Why Do Animals Play?

Scientists want an evolutionary explanation. But maybe the answer is simply: Its fun.

- Sallie Tisdale

Orcas sank another yacht near the Iberian Peninsula in November.

Members of a pod had been ramming and shaking boats in the area for more than three years, and had now sunk four. Many observers believed the orcas were attacking their boats, perhaps taking revenge on fishermen. But both boaters and scientists wondered if the orcas were playing, and the marine biologists who study this group think it may be a fad. "The consensus is that they're doing this to show off," the director of science at an ocean-conservation group said. (As fads do, this one may have spread; a yacht had been rammed near Scotland in June.) This is no consolation to sailors, some of whom have tried to take their own revenge on the orcas, shooting at them, lighting firecrackers, and playing heavymetal music underwater to drive them away.

We project a great deal onto animals. They are elevated into ideals of love and fidelity (dogs, horses), and often they are reduced to objects and tools (cattle, pigs, horses again). Much of humanity's history with animals has been made possible only by refusing to grant them inner lives anything like our own. We can be amused by a parrot's speech and intrigued by macaques that use human hair as dental floss, but many animals live in ways we can hardly imagine.

Whales and frogs and frigate birds exist in realms we cannot enter, walled off by complex sensory differences and disparate desires. We deny them the individual worth so precisely known as "personhood." This denial doesn't just constrict our imagination; it has also constricted research in ethology, or animal behavior.