I
have a few more observations that I learned while reading Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring.
Some
animal species are even more cruel than humans. A male roebuck, if confined in
the same enclosure as females or young, will kill them and slit their bellies
open. And doves, the paragons of peace, or so we think, will (if confined) kill
one another; the victor will pluck the feathers off of the vanquished. In many
cases, the animal that knows that it is about to be vanquished will engage in
submission behavior, in order to keep from being killed. A turkey, for example,
will lie down when it knows it is losing a fight. But peacocks do not recognize
turkey behavior; so when turkeys and peacocks are confined together, the
peacock kills the turkey.
That
is, doves can be very cruel. At the same time, wolves are often submissive to
one another and refrain from outright combat and cruelty. Lorenz then asks, at
the end of one of his essays written early in the Cold War era, will we be
submissive like wolves or murderous like doves? The entire future of the world
may depend on the answer to this question.
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