Free Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison

State, was initially incredulous that large families of beavers, sometimes as many as fourteen, could survive throughout a winter sharing cramped living quarters and depending upon food from a common stockpile. To do so, she reasoned, the animals had to have highly complex social strategies allowing them to communicate in subtle ways, extensive sources of mutual and communal pleasure, and, above all, a high threshold for the release of aggressive behavior. Throughout much of the year, Ryden noted, beavers did in fact build up strong social bonds through pleasurable nibbling and grooming of one another, close physical proximity, and extended periods of ebullient play.
    “How do beavers keep from getting on one another’s nerves?” she asks in
Lily Pond
. “Not a single night had passed but I had watched my beavers swim alongside one another, or touch noses, or ‘speak’ to one another. And how often had I seen two or more of them seek one another out for no other reason than to feed in company? Yet the lilies they consumed side by side were available all over the pond. And what of the precision diving and porpoising bouts I had witnessed? Were these not expressions of exuberant play? [The beavers] engaged in nonstop aquabatics, plunging under and over each other, swimming together and down. Suddenly, up again. First one, then the other, rolling, porpoising, somersaulting. This was exuberance.” Nature, Ryden concluded, had given the beavers strong social glue; fast-held pleasures kept their aggression at bay. Exuberance bound beaver to beaver into a close and united group.
    Exuberant play appears to be particularly important in nourishing social affinities in very young animals that later become members of a cohesive social unit.Wolves, who form close packs as adult animals, show more playful behavior when young than do coyotes and red foxes, who grow up to be more solitary.Common seals engage in highly exuberant play when young; as adults they form tightly cohesive social groups and display little evidence of fighting or aggressive competition for mates. Grey seals, on the other hand, are much more likely as adults to disperse along a shore than live together in closely bound groups. They are also less likely to vigorously play together as pups. It is not just the amount of contact that is important, however, but the nature of that contact. The ethologist Desmond Morris has suggested that exuberant movements during play may have a “catalytic” effect on the formation of social affinities and that these bonds would not be so strong if the young seals “merely nuzzled each other in a tranquil manner.”
    Play is critical in diffusing social tensions as well. The naturalistBenjamin Kilham, who rears orphaned wild black bear cubs, recounts an occasion when, after a week had elapsed during which he could not spend time playing with the cubs, one of them “slow-bit” his hand with a canine tooth. “Something was obviously amiss between us, so … I took them on a walk. But even that was abnormal and strained. Reluctant even to start out, the cubs moved slowly along behind me, feeding on beechnuts for a while before following me up the hill toward a bear tree. Halfway up the hill they sat down, so I joined them. Then they decided to play … a twenty-minute roughhouse session ensued. Afterward I took a half-hour nap entwined in an ursine mass. Everything was back to normal.” Play was restorative to the temporarily disrupted social bonds.
    Elephants are particularly known for their tight social bonds and for an extended period of maturation. The young suckle for four years, and births are few and far between. Each young calf represents an enormous investment of time and energy by its mother and others in the close-knit community. Cynthia Moss, who directs the Amboseli Elephant Research Project in Kenya, describes the family reaction to the birth of an elephant calf as “almost delirious with excitement.” There