View from the North 40: Voting is animal nature, one way or another

I have been working to better understand politics and — with Super Tuesday behind us and the Montana primary election still so far in the distance that we can’t see our relevance beyond our in-state races — I’ve stumbled across a New York Times article delving into voting processes in the animal kingdom.

The article, “Sneezing dogs, dancing bees: How animals vote” by Elizabeth Preston, was cute, a lot cuter than you would expect out of the Times, which is known to publish novelette-length articles teeming with big words and stuffy attributions to Mr. Blahblahblah, Ms. So-n-so and Dr. Whatever.

Meerkats, the article says, move in loose groups of six to 19 members across the desert looking for food, keeping about a 30-foot distance from each other — which I totally get. Personal-space loving introverts unite.

Anyhow, meerkats, in case you don’t know, live on the African continent and look like the love child of a raccoon and a prairie dog.

A Dr. Marta Manser found in a study of meerkats that if three meerkats of any rank in the group let out a mewing noise, the group moves on to a new area for food.

So they don’t have a majority rules political structure, it’s just the power of suggestion by three group members — which I totally get. Someone mentions food around me, then I start to thinking about being hungry. All it takes is another person to say “Hey, anyone up for a burger or pizza or something?” and all of a sudden my loner-personal-space needs be damned, I’m the lead human in the stampede for the nearest food joint.

Meerkats just might be my spirit animals.

Honeybees, the article says, are a tight-knit species rallying around their queen, but that queen isn’t the center of all the decision making. I know, that surprised me, too. I guess they’re more like the Brits: The queen is mostly a figurehead. It’s the honeybee scouts that check things out then come back to tell everyone what’s going on and what should be done — communicating all this through dance movements.

It’s like Riverdance meets British parliament, and if the scouts have differing opinions on where to go, they dance it out until everyone is in step.

African wild dogs, on the other hand, communicate through sneezing, the article says. The wild dogs do two things, the author added, they laze around or they hunt, and how they decide which of these to do is through voting by sneezing. They obviously aren’t worried about coronavirus at this point.

Apparently, anyone can sneeze their ballot, but the less authority a dog has the more sneezing it has to do to be considered relevant by its clan members.

That said, this section ends by saying that “researchers note that dogs might actually cast their votes via some other, hidden signal. The sneezes could help the animals clear out their noses and get ready to sniff for prey.”

So maybe, just maybe, the wild dogs are governed by what Wikipedia calls a magocracy — a government structure in which the highest authority is some type of magic user.

More improbable forms of government, and leaders, exist in our realm.

Primates, the article points out, are humankind’s closest relatives, however, no one authority among the primates “tallies up … votes and announces the results.”

Of course, they’re primates, not humans, they can do math in their heads.

The thing is, the article said, a study of baboons showed that if a group has disagreements about what direction to go, the leaders of the different factions just wander off in the directions they want and everyone else sort of mills around in that space between the groups. They don’t necessarily end up where any one subgroup wanted to be, but when they got there the ended up together, and that’s what counted.

I guess they’re not so different from humans after all.

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Sidenote: The NYT article looks suspiciously similar to the article, “How animals vote to make group decisions” by Jan Hoole of Keele University, published in 2017 on the website Theconversation.com. Rest easy, readers, I’m on the case at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .