Why Even Goats Get Goofy

 

"Kingdom of Play

By David Toomey

Scribner, 304 pages, $29

There was a time when kids, on weekends and after school, were shoved out the door and left to their own devices. "Go play," our mothers told us, and we did. We wrestled, played sandlot baseball and touch football, dispersed into the woods for jungle warfare, smoked purloined cigarettes.

If anyone ever asked us why we liked to play, we would have said, "Duh -- it's fun." That would have raised the further question of what "fun" is, and brought us to the problem of defining "play."

Pursuing such questions to wherever their answers might lurk is unquestionably fun for David Toomey, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In "Kingdom of Play: What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Flopping Monkeys, and Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself," Mr. Toomey ranges across the breadth of scientific research into both the "what" and the "why" of play.

Our breadth of research, alas, is of no great breadth. Mr. Toomey notes that when the ethologist Gordon Burghardt describes his work on animal play to other scientists, the response is only, says Mr. Burghardt, "amused interest and a shared story about a pet." The very qualities that make play so much fun -- its frivolity, its lack of high-stakes seriousness -- tend to cast research into play as itself frivolous, and therefore hard to get funded. Yet pure science in its essence is a form of play, an exercise in open-ended tinkering with the stuff of this world that corresponds to, say, a curious octopus's tinkering with a floating plastic pill bottle.

So what is play, exactly? Mr. Burghardt provides a set of characteristics -- among them, play is nonfunctional (unrelated to procuring food or sex) and voluntary (even if Mom tells you to do it) -- that do not so much define play as distinguish it from work, allowing us to recognize the former not only in the human species but throughout the animal kingdom.

Using Mr. Burghardt's lens to perceive how other creatures fill their downtime, the author reveals how extraordinarily extensive the kingdom of play really is. Birds do it -- a crow, for example, will repeatedly slide down a snowy roof using the lid of a jar. Bees do it -- rolling tiny wooden balls any which way for the heck of it. Even Komodo dragons do it, biting and shaking a tennis shoe as a dog might. Sturgeons have been observed taking a gulp of air, then releasing it underwater and chasing the bubbles as they rise.

But why? Consider the risks assumed in roof-surfing, belly-flopping and mud-sliding: energy depletion, injury, a moment's inattentiveness with a predator nearby. Scholarly disrespect for the behavior stems partly from the general daffiness of play, and partly from how subversive it seems to natural selection's stern biases toward staying alive and engendering progeny. Yet whatever the risks and drawbacks of play, writes Mr. Toomey, "they are worth the trouble. Nature takes play seriously."

Ultimately, it is in its perspicacious survey of how play subtly interacts with -- and advances -- natural selection and evolution that this book achieves its charm. Its extensive bestiary and the smorgasbord of behaviors documented here suggest that intelligence, emotion, imagination, humor, creativity and culture are much more prevalent in the animal kingdom than humans might presume. Social play between two or more members of the same (or even different) species relies on -- and develops -- self-awareness, reciprocity, empathy, restraint, a feel for rules and boundaries, a fledgling morality. This is as true for wolf pups when they wrestle as it is for free-range children. Mr. Toomey mentions several studies of criminally violent men, lives that share a strikingly common absence of normal play during childhood.

The author also cites the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp on our generational shift in American child-rearing. Children now are so rarely left unsupervised to play together, so rarely allowed to negotiate their own rules, that Panksepp, who died in 2017, suggested we be may in the midst of "an unplanned cultural experiment" involving what amounts to play-deprivation. "Too many youngsters of our species never get sufficient amounts of natural, self-generated play," Panksepp says. "That may be one cause of our current epidemic of hyperkinetic kids with inadequate control over their own impulses."

Most animals play throughout their life cycles. I still go outside, control my impulses (usually) and play with kids grown as long in the tooth as I am. The games are different, but no less fun. Mr. Toomey admits to science's continued failure to arrive at an airtight, all-purpose definition of play, though he likes the musician Brian Eno's offering of "everything we don't have to do." Regarding our own species, that nicely plucks the strings that connect hopscotch and freeze tag to Bach's Mass in B Minor.

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Mr. Carey's books include "Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman" and "The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire."" [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Why Even Goats Get Goofy. Richard Adams Carey.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Mar 2024: C.9.