Across the millennia of human culture we have established a million reasons to demonstrate why we are not animals: animals don’t have souls; they lack a sense of self; they have no language; they don’t understand about death; they can’t reason; they can’t think; they have no culture. Every time we establish these absolutes we find more evidence to show that we share more things with our fellow animals than we are quite comfortable with.

Why do the lions in the Luangwa Valley specialise in buffalo when there are plenty of zebra? Why do chaffinches in Italy sing different songs to the chaffinches in your garden?

Joel Berger wondered about fear: does fear have a relationship with culture?

In the 19th century across much of the world, humans saw as their duty the extirpation of large carnivores. In the late 20th century we reversed this and tried to bring them back. And so, for example, wolves came back into places they haven’t been seen for generations. What would the moose make of that? Is fear of wolves hard-wired, a profound aspect of the moose being? Or is it something they picked up and then discarded when no longer relevant? At first the moose were so naive about wolves that a pack could walk right into a herd and help themselves: like foxes in a chicken-run. But Berger found that within a generation moose became wolf-savvy again. Fear, learnt by females, was then transmitted to calves. Here was a culture that had changed for a wolf-free society and changed again for a society in which wolves were once more a factor.

Culture is the passing of information by non-genetic means. It is the human capacity for cultural transmission that has allowed us to change the world. But we are not alone in the ability to establish and to change a culture. It is not a question of absolutes: it is a question of degree.

Berger’s research involved majestic hardships and eccentric practices that included pitching carnivore dung baseball-style at browsing moose to see if they responded to the scent. He is the hairy-arsed action-man academic whose experience comes not from the lab but from the wild world. Culture is not something that divides us from the animal world: it is one more thing that links us.

The Better to Eat You With: Fear in the Animal World by Joel Berger
Chicago University, £15; 360pp Buy the book

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