Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
BY SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH
Families have quarrels. Sometimes, they even have bust-ups and, as a consequence, split forever. Sociologists, had they been observing them at the time, might well have foreseen such ructions, long before the family itself realised what was happening. Animal sociologists – ethologists to give them their proper name – can often do exactly the same thing. Those studying animals that live in families, troops or herds, spend years observing such communities, trying to understand the rules that govern them, and they can, as a consequence, sometimes predict that animals are about to do the same sort of thing. What happens next can be not only dramatic but also very revealing of the nature of the animals themselves. But recording such events would be difficult.
Individual animals are often not as easy for us to identify as individuals of our own species. Sometimes ethologists have to attach radio- tags to the animals they are studying so that they are able to be absolutely certain of their identities. They also give them names so that they can easily describe what is hap- pening – or is about to happen. Usually the names they choose have no similarity to the names we use for our children and friends. They do that in order to avoid being accused of one of the cardinal sins of ethology – anthropomorphism, that is to say, attributing human characteristics and emotions to an animal without adequate justification.
Some degree of anthropomorphism, of course, is justifiable and inevitable. If an elephant, on seeing you, lifts its trunk, flaps its ears and then charges, you are justi-
fied, at the very least, in saying that it is angry. That, certainly, is attributing a human emotion to an animal. What other word in our everyday vocabulary do we have to describe its feelings? But suppose you watched an elephant coming across a pile of elephant bones, picking them up with its trunk, one by one, as if caressing them. It would be tempting to say that the animal was mourning the death of a relative – tempting, but unjustified. Even if you know that the bones had belonged to a member of that elephant family, you could not be sure of what was in its mind. Calling this book, and the television series on which it is based, ‘Dynasties’ might in itself seem to be sinfully anthropomorphic. It will, after all, remind many of the famous American television series, Dynasty, which ran for so many years about a human oil-rich family in the United States whose interpersonal relationships were so sensational and so fractious. Happily, however, the dictionary legitimises such use for it and says no more than that the word refers to ‘a succession of rulers of the same line or family’. Animals have families just as we do and that is exactly what the new series, which starts on 11 November, is about.
To choose their subjects, the producers consulted ethologists all round the world asking whether the particular animal group they were studying was itself approaching one of the crises which inevitably overtake even the most amiable and well-established families. From the answers, they selected five, as varied as possible both in the nature of the animals themselves and the sort of dramas that were likely to overtake them. Camera teams then joined the scientists and followed the fortunes of each of those families for up to two and a half years.
It was a risky plan. It could be that in spite of the ethologists’ predictions, nothing dramatic would happen, that the animals concerned, day after day, month after month, would continue doing exactly the same sort of thing, without any radical change. In such a case, even though they were filmed over such a long time, there would be scarcely enough incidents to justify an hour-long programme. It might also be that a crisis would lead not to happier times with a new generation, but a failure of the animals concerned to meet the demands of their new situation. But the producers determined before the series went into production that, once a community had been chosen, the drama would be told exactly as it happened.
You must now be the judge as to whether these varied and extra ordinary histories are tragedies or triumphs.
‘The drama is told exactly as it happened’