, like the Hadza of Tanzania, babies are cared for by someone other than their mother a whopping 85 percent of the time during their first days of life. Although mothers take over more as time goes on, Hadza children still spend roughly one-third of their infancy being carried by allomothers. Central African Aka and Efe women share their babies, cooperatively holding, comforting, washing, and even nursing them collectively. This is no anomaly; women provide children who are not their own with milk in nearly 90 percent of modern foraging societies around the world. Humans in modern cultures extensively allomother as well, although allomothering takes different forms across various cultures and subcultures. Most modern human infants don’t receive care from twenty different people every day like the average Aka baby, but they will nonetheless be allomothered by a great many adults and older children between infancy and adulthood. This includes all the feeding, cleaning, cuddling, protection, and entertainment that infants receive from their earliest days onward from fathers, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins—as well as from genetically unrelated caregivers like doctors, nurses, neighbors, and babysitters. It also includes the care, instruction, and resources that older children receive from teachers, coaches, and other adults as they mature. And of course, children who are raised by adoptive parents, foster parents, or godparents are, biologically speaking, allomothered as well.

  I sometimes get the sense that some people view it as a necessary but unnatural evil that human children receive so much care from individuals other than their mothers. The belief that children should spend the maximum amount of time possible specifically with their mothers for proper socioemotional development is common and not entirely without basis in the scientific literature. Developmental scientists tracing back to the psychiatrist John Bowlby have historically emphasized the importance of a secure attachment to a single primary caregiver (nearly always the mother) for a child’s social and emotional well-being. Given this, the assumption that a child will inevitably be at least a little worse off when cared for by anyone other than his or her mother is common. This assumption underlies many public debates about whether child care for working mothers should be affordable and accessible, and it probably influences the thinking of the 60 percent of Americans who continue to believe that children are better off if their mother stays home to care for them. Mothers who are not working get, if anything, even more flak if they leave their children in others’ care. I was on maternity leave after having my second daughter when I mentioned to an older relative that we’d hired a night nurse to help care for her. His somewhat skeptical response was to ask why I wasn’t doing it “the old-fashioned way.”

  The idea that it is preferable for a human mother to be her child’s sole caregiver around the clock is rooted in modern postwar views of family life that have drifted far afield from our species’ evolutionary roots. Mothers getting ample help from experienced caregivers is the actual old-fashioned way. This way is vastly more natural and sustainable—and beneficial for children—than for one or even two frazzled and inexperienced parents to try to manage twenty-four hours of daily care for some of the most altricial newborns on earth. As the historian Stephanie Coontz has put it, “Children do best in societies where childrearing is considered too important to be left entirely to parents.” Allomothering not only relieves mothers of the massive burden of caring for and rearing needy, al
tricial, resource-hungry children alone but also fosters strong bonds between children and a wide array of supportive adults and provides children with opportunities to learn the many skills they will need as they mature—not least among them the opportunity to learn to love and trust widely rather than narrowly.

  I should mention, by the way, that in focusing on mothering and allomothering, I by no means intend to give human fathers short shrift—far from it. Most mammalian fathers play little or no direct role in raising their children, but human fathers are among the more devoted and indispensable “allomothers” in the animal world. Between fathers’ direct care for their children and the indirect care they provide for mothers while mothers nurse and tend to children, it is clear that humans’ survival as a species depends, without question, on fathers’ committed care.

  Solo care of human infants is essentially impossible. It’s so difficult that mothers in some foraging cultures (as well as mothers of other allomothering species) will abandon their newborns if they perceive that they will not receive sufficient allomothering support. The prevalence of postpartum depression has much less to do with postnatal hormones (a common myth) than with how legitimately depressing it is to care for a baby without enough help. Inadequate social support is a top risk factor for postpartum depression; it’s a bigger risk factor than poverty or having medical complications. My own experience bears this out. My husband and I tried to take care of our first daughter without enough help, and the effects on our mental health were grim. We were not living in poverty, and I suffered no complications, but we were grossly inexperienced at taking care of babies, had no close family living nearby, and were miserable. We were much smarter about paying for extra allomothering the second time around. The salary we paid Marie, our lovely night nurse, to help care for my second daughter may be the best investment I’ve ever made, and it opened my eyes to the importance of allomothering in raising human children.

  None of this negates the importance of close bonds between mothers and their own children, of course. Allomothers need not prioritize the welfare of all infants equally, or be equally invested in their care. But humans’ deeply ingrained capacity for allomothering explains why most adults find it so difficult to disengage from the sight or sound of children in need, even when those children are total strangers. This is why charities often use images of distressed children in advertisements to such powerful effect. Depictions of suffering or injured children can galvanize action from strangers in a way that hordes of suffering adults rarely do. Think of the famous “napalm girl” photograph in which a naked and burned nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phúc and several other children are running, terrified and screaming, from a napalm attack on their village. This searing image was credited with turning the tide of public opinion against the war in Vietnam. Think also of the awful, heartrending image of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose sweet, round body was found facedown and lifeless amid the lapping waves on a Turkish beach. The sight of this one boy stirred compassion in millions of strangers and was widely credited with causing large shifts in opinion about Syrian refugees. It also massively increased charitable donations to help them. One charity, the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, which rescues refugees’ boats in the Mediterranean, saw a fifteen-fold increase in donations in the twenty-four hours after the photograph was published. The average number of donations to the Swedish Red Cross increased one-hundred-fold in the week following the photograph’s publication relative to the week immediately before.

  That intensive allomothering is a fundamental part of human nature helps to explain why we humans have unusually low and relaxed thresholds for what will trip our “baby!” alarms. We put lions and dogs to shame. But our alarms work fundamentally the same way as theirs: the urge to care is tripped by the perception of what ethologists call “key stimuli” that characterize babies and young children. These features include a large head, large eyes, and a small chin and jaw, features that set children apart from adults across nearly every vertebrate species and that elicit care from adults very effectively. The reason that babies look this way is fairly straightforward: their brains and the tops of their skulls grow fast and early, whereas the lower halves of their faces grow slowly. These patterns are particularly pronounced among mammals, in whom milk supports the growth of babies’ ballooning craniums. The resulting babyish proportions, termed kindchenschema by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, create an appearance of cuteness and cuddliness that draws in adults’ attention and causes them to respond with increased care.

  For example, Jim Coan and his colleagues at the University of Virginia found that after adult men and women simply view pictures of baby animals, they make slower, more careful body movements. This is particularly true when the images depict unusually cute, babyish-looking animals. My own research has found that viewing images of human infants triggers the motivation to approach—to literally draw closer. With my student Jennifer Hammer, I presented forty-five subjects with images of unfamiliar adults and infants on a computer screen and asked them to alternately categorize each picture by moving a lever toward or away from themselves. The goal of the study was to measure the degree to which different images caused respondents to either want to approach what they saw—to draw closer—or to avoid it. Approach and avoidance are among the most primitive emotional responses that we have, and nearly any emotionally significant stimulus will trigger the desire to do one or the other (or occasionally both). Approach and avoidance can be measured in the laboratory using a lever, which in our case was a joystick hooked up to a computer. When we compared how quickly subjects pushed or pulled the lever in response to each face, we found that they pulled and pushed equally rapidly in response to adult faces, meaning that they felt no particular motivation to either avoid or approach. But when subjects (both men and women) gazed at babies’ faces, they were suddenly able to pull the lever toward themselves—indicating the motivation to approach—much more quickly than they could push it away. We also found that this pattern was linked to psychopathy. Subjects who were less psychopathic—in other words, more caring—had stronger approach responses to babies, suggesting an intrinsic link between this response and compassion.

  The psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz and others have documented many other ways in which a cute, appealing, babyish appearance elicits caring responses from adults, whether the possessor of the babyish appearance is an actual baby or an adult with a babyish-looking face, or even a babyish-sounding voice. Adults with babyish features are viewed as more worthy of concern and care and as needing more of it. They receive lighter judicial sentences for minor crimes and are more likely to receive help from strangers—in one study, adults with babyish-looking faces were more likely to have lost résumés mailed back to them than were less babyish-looking people. These effects are not simply due to babyish-looking people being more attractive. Even controlling for variation in attractiveness, more babyish-looking or-sounding people evoke more concern and protectiveness from others who encounter them. Note that the urge to nurture and care for that which is babyish doesn’t stop with human adults but extends to babyish-looking cartoon characters, toys, and nonhuman animals, all of which attract attention, approach, and the urge to care.

  This fact helps to explain all the abundant alloparental care that humans provide to nonhuman animals as well. What do you think domestic dogs and cats are but unusually infantile-looking wolves and wildcats that people provide with the full suite of maternal care, including retrieval, cleaning, feeding, and protection? Over half of all American households at any given time routinely engage in these behaviors, a fact that researchers have struggled to explain. There appears to be no genuinely rational reason that so many people across a wide variety of cultures keep and care for pets. Although some of them fulfill nominally useful functions like protection or catching vermin, household pets, particularly those in industrialized countries, are mostly an enormous net drain on time and resources, and they require constant care—not unlike human
babies. It may be that we just can’t help ourselves. We are literally built to parent, and we have fairly lax thresholds regarding who or what we will apply our allomothering energy to. It has been speculated that one of the causes of rising pet ownership in industrialized nations is the decline in these nations’ fertility. It’s as though we seek out pets to satisfy allomaternal urges that aren’t met by human babies.

  Humans are also responsive allomothers to wild baby animals of all stripes. Just think back to the crowd on the Florida beach where I shepherded the baby loggerheads to the sea. That day I was part of a glorious assemblage of men and women and boys and girls all allomothering our hearts out together. Those turtles were just a few of the thousands upon thousands of wild animal babies helped or rescued by Americans every year—like the squirrel pups adopted by Mimi the chihuahua, who would never have met their new allomother had they not first been retrieved, protected, and fed by two humans, Jeanette Young and her son-in-law. Even in an urban metropolis like Washington, DC, wildlife allomothers abound. I became one of them yet again shortly after setting out for a run through my neighborhood one recent September.

  I had just turned on to a large, busy boulevard when I encountered a man and a woman on the sidewalk staring up into a tree. I paused long enough to spot tufts of gray, fluffy feathers and a slate-gray beak poking out between the curled fingers of the man’s hand. My curiosity got the better of me, and I stopped to ask what was going on. The man held out his fist to show me a baby blue jay cupped inside. It was quite still, but alert and unharmed; it gazed at me with glittering black eyes. The man told me he had been driving by and saw it hunched in the middle of the road, still wearing the downy feathers of a nestling and unable to fly. He pulled over, leapt from his car, and ran into the street, evading squealing rush hour traffic, to retrieve it and carry it to safety. But now he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with it; he and the woman had been trying to locate a nest in the tree above. But they were both on their way to work and couldn’t stand there indefinitely. Isn’t it interesting that none of the three of us ever even considered simply leaving the little creature on the sidewalk to fend for itself? Unthinkable. What could I do but offer to take it? So I did. Gently, the man transferred the bird’s warm, cloud-soft body into my hand, then thanked me and drove away. I carried the jay home, its scaly dinosaur toes clutching my fingers and its heart pounding against them. It never made a sound, and its eyes never left my face. Once home, I put it inside a small box lined with a cloth, then drove it to a local shelter called City Wildlife, where it was raised with foster siblings brought in by other local allomothers before being released back into the urban forest. I think of it sometimes still. I hope it is doing well.