The latest episode of the BBC radio programme Science in Action includes an account of what could well be the most spectacularly pointless and inept experiment in the history of science.
A team led by Canadian zoologist Professor Liana Zanette used loudspeakers and video cameras to test the reactions of African wildlife to a variety of sounds that included lions growling and a human voice speaking.
When the sounds were played to animals congregating at a waterhole in a South African game reserve, the researchers noted that the animals were twice as likely to flee from the sound of a human voice than from that of a lion.
Zanette, from the University of Western Ontario, concluded from this that the animals were more afraid of people than of lions, which apparently confirmed her perception of humans as “super lethal” and a “super predator”.
But the experiment tells us nothing of the sort. It's totally unsurprising that wild animals responded more fearfully to the amplified sound of a human voice than to that of growling lions, for the obvious reason that it’s something they wouldn’t be accustomed to hearing.
Growling lions are part of the soundtrack of the savannah; a human voice isn’t. If I were a gazelle or a gnu, I too would run in panic if my evening drink was abruptly interrupted by a metallic-sounding voice emanating from a loudspeaker concealed in the undergrowth. I imagine the noise of a V12 Ferrari or Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin would have had much the same galvanising effect.
To use a different analogy, humans would almost certainly take to their heels if they saw a North American black bear ambling down Lambton Quay – not because the black bear is aggressive toward people (it isn’t), but simply from a natural fear of the unknown.
But Zanette wants us to think that animals perceive people as a “top enemy” that they must avoid. This plays into an ideologically fashionable view of humans as intrinsically malevolent – violent destroyers of everything they touch, and more so if they happen to be white. Among the educated classes of the Western hemisphere, self-loathing is not just popular but mandatory. (It may or may not be significant that the voice played over the loudspeaker is that of an Anglo-Saxon male speaking English, the language of vile colonisers, rather than one of the native languages used by the poachers who represent by far the greatest threat to South African wildlife.)
Intriguingly, the professor’s comments are laced with a type of anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to animals – more commonly associated with Walt Disney children's movies. She talks as if animals somehow mystically communicate to each other the knowledge that humans are the ultimate predators. “Fear of humans pervades the entire animal community,” Zanette declares at one point. I wonder how this squares with the observations of explorers landing in previously untouched places who noted that the wildlife (seals, famously - and to their great cost) showed no fear of humans. Perhaps they didn't get the memo.
Zanette's fatuous theorising is barely one step removed from Bambi. It beggars belief that a scientist could be so childishly simplistic. It’s the sort of breathtaking idiocy that gives scientists a bad name - or should I say a worse one, since the scientific establishment frequently gives the impression of having abandoned credibility in favour of catastrophising.
You can hear the BBC interview here, starting at about the 22-minute mark. It's worth noting that the show’s host, Roland Pease, appears to share Zanette's astonishment at animals behaving exactly as you'd expect them to. Media credulity is part of the problem.
Addendum, October 10: A brief Google search reveals that many of the world's most illustrious journalistic institutions - the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times of India, Forbes, Newsweek, Popular Science (the name says it all) - uncritically reported Zanette's conclusions under headlines such as "Wild animals fear humans more than lions, study finds". This is the most highly educated generation of journalists in history, but they lack that most essential quality: scepticism. Shame on them all.
