I also learned about baboon individuality directly, since each one approached his or her relationship with me in a slightly different way. Cicero, the outcast juvenile, often followed me and sat quietly a few feet away, seemingly deriving some small comfort from my proximity. Leda, the easygoing female, would walk so close to me I could feel her fur against my bare legs. Dakar, feisty adolescent male, would catch my eye and then march over to me, stand directly in front of me, and grab my kneecap while staring at my face intently (thanks to Dakar, I’ve become rather good at appearing calm when my heart is pounding). Clearly, the baboons also knew me as an individual.{I tested this once by dressing up a woman friend of similar appearance, height, and build in my field clothes. Carrying my distinctive hat, sunglasses, binoculars, and notebook, she emerged from my jeep and approached the baboons. They almost immediately took off, looking back nervously, even though she was still several hundred meters away. On another occasion, I returned after a few days’ absence, with most of my long hair cut off. The baboons closest to me began to run away, but then they stopped, turned around, and peered at me intently. I could see the light of recognition dawn as, one by one, they relaxed and resumed their normal activities.} This knowledge was lasting, as I learned when I paid an unexpected visit to one of my study troops seven years after last being with them. They had been unstudied during the previous five years, so the adults had no recent experience with people coming close to them, and the youngsters had no such experience at all. I was traveling with a fellow scientist whom the baboons had never met, and, as we approached on foot from a distance, I anticipated considerable wariness toward both of us. When we got to within about one hundred yards, all of the youngsters fled, but the adults merely glanced at us and continued foraging. I asked my companion to remain where he was, and slowly I moved closer, expecting the remaining baboons to move away at any moment. To my utter amazement, they ignored me, except for an occasional glance, until I found myself walking among them exactly as I had done many years before. To make sure they were comfortable with me, as opposed to white people in general,{The baboons were far more comfortable, in general, with white people than with Africans, simply because most of the whites they had known were nonthreatening researchers, while most of the Africans they’d encountered were local people who sometimes chased them.} I asked my friend to come closer. Immediately, the baboons moved away. It was I they recognized, and after a seven-year interval they clearly trusted me as much as they had on the day I left.
Trust, while an important component of friendship, does not, in and of itself, define it. Friendship requires some degree of mutuality, some give-and-take. Because it was important, scientifically, for me to minimize my interactions with the baboons, I had few opportunities to explore the possibilities of such give-and- take with them. But occasional events hinted that such relations might be possible, were I encountering them first and foremost as fellow social beings, rather than as subjects of scientific inquiry. For example, one day, as I rested my hand on a large rock, I suddenly felt the gentlest of touches on my fingertips. Turning around slowly, I came face-to-face with one of my favorite juveniles, a slight fellow named Damien. He looked intently into my eyes, as if to make sure that I was not disturbed by his touch, and then he proceeded to use his index finger to examine, in great detail, each one of my fingernails in turn. This exploration was made especially poignant by the fact that Damien was examining my fingers with one that looked very much the same, except that his was smaller and black. After touching each nail, and without removing his finger, Damien glanced up at me for a few seconds. Each time our gaze met, I wondered if he, like I, was contemplating the implications of the realization that our fingers and fingernails were so alike.
I experienced an even greater sense of intimacy when, in 1978, I had the exceptional privilege of spending a week with Diane Fossey and the mountain gorillas she had been studying for many years. One day, I was out with one of her groups, along with a male colleague unfamiliar to the gorillas and a young male researcher whom they knew well. Digit, one of the young adult males, was strutting about and beating his chest in an early challenge to the leading silverback male. My two male companions were fascinated by this tension, but after a while I had had enough of the macho energy, and I wandered off. About thirty meters away, I came upon a “nursery” group of mothers and infants who had perhaps moved off for the same reasons I had. I sat near them and watched the mothers eating and the babies playing for timeless, peaceful moments. Then my eyes met the warm gaze of an adolescent female, Pandora. I continued to look at her, silently sending friendliness her way. Unexpectedly, she stood and moved closer. Stopping right in front of me, with her face at eye level, she leaned forward and pushed her large, flat, wrinkled nose against mine. I know that she was right up against me, because I distinctly remember how her warm, sweet breath fogged up my glasses, blinding me. I felt no fear and continued to focus on the enormous affection and respect I felt for her. Perhaps she sensed my attitude, because in the next moment I felt her impossibly long ape arms wrap around me, and for precious seconds, she held me in her embrace. Then she released me, gazed once more into my eyes, and returned to munching on leaves. If you find this account hard to believe, watch Dian Fossey’s National Geographic special on the mountain gorillas and look for the scene in which she comes face-to-face with the young male Digit (the same one whose macho display drove me away).
After returning from Africa, I was very lonely for nonhuman company. This yearning was greatly eased by my dog Safi, who, like the baboons, has given me the opportunity to experience a joyful intersubjectivity that transcends species boundaries. I turn now to this relationship, because, while few of us can travel to Africa to live with wild baboons, most of us have the chance to develop a bond with a member of another intelligent, social species, be it a dog, a cat, or some other kind of animal.
Before I went to Africa, I had lived with dogs, but not until my baboon experience did I begin to question the rather limited framework within which I, and other members of my culture, relate to our “pets.” The very word “pet” connotes a lesser being than the wild counterpart, a being who is neotenous, domesticated, dependent. Even the most avid pet-lovers generally operate within a narrow set of assumptions about what their animals are capable of, and what sort of relationship it is possible to have with them. This was true of me before the baboons, despite my long experience with pets and abundant knowledge of animal behavior.
I rescued Safi, aged eight months, from an animal shelter where she had been brought as a stray, collarless, without history. She hovered on the border between childhood and adulthood, mature enough to focus her attention intelligently, but still extremely puppylike in demeanor and playfulness. From the instant of our first meeting, I experienced her as a wild animal{This perception was no doubt facilitated by the fact that she closely resembles a jet-black timber wolf, her dogness given away only by the abnormally large size of her upright ears.} possessed by an instinctual wisdom akin to that of my baboons. Because I had so much respect for her intelligence, I did not consider it necessary to “train” her. Instead, I discuss all important matters with her, in English, repeating phrases and sentences over and over in particular circumstances to facilitate her ability to learn my language. She understands (in the sense of responding appropriately) to many English phrases, and she, in turn, has patiently taught me to understand her language of gestures and postures (she rarely uses vocal communication). Some dogs bark when they want to go out, but Safi instead gazes at the door, even if she’s standing far away, and then looks at me (it took me a while to catch on). If we’re out walking, and I become too absorbed in my own thoughts or in talking with other people, she regains my attention by gently touching her nose to the back of my leg in that sensitive spot behind the knee. As I write this paragraph, she leaves the spot where she’s been resting for the last hour and gently prods my elbow with her nose, signaling a desire to connect. When I approach her with a similar desire, she’s nearly always willing to pause in her activities to attend to me, and I do the same for her. I stop typing, meet her gaze, say her name, and brush the top of her head with my lips. Apparently fulfilled by this brief contact, she leaves me uninterrupted for another hour or two, a restraint specific to those times when I am writing.