By Tim Friend, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/life/dcovwed.htm
Contributed by Marc Bekoff -
bekoffm@spot.colorado.edu
Warning: The following story is about behavior in
animals that strongly resembles emotional behavior in humans, and it
contains statements that may be offensive to some members of the human
race. First potentially offensive statement: It's OK for scientists to
describe animal behavior in human terms. That's according to Marc Bekoff,
editor of a book titled The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of
Animal Emotions (Discovery Books, $35).
The book is a collection of essays about animals written
by more than 50 animal behavior scientists. Their observations are the
sort they normally would only tell a friend privately over a beer;
reading the book is like pulling a chair up to the table to listen in.
The issue here is anthropomorphism - the ascribing of human
characteristics to non-human things, such as animals or pieces of wood.
Scientists take a dim view of anthropomorphism. An animal behavior
researcher (they're called ethologists) would no more tell a scientific
audience that a dog is happy than you would say a stick is happy. For
the ethologist, the "A" word is taboo. Dirty. Nasty. Ethologists have a
somewhat derogatory term for non-scientists who because of their lack of
education and scientific discipline anthropomorphize animals. They call
such people "pet owners." In The Smile of a Dolphin, however, the "A"
word is employed with apologetic abundance as ethologists, including
Bernd Wrsig (ravens), John Fentress (wolves) and Richard Wrangham
(primates) reveal their private anthropomorphic moments.
Perhaps it was safety in numbers that provided the
courage for the ethologists to make this mass confession. Or maybe the
time has arrived to acknowledge that animals are more complex
emotionally and cognitively than scientific-minded humans have given
them credit for over the past several centuries, says Bekoff, who has
studied animal play behavior for 30 years at the University of Colorado
at Boulder.
"It has made me feel good that people who have the book
are saying, 'Wow, it's about time scientists came out of the closet,'"
says Bekoff, who has an agenda with the book: "If more scientists and
more members of the public learn that animals have rich, emotional
lives, then perhaps society will do more to find alternatives to animals
for biomedical research."
Bekoff says that animals experience human-type emotions
when caged and used in invasive experiments; ignoring those emotions
helps justify experiments he considers cruel and unethical. Most
scientists, however, are uncomfortable mixing political agendas with
science. Bennet Galef of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, says
scientists must be careful that scientific truths and, more important,
uncertainties are not twisted to further a particular agenda. Galef is
the reigning king curmudgeon of ethology. His expertise is in animal
culture, or the lack of evidence for it. When it comes to emotions, he
doesn't believe a book full of anecdotes is proof of anything. "I
personally believe that animals do have emotional states, but our job as
scientists is not to know it, it is to show it," Galef says. "Science is
a game I play, and it has certain rules. The rule isn't to look at a dog
and say that he is happy. I don't find Marc Bekoff's way logically
satisfying."
But part of the power of Bekoff's book is that he lets
other scientists tell stories to bolster the notion that animals do
experience emotions. True, there is no scientific proof in the
traditional laboratory sense. Readers of the book will have to settle
for a non-scientific intuitive sense that something rich and not so
foreign to our human experience is going on in the wild.
In the book, Christine Drea of Duke University describes
the powerful maternal-type bond she formed with a young male hyena she
named Phoenix. Drea cared for Phoenix from birth and raised him in her
office at Duke. Eventually, he was moved into a hyena enclosure and
learned to socialize with members of his own species. Even so, whenever
Drea called his name, Phoenix would issue all sorts of vocalizations
associated with excitement and affection. One time, he was in such a
tizzy after having been beaten up by an older, dominant female that he
wouldn't let anyone examine him. But when he heard Drea's voice, he let
out a pitiful whine. Drea writes: "Before I was even fully seated, he
crawled into my lap (which he'd long since outgrown), turned over on his
back, stared up at me with bewildered eyes. . . . As I consoled him and
checked for cuts, he lowered his head, closed his eyes and fell sound
asleep. In scientific terms, he was a low-ranking hyena who had suffered
the stress and acute changes in circulating cortisol concentrations
brought on by social interactions with higher-ranking animals. In
layman's terms, he was merely a frightened hyena who needed comforting."
And that brings us to the No. 2 potentially offensive
statement: Social animals, those that invest a lot of time in rearing
their young and form bonds with other members of their species,
experience emotions such as love, joy, grief, shame, fear and
frustration. Admittedly, there is confusion among scientists about how
to define emotions and whether animals have some means of controlling
emotions. Another question: If an animal appears happy or sad, does it
actually feel happy or sad? If it's impossible at times to know what a
fellow human is thinking, how can we figure out what an animal is
experiencing internally?
No one claims to have the answers, says Richard Wrangham
of Harvard, author of the 1997 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins
of Human Violence . Wrangham specializes in the study of aggression. He
has conducted 30 years of field observations of chimpanzees and also
operates a full slate of laboratory experiments to test hypotheses he
develops in the field. Wrangham says that, as a rule, animals can be
quite aggressive when it comes to food. But he relates a story that
would indicate animals can employ restraint and deception. He saw two
chimpanzees eye an infant baboon in the care of its mother; the mother
was feeding on fruit in a tree. Chimpanzees will kill and eat baby
baboons. Wrangham watched the chimpanzees inch steadily closer to the
infant by behaving with remarkable nonchalance for 25 minutes. Finally,
when the chimpanzees were very close still appearing to ignore the
baboons they struck with lightning-quick ferocity and took the infant
from the mother.
The paranoia about being anthropomorphic about animal
behavior was in full display among a panel of ethologists at a recent
meeting of the Smithsonian Associates program in Washington, D.C.
Wrangham and Fentress expressed nervousness at speaking so openly about
animal behavior in humanlike terms. The paranoia harks back at least to
the 17th century to Rene Descartes, the French philosopher who helped
develop the objective scientific method of study, which remains the
standard for scientific inquiry today. Descartes believed that animals
are the slaves of their emotions and lack any of the type of control
observed by Wrangham in the predatory chimpanzees. In Descartes' view,
animals are essentially machines that behave automatically and lack
souls and because they lack souls, they cannot feel pain. Descartes was
instrumental in launching the use of animals for scientific research.
In 1879, Charles Darwin published a book, On the
Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. The book is not highly
regarded by today's ethologists, but it was a landmark because it stated
that animals experience emotions. Darwin believed emotions evolved in
both animals and humans for the purpose of furthering social bonds in
group-living animals. No one paid much attention to Darwin's book, and
now, more than 100 years later, scientists are still arguing whether
animals feel sadness, happiness and even pain.
"The only difference between now and 1879 is that
scientists today can say dopamine," Galef says. Dopamine is a
neurotransmitter involved in a great many human emotional states. Bekoff
says that the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of humans and other
vertebrates are similar enough to hypothesize that if dopamine makes a
human feel good or happy, it is doing the same in a dog or a rat. Many
scientists now agree with Darwin that emotions evolved to strengthen the
bonds linking social animals. Studies are being conducted that Bekoff
says may one day provide the evidence to back up what seems obvious to
pet owners - that a dog's happy face is indeed saying, "Don't worry, be
happy."
Go on to The AVMA
Supports Animal Abuse
Return to 28 January 2001 Issue
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