Look, the dunnock is not a bitch, but that attention-grabbing headline still has some relevance to the wee hedge sparrows.
Emily at work recommended Lucy Cooke's Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal, which certainly is interesting. It demonstrates how androcentric assumptions have obfuscated the truth about female animals for centuries. It's full of fascinating stories and is written in a very engaging style. And it's iconoclastic. I mean, check out this rereading of the uber-cute meerkat.
Meerkat culture is tense and homicidal. A study investigating lethal violence in more than one thousand different mammals unmasked the meerkat as the most murderous mammal on the planet – beating even humans to the brutal top spot. Every meerkat born has a one in five probability of being killed by another meerkat, most likely a female and quite possibly their own mother.
I take issue with one thing and am slightly disturbed by another.
What I take issue with is that zoologists often write that animals are acting as though motivated by the need to reproduce. I do not think the animal is thinking about the next generation when they, say, make friends with another female. They are not thinking, "If I buddy up with her, then she will look after my babies when I need to grab a sarnie." That may be a distal cause, but the proximate cause will be emotional - that they like this other female. When I flirted with that young radio reporter back in 1993, I wasn't considering parenthood. Cooke writes as though the animals are machines to carry genes. OK, maybe we all are, but when we act, we act out of immediate emotional sensations of attraction and aversion, which we experience to a greater or lesser extent and in greater or lesser complexity. Plus, there may be various "motivations" all working together: to be safe, to experience companionship, etc. Behaviour in the moment is far more complex than the mathematics of evolutionary benefits over the course of a lifetime suggests.
Secondly, the book exposes a lot of violence, stress and pain. It tends to back up that idea that life for wild animals is net-negative. And I don't agree. I can't back this up with stats. But just note that probably 90% of the time, not much is happening OR an animal is engaged in feeding, grooming, sleeping etc. Only a small amount of the time is their conflict and only a small amount of that is serious conflict or danger. It's just we focus on the threat, the danger, the hostility.
A more interesting question, perhaps, is WHY?
The dunnocks - they were assumed to be models of monogamy, but dunnock sexual relations are seriously X-rated!
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