Centuries ago, they were stretched across sacrificial altar stones. Today, they may be recovered from alleyway trash dumpsters. The slaughter of innocents can never be pretty. But the practice has persisted for thousands – perhaps millions – of years, in all corners of the world, and in many species besides our own.
Is the impulse toward infanticide reflective only of dark yearnings from sick minds, or can it also represent a starkly adaptive form of evolutionary advancement? The evidence points in multiple directions.
What is clear is that infanticide comes in many forms and likely results from a variety of economic, social, and medical (including psychiatric) factors. Might a desire for career advancement and personal satisfaction be among them?
I would never have thought to ask, had it not been for an Atlantic Bottlenose dolphin who allowed her newborn calf to die for no other readily apparent reason.
Slooper was a dolphin in her prime when managers at the U.S. Navy’s Marine Mammal Program selected her for breeding a number of years ago. As one of Slooper’s trainers, I had a more than passing familiarity with the quality of the animal’s mind. It was exceptional.
By the time I came to work with her, Slooper had already participated in a whole host of mentally challenging tasks designed to help scientists better understand the nature of the remarkable bio-acoustic ability that all dolphins have. Not only was Slooper a quick study who mastered complex choice paradigms with ease, she also displayed a willingness to stay on-task two- to three-times longer than even her most experienced aquatic co-workers.
Moreover, Slooper demonstrated an unusual degree of affiliative preference for humans compared to other dolphins. Although well-trained dolphins can be, and often are, taught to actively respond to the mere presence of people, few animals ever evidenced the high-energy reaction Slooper regularly offered her trainers. She was consistently willing to break off social contact with members of her own species to speed-swim toward any human in the vicinity. Slooper seemed genuinely eager to work cooperatively with humans at almost any opportunity.
No wonder she was a prime candidate for breeding.
What was surprising was Slooper’s reaction to her own calf in the hours and days after its birth. Although she allowed the calf to swim at her side, whenever it tried to nurse Slooper pivoted her belly away from the newborn, effectively preventing it from feeding. Dolphins are extremely social animals with strong maternal instincts. Slooper was highly intelligent, and she had seen calves nursed and cared for many times in the past. Why, then, was she starving her baby?
Animals – humans included – often allow sick or deformed offspring to die of neglect shortly after birth, probably as a means of insuring the overall health of a given gene pool. Slooper’s calf, however, appeared to be healthy. But dolphin bio-sonar operates within the same frequency range as human medical imaging technology, which means that dolphins can peer into each other’s bodies much like an X-ray machine.
Could it be that Slooper detected some life-threatening illness or deformity that her well-trained human veterinary team could not? If so, then why did other dolphins with the same sonic powers of perception attempt to intervene on the calf’s behalf, only to be chased away by Slooper herself? Maybe the case for infanticide lay elsewhere.
It is known that in Neolithic times, humans regularly practiced infanticide when scant resources seemed unlikely to support population increases. To this day, in places around the globe, poverty and other forms of resource scarcity often contribute to infanticide in humans as well as in other animals.
But scarcity wasn’t Slooper’s problem. It couldn’t have been. In her world, food did not need to be foraged, nor were there any predators to compete with. She was a Navy dolphin who dined on a never-ending supply of restaurant-quality fish delivered daily by human co-workers whose companionship she herself actively sought out. Slooper was, for all intents and purposes, a working gal with a reliable income from a job that provided a benefit package complete with medical, dental, and retirement plans.
And therein – perhaps – lay the rub.
Slooper seemed highly invested in a career path that was essentially unique in her species’ 55-million year history. Could a desire for job security be strong enough to trump the biologic imperative of child rearing? In a day and age when human families often depend upon dual incomes for survival – and when Xbox and iPhones too often function as surrogate parents – one has to wonder whether the search for security sometimes causes us to sacrifice our children.
