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By
the late sixties Ervin had reached a point in his research where "I needed
a social group with a complex behavioral repertoire to study," as he put
it. He hooked up with some scientists who were doing experiments on the
green monkeys at Livingston Falls, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and
is now Zimbabwe. Greens were just what he was looking for. "The weed monkey
of Africa," Ervin called them. "They range all over the continent
and exploit practically every habitat. They are highly adaptable and aren't
endangered, and their DNA overlaps 95.5 % with man." One of the experiments
was to remove the amigdalas of the dominant, or alpha male of the troop,
and to see what happened. As expected, the males' status in the troop plummeted.
In fact, they became vegetables and were quickly eaten by leopards.
Just
as Ervin was getting on the plane to set up some experiments of his own,
Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then called, hit the fan. Livingston
Falls fell to the guerillas of Robert Mugabe, so Ervin needed to
find another population. By chance, a colleague at the Smithsonian Institution
happened to discover an old green-monkey skin labeled St. Kitts. Ervin
flew down as soon as he could. He drove out to the arid southern tip of
the island, where there is a great salt pond. A man named Mr. Wigley lived
on the pond. Ervin asked him if there were any monkeys on the island, and
he said, 'Yeah boss.'"
Ervin dreamed
of stocking the southern tip with monkeys and doing a massive Calhoun
experiment : fencing them off in a confined area and providing them with
unlimited food until, as with Calhoun's rats, every space was filled
and they became a city and began to rape and murder each other and the
mothers to commit infanticide, eating their babies. Ervin could play Animal
Farm games-- control them with electronics and gadgets, make the weakest
one the only one who could open the food, and watch how he became the leader,
make the alpha male a criminal outlaw omega.
All this was
a little hard-core and Island of Dr. Moreau for my blood. I really had
problems with what was going on here, however important to science and
beneficial it was to the human race. I wondered what Brigitte Bardot would
think of this place. "Is that where they blind them? " the primatologist
Jane Goodall asked when I told her about my visit to St. Kitts. I reached
her in Milwaukee, where she was giving a lecture. She is on the road three
hundred days a year giving lectures and talks and making appearances to
raise consciousness about the assault on Africa’s remaining wildlife by
the bushmeat trade, starving refugees, and a host of other things. "This
is one of these off-shore medical labs where ghastly experiments that would
never be permissible on the mainland are performed. Once you accept that
humans are not the only beings with feelings or personalities and reason,
a whole new concept enters in, and places like this raise a lot of questions.
We have too long thought we can do anything we like as long as it is vaguely
postulated to be good for us."
To which Ervin,
in one of our discussions on the island, had already countered : "Even
if my motives were purely selfish-- intellectual curiosity, ambition, to
be the one who discovers the genetic basis of alcoholism-- this research
would still benefit the human race. Alcoholism is the third leading cause
of preventable death in the U.S.. One in eight children has an alcoholic
parent. The annual cost of the disease is a hundred and thirty billion
dollars-- twice the cost of the Gulf War-- mainly due to absenteeism, but
also because it causes chronic heart and liver disease and several kinds
of brain rot and takes up half the nation's hospital beds, the health costs
are staggering.
Half of fatal car accidents are
alcohol-related, and this is quite apart from the tremendous social toll--
fatherless children, abused wives, and other personal tragedies. So you
can see why this is worth trying to understand. And to understand it you
have to have animals whose neurobiology and endocrinology you can manipulate.
No progress has been possible in any clinical problem you want to name--
cancer, influenza-- without an animal model."
***
For the
next four years, after discovering that there were monkeys on St. Kitts,
Ervin would come down whenever he could and study the monkeys in the wild.
He found that true to their species, they had adapted to practically every
one of the island's mini-ecosystems. The traditional African troop has
eighteen members, half male and half female, a third of whom are adults.
There is a sharp male hierarchy, with one predominant alpha male, and three
or four betas, and a similar pecking order among the females. The troop
moves in formal, almost military, array, with beta outriders keeping a
lookout for leopards or other predators. But the St. Kitts greens have
been without predators for centuries, and their social organization, Ervin
noted, was much looser and more relaxed, "like a Quaker meeting," as he
put it. The African greens have a repertoire of fifty-two vocalizations,
but he had only identified thirty-six on St. Kitts. Had some, like LEOPARD
! been dropped, and others, like IT'S ONLY A TRACTOR been added ? he wondered.
He paid particular
attention to their diet. The ones on the arid peninsula ate sea grapes
and clammy cherries, and plucked limpets off rocks. Most of them raided
the crops, so the local authorities, who paid hunters to pop them, had
no problem with Frank capturing some of them to study in a more controlled
setting. But it wasn't until l972 that Kittisians began to take his requests
for monkeys seriously, and the first ones began to come in.
Ervin read in
an eighteenth-century natural history of the island by a Jesuit naturalist
Father LeBlanc how the slaves would set out halved coconuts filled with
molasses and rum to lure the monkeys in from the forest; barbecued monkey
is still a popular dish on the island. This got him thinking about how
the monkeys might be useful for alcohol research. It was during this conversation,
driving down to Basseterre, that a serious confusion about the monkeys
getting bombed on the fermented sugar cane emerged. Maurice and I thought
we were going to see feral intoxication. This was what we had flown all
the way down here to see. Ervin had assured me over the phone that seeing
this was only a matter of patience and the amount of time we had. But now
he confessed that he had never personally witnessed a single act of spontaneous
wild drunkness, nor were there any reports of such a thing happening. Moreover,
the cane didn't ferment after rain- he didn't know where we had got that
idea. But there was a tree on the island known as the jumbie cutlass whose
fruit was hallucinogenic, and the monkeys had frequently been observed
tripping out after eating it. So wild drinking "would be expected," he
now said. "Look at all the alcoholic dogs."
He
pointed out that "Alcohol is not a bad food source, as Joe Six-pack's belly
attests. One can imagine the selective advantage of being able to eat fermented
fruit. One can even imagine genes for extracting the calories in alcohol,
and seventeen percent who didn't get efficient at doing this and leave
acetaldehyde (which is what you make when you drink alcohol) in the brain
long enough for addictive compounds to form."
This was one
approach that Frank was looking at : alcoholics may be pushed heavily by
their genes or their environment, but alcohol itself may be also intrinsically
addictive. "If you do your homework on the blackboard, you could show that
acetaldehyde going to the brain can in theory interact with dopamine, serotonin,
and probably other neurotransmitters, to form an adduct which would be
an opiate-like compound that could be the basis of a true addiction like
morphine, opium, etc.. But nobody has been able to demonstrate that this
happens in man. So far such opiate compounds have only been found in the
spinal columns of Parkinson’s disease patients, but not alcoholics. It
takes a certain kind of enzyme to tie together acetaldehyde and dopamine."
It was
to explore such avenues that Ervin and Palmour started their alcoholism
research program in l980. Rats had been used in alcohol research
since the twenties, but theirs was the first monkey model. Since
then rhesus monkey have been tested in Rotterdam and at Harvard, sinomologus
monkeys in Denver, and Frank had just sold some of his drinkers to the
University of North Carolina. "When I started the study, the literature
said animals will not voluntarily consume alcohol in excess," he continued.
"The existing studies were set-ups for the animals to self-inject intravenously,
which is a more useful model for heroine, or forced-drinking set-ups, where
the animal is shocked every ten seconds until he takes a drink. But I screened
two hundred monkeys for voluntary consumption, and found thirty-five drinkers."
I accompanied
Amanda, a local girl who is responsible for putting out the rum and recording
how much each monkey drinks, one one her rounds. The rum that is used is
a hundred-and-fifty-proof local moonshine brewed in the hills and known
as "hammond," for Lord Roy Hammond, whose agents cracked down on the practice
after the Second World War. The hammond is diluted with water to thirty
proof and is placed from nine a.m. to one p.m. in a bottle alongside an
identical bottle of pure water. The monkey has the choice of which liquid
he wants to drink. "After two weeks you can tell who is a drinker and who
isn't," Amanda explained. "This tall one's a crazy alcohol drinker," stopping
at cage 0609-3. "He has already drunk 275 cc's in an hour and
a half. He usually drinks over 400 cc. After three hundred they get drunk
and lay down." 01907, however, hadn't touched his hammond bottle.
The monkeys
in the study were in small solitary cages, to keep environmental influences
to a minimum. But I wondered whether boredom and isolation factored in
a monkey's choice of which fluid; if I were locked in solitary like this
day after day, I'd probably go for the rum myself.
Ervin had prepared
a group of ten males so Maurice and I could observe the effects of
hammond on social behavior. We would be "sort of like a bartender observing
his customers," he explained. A bald patch had been shaved on a different
part of each monkey's body to tell it apart. Ervin gave us a crash course
in first-level screening for sixteen basic categories of behavior-- the
same techniques employed by biosocial anthropologists in the field, which
he said have proved surprisingly useful on mental wards and in prisons
in predicting recovery and recidivism rates. "Psychiatrists are too hung
up on speech," he said. "A person can sound completely rational, but you
can tell from his body language that he's dying to kill you." (Here Ervin
became a psycho maniacally wringing his hands in his crotch and jerking
his head uncontrollably to the right.)
"The first
split is between social and individual behavior," he explained. "Individual
is eat, drink, defecate, urinate, masturbate, orient (focus on something).
Signs of anxiety include scratching, ear flapping, yawning; abrupt anxiety
may be expressed by an involuntary liquid defecation. Social behavior breaks
down into affiliative and agonistic. Grooming is the female affiliative
behavior par excellence, as you can test by driving around the island and
seeing all the girls platting and braiding each other's hair, while the
boys are chasing each other and rough-and-tumbling. The same is true of
monkeys.
"For agonistic
behavior you describe what the focal animal is doing. You separate the
social hierarchy by the rate of threats received or emitted. The lowest
level of threat is displacement. A big male displaces a smaller one from
the shade. At the first level of aggression there is eye-to-eye contact,
frequently accompanied by a smile or half-yawn, a slight demonstration
of the teeth. At the second level, the mouth opens fully, the canines are
displayed, and the monkey barks. The recipient escalates or backs off.
In a full dominance confrontation the loser submits, and you get a pelvic
present. In the case of stumptail macaques, the loser is buggered.
"If the conflict
is not resolved by symbolic semiotics," Ervin went on, "the antagonists
chase each other and cut each other up. Their canines are as sharp as straight
razors. Eighty percent of the bites are at the axillary, femural, or carotid
arteries, where they are most likely to kill."
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