One of the most entertaining programmes I have watched on TV was an earnest piece of research done by a naturalist, armed with a secret camera, who had set out to prove that female birds, supposedly bonded for life to their mates, actually cheated on the sly. In other words, birds committed adultery too.

The programme showed clear footage of each stage leading to the crime, the offender being a small-sized female bird that hopped and twittered in the most charming way. Her crime had all the three requisites of means, opportunity and motive that, in a human court of justice, would have been gleefully emphasized by the prosecutor. The means—the bird’s charms, enhanced by ovulatory readiness. The opportunity—that little window of time when her mate was away looking for food, and the lover was waiting on a leafy branch nearby. The motive—the urge, deeply ingrained in every female of every species, to make sure that her offspring are fathered by the best males and nurtured by the most dependable provider. And what better way for the female bird to achieve this goal than to have both the hardworking food-bringer, and the handsome, robust Romeo? The evidence of her crime—the DNA test, indisputable proof in any court of justice, showing that the little baby birds which had hatched out of her eggs were not the biological offspring of that poor cuckolded partner.

What amused me most about the programme was the projection of our human moral values on to the amoral world of nature, using the language of moral judgment, such as ‘cheat’, ’sly’, ‘deceive’, ‘adultery’, for creatures going about their purely instinctual activities of feeding and mating. This anthropomorphic tendency of humans seems to be an innate one, shown throughout history and across cultures, especially in myths and folklore. It operates both ways on the Great Chain of Being, going upwards when we assign human attributes to angels, deities and gods, (in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, the gods and goddesses were so human that they were always quarrelling with each other, seeking revenge, stealing each other’s mates, etc.) and downwards when we give animals, birds and even insects distinctive human features and invest them with distinctive human qualities, whether sinister such as deceit (the snake), or desirable such as gentleness( the dove) and industriousness (the ant). Anthropomorphism, in effect, ‘humanises’ all creation, in the grandest possible bonding exercise of God, Man and Beast.

I suspect that the producer of that TV program of bird adultery didn’t have any such lofty purpose when he deliberately used that word. He could of course have used any of the technical terms that scientists seem so fond of, such as ‘assortative mating’ or ‘goal-directed preferential bonding’, but he chose the provocative ‘A’ word in that entertaining program precisely for that purpose—to raise a laugh and endear the little feathered adulterer to her human audience, for being so like them.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...