Sir Patrick Bateson
Animal behaviourist, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and author of a report on deer hunting
SIR PATRICK BATESON, who has died aged 79, was a former Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and an animal behaviourist who was not afraid to put his head above the parapet in controversies over animal welfare; among other things he conducted a study into the hunting of deer with hounds which led to the sport being banned on National Trust land.
Bateson’s main interest lay in the processes which translate genetic and environmental influences into changes in animal behaviour, beginning with “imprinting”, whereby animals bond instinctively with their parents and learn to recognise members of their own species.
The great authority in the field in the early 20th century was the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who collaborated with the Dutch biologist Niko Tinbergen in developing ethology (the study of animal behaviour) as a separate sub-discipline of biology. Lorenz saw imprinting as behaviour that was largely innate but triggered through environmental stimuli. He argued that animals have an inner drive to carry out instinctive behaviours, and that if they do not encounter the right environmental stimulus (eg the sight of a parent) they will eventually engage in the behaviour with an inappropriate stimulus.
Bateson first came to public attention in 1963, while a graduate student at Cambridge, when, at an international conference in Sweden, he challenged Lorenz’s view that imprinting was a “special form of learning”, arguing from his own research that it shared many features with normal perceptual learning.
Lorenz was sitting in the front row of the audience and became increasingly agitated. At the end of Bateson’s talk he got up and announced that he would address his remarks, not to Bateson but to Robert Hinde (Bateson’s supervisor). His relationship with Lorenz never fully recovered, but Bateson was given a special citation by the Zoological Society of London for his talk.
After taking his PHD in 1963, Bateson spent two years at Stanford University, doing postdoctoral research on the neural basis of animal behaviour as a Harkness Fellow with the neuropsychologist Karl Pribram.
During one experiment, he put panels of letters in monkeys’ cages to which the monkeys were exposed for some time; later they were taken to apparatus where, if they pressed buttons, letters popped up and if they chose the right letter they got a peanut. Bateson discovered that if the monkey had seen one of the letters before then it learnt very quickly; if it had seen two of the letters, however, then it took it much longer to learn to discriminate between them than it took monkeys which had never seen the letters before. It seems the monkeys had classified the letters together and when they had to choose between them they had to unlearn the categorisation.
Later, Bateson examined the role of play in cats, concluding that play enables animals to cope creatively with new challenges.
Such work led Bateson to conclude that the processes of perceptual learning play a much more important role in evolution than implied by theories which treat living organisms as passive vehicles for processes over which they have no control. His view was that adaptability was an important driver of process, with organisms themselves playing an active role in their own development and the evolution of their descendants. This work helped to spawn a whole new
field of research, epigenetics, which concerns the mechanisms of transgenerational adaptation.
Bateson had always been interested in animal welfare, and in his report for the National Trust The Behavioural and Physiological Effects of Culling Red
Deer (1997), he concluded that hunted deer suffer severe stress and that shooting was a less cruel way of controlling their numbers. The report infuriated hunt supporters and Bateson found himself the target of a campaign of abuse.
When the Labour government moved to ban hunting with hounds, however, Bateson distanced himself from claims by ministers that his work had provided “incontrovertible” evidence that foxhunting was cruel, on the basis that it was wrong to extrapolate from deer to foxes without similar scientific research on foxes. It also emerged that he had written to the Rural Affairs Minister Alun Michael urging him to take into consideration the “economic, social and cultural benefits” of hunting when deciding its future.
The younger of two sons, Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson was born in the Chiltern Hills on March 31 1938. His father, Dick, was in the wood pulp business and served as a British officer in the Second World War before being taken prisoner by the Germans at Dunkirk. He never fully regained his health following the war and died 10 years later. His mother, Sölvi, was Norwegian, the daughter of Paal Berg, the chief justice of Norway who ran the country during the Nazi occupation and was later responsible for signing Quisling’s death warrant.
Young Patrick’s interests, however, owed more to the biologist William Bateson, a cousin of his grandfather who had coined the term “genetics” and popularised the ideas of Gregor Mendel. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was William’s son.
At Westminster School, Patrick was inspired by a biology master who had taught Andrew Huxley. By the age of 14 he had started going to a bird observatory on the Northumberland coast in his holidays to help ring birds to study their migration. He won a place at King’s College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences, but before going up in 1957, spent more than a year with his grandfather in Norway, working at the Oslo Natural History Museum and as a deckhand doing hydrographical work with the Norsk Polarinstitut.
While at Cambridge, he and three friends travelled to the high Arctic to work on the rare Ivory Gull; Niko Tinbergen, who would be a great influence, gave them a lot of help. The time Bateson spent writing up their research – and on the River Cam (he was a keen and talented oarsman and rowed in the first eight both at Westminster and Kings) – meant that he did poorly in his Part I exams. In his final year, however, he did Zoology, in which he got a First and a university prize.
He went on to do a PHD on behavioural imprinting under Robert Hinde, returning to Cambridge after his two years in California as a senior research assistant in the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour. He remained at Cambridge until he retired, serving as director of the sub-department (1976 – 1988) and as Professor of Ethology (1984-2005).
His time as Provost of King’s, from 1988 to 2003, was not without difficulties. He was elected by a few votes and to begin with there was some ill feeling on the governing body. While things improved, he noted a sharp contrast between the ethos of department and college: “Department meetings were businesslike and efficient; at King’s there would be long discussions which appeared to be reaching a consensus when someone who had been quiet until that point suddenly lobbed in a hand grenade and shattered the consensus and you would have to start again.”
Yet there were many aspects of the job which he enjoyed. He instituted Provost Seminars, involving both students and fellows in discussions with keynote speakers, and he and his wife Dusha held musical evenings in the Lodge. Guests who stayed during their time there included Princess Margaret, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev and Salman Rushdie, whose Special Branch entourage provoked complaints from Dadie Rylands about rough looking types with dogs in the garden.
In 2010 Bateson conducted a survey of the breeding of pedigree dogs, amid concerns about the welfare implications of breeding for exaggerated characteristics like a flattened face or sloping back. His report was critical of what some breeders were doing and made a number of recommendations, including a legal requirement for all puppies to be microchipped before sale, which could help trace bad breeders. “This time,” he recalled, “it was like pushing on an open door and I received none of the odium that accompanied my report on staghunting.”
The following year he chaired an independent review of scientific research using non-human primates which found that 91 per cent of research on non-human primates between 1997 and 2007 was of high quality. It concluded that while such research was vital in helping us to better understand human physiology and disease, non-human primates should only be used when no other potential animal models were viable and when human subjects could not be used as alternatives.
Bateson wrote hundreds of scientific papers and was author, co-author or editor of numerous books on animal behaviour and animal welfare.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1983 and over the decades served as biological secretary and vice president of the Society; president of the Zoological Society of London, and vice-chairman of the Museums and Galleries Commission. He was knighted in 2003 for services to biology
In retirement Bateson spent much of his time writing from his home in Suffolk, where he and his wife bred Egyptian cats.
He married, in 1963, Dusha Matthews, who survives him with their two daughters. His older daughter, Melissa, is Professor of Ethology at Newcastle University.
Sir Patrick Bateson, born March 31 1938, died August 1 2017