NATALIE ANGIER ESSAY

The other day I glanced out my window and felt a twinge of revulsion. Pecking at my bird feeder were two brown-headed cowbirds, one male and one female, and I knew what that meant. Pretty soon the fattened, fertilized female would be slipping her eggs into some other birds’ nest, with the expectation that the naive hosts would brood, feed and rear her squawking, ravenous young at the neglect and even death of their own.
I wanted them off of my feeder. That feeder is for the good birds, the ones that rear their own families and also look attractive. It’s not meant for sneaky freeloaders, birds that are looking for a free meal. I was suffering from a severe case of biobigotry: the persistent and often irrational desire to be surrounded only by those species of which one approves, and to exclude any animals, plants and other life forms that one finds offensive.
“Throughout history there have been vilified animals and totemic animals, said John Fraser, a conservation psychologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “There are the animals you don’t like and that you dismiss as small brown vermin, and the animals whose attributes you absolutely want to own.
Biobigotry is different from the impulse to avoid organisms that can hurt or sicken us. Rather, it is the dislike we direct toward creatures that live outdoors and generally mind their own business, but that behave in ways we find rude, irritating, selfish or contemptible. The squirrels are gluttons, the crows are schoolyard bullies, the house sparrows are boring and look like mice when they skitter along the ground. How we love those noble falcons and eagles that lately have blessed us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges. How we beg them to feast freely on the pigeons and starlings that curse us by nesting on our skyscrapers and bridges.
Sometimes our biobigotry is merely attitudinal. In the course of an interview about spotted hyenas, for example, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, scornfully referred to the wildebeest that the hyenas frequently prey on as “wildeburgers. Why? Because once a wildebeest has been caught, said the scientist, it just stands there with cowlike passivity and allows itself to be torn apart. Compare that with a zebra, the researcher said, which will go down fighting and kicking .
“Oh, we’re all of us prone to a massive over-interpretation of the things that we see, said Marc D. Hauser, professor of psychology and evolutionary biology at Harvard University and author of “Moral Minds. “I distinctly remember, when I first went to Amboseli National Park to study vervet monkeys, how quickly I developed strong feelings about the personalities of the monkeys - here were the great and brave ones, there were the lame ones that hid in the bushes and acted pathetic.
At other times, we take steps to favor our local heroes. We try to squirrel-proof our bird feeders, yank weeds from our flower beds, call Animal Control, and when all else fails, reach for our guns.
Stephen C. Sautner of the Wildlife Conservation Society cited the case of a friend and avid birder who has a colony of purple martins on his property. “He spends much of his time shooting and trapping starlings and English sparrows,’’ said Mr. Sautner, “both of which he describes as ‘evil.’
We always have a story to justify our most aggressive attempts at unwantedanimal control. The animal is an invasive species , and it doesn’t belong here. Or it’s a native species but its range has been unnaturally extended through deforestation. Or it likes our garbage and our raggedy parks and thus has an unfair advantage over fussier creatures.
Whatever the details of the situation, said Marc Bekoff, author of “The Emotional Lives of Animals’’ and emeritus professor of biology at the University of Colorado, “I see it as a double cross that we create a situation where cowbirds spread, or red foxes eat endangered birds, and then we decide, well, now we’ve got to go out and kill the cowbirds and the foxes.
Our proneness to biobigotry, experts said, arises from several salient human traits. For one, we are equipped with an often overactive theory of mind - the conviction that those around you have their own minds, goals and desires, and that it might behoove you to anticipate what they’ll do next. We spin elaborate narratives out of the slenderest of observational threads: Look, the blue jay is trying to dislodge the cowbird from the feeder. Could the jay know the cowbird is a nest parasite and be trying to drum it out of town?
“We interpret animal behaviors through a human lens and human morality, said Mr. Fraser, the conservation psychologist.
Related to the human impulse to see ourselves in nature is the persistent sense that nature belongs to us, and that we have the right and the means to control it.
“In the past, when we talked about exploiting nature, that was seen as a good thing, Mr. Fraser said. “Now we realize that that attitude is counterproductive to human success.