Machiavellian Motherhood

Life is harsh in the wild, and so are mothers.

Oh, mothers! Dear noble, selfless, tender and ferocious defenders of progeny all across nature’s phylogeny: How well you deserve our admiration as Mother’s Day draws near, and how photogenically you grace the greeting cards that we thrifty offspring will send in lieu of a proper gift.

Here is a mother guinea hen, trailed by a dozen cotton-ball chicks. Here a mother panda and a baby panda share a stalk of bamboo, while over there, a great black eagle dam carries food to her waiting young. We love you, Mom, you’re our port in the storm. You alone help clip Mother Nature’s bloodstained claws.

But wait. That guinea hen is walking awfully fast. In fact, her brood cannot quite keep up with her, and by the end of the day, whoops, only two chicks still straggle behind. And the mama panda, did she not give birth to twins? So why did just one little panda emerge from her den? As for the African black eagle, her nest is less a Hallmark poem than an Edgar Allan Poe. The mother has gathered prey in abundance, and has hyrax carcasses to spare. Yet she feeds only one of her two eaglets, then stands by looking bored as the fattened bird repeatedly pecks its starving sibling to death.

Natalie Angier, who I love, points out that sentimental notions of motherhood in the wild often do not square with the reality.

What is wrong with these coldhearted mothers, to give life then carelessly toss it away? Are they freaks or diseased or unnatural? Cackling mad like Piper Laurie in “Carrie”?

In a word — ha. As much as we may like to believe that mother animals are designed to nurture and protect their young, to fight to the death, if need be, to keep their offspring alive, in fact, nature abounds with mothers that defy the standard maternal script in a raft of macabre ways. There are mothers that zestily eat their young and mothers that drink their young’s blood. Mothers that pit one young against the other in a fight to the death and mothers that raise one set of their babies on the flesh of their siblings.

Images of fierce and dedicated animal mothers are often used to bolster the Vaseline-on-the-lens portrait of the ideal human mother. You know the type: self-sacrificing, loving, protective. So dedicated to her offspring that her own self, her own identity, is subsumed by Motherhood. Ah, Motherhood: a woman’s highest, best destiny. The role in life she was born to play. A woman isn’t truly a Woman until she’s a Mother.

Too bad for the motherhood fetishists that animal mothers regularly abort, abandon, starve, kill or eat their young — or stand by while their young kill each other.

So sentimentalized is motherhood in both the human and animal worlds that zoos don’t like to let on that certain of their star attractions aren’t exactly icons of maternal love:

“Pandas frequently give birth to twins, but they virtually never raise two babies,” said Scott Forbes, a professor of biology at the University of Winnipeg. “This is the dark side of pandas, that they have two and throw one away.”

It is also something that zoos with ever-popular panda displays rarely discuss.

“They consider it bad P.R. for the pandas,” Dr. Forbes said.

Do we know for sure that Butterstick wasn’t a twin?

Here’s another example of maternal indifference that defies the talking points of the family-values set. Remember how “March of the Penguins” was hyped by conservatives as an example of the strength and value of family (and as an argument against same-sex marriage)? Well, it wasn’t just the gay penguins at the Central Park Zoo or the fact that penguins rotate their mates that put the lie to that line of propaganda:

In the blockbuster movie “The March of the Penguins,” the emperor penguins were portrayed as fairy parents, loving every egg they laid and mourning every egg that cracked before its time. Among the less storied royal penguins, a mother lays two eggs each breeding season, the second 60 percent larger than the first. Just before the second egg is laid, the mother unsentimentally rolls the first egg right out of the nest.

In Magellanic penguins, the mother also lays two eggs and allows both to hatch; only then does she begin to discriminate. Of the fish she brings to the nest, she gives 90 percent to the larger chick, even as the smaller one howls for food. In the pitiless cold of Antarctica, the underfed bird invariably dies.

Very often, this kind of maternal behavior reflects some harsh environmental realities. For instance, if there are not sufficient resources to raise offspring, animal mothers will do what they have to in order to avoid raising offspring. Which, if you want to anthropomorphize things, sounds an awful lot like what humans do when they can’t afford another mouth to feed or it just isn’t a good time to be pregnant.

Well, except for the killing and eating part. Though that’s also done as a matter of survival:

“Cannibalizing the victim serves the dual function of providing a timely meal and ensuring that there is one less mouth to feed,” Dr. Forbes, the University of Winnipeg biologist, writes in his new book, “A Natural History of Families.”

A hungry mother can be the stuff of nightmares — especially if it is the mother next door. Chimpanzees are exemplary mothers when it comes to caring for their own, said Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist and the author of “Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection.”

Unlike humans, Dr. Hrdy said, the apes never abandon or reject their young, no matter how diseased or crippled a baby may be. Yet because female chimpanzees live in troops with other nonrelated females, a ravenous, lactating mother feels little compunction about killing and eating the child of a group mate. “It’s a good way to get lipids,” Dr. Hrdy said.

Happy Mothers’ Day!