We may sometimes see them as commodities — as chicken salad and leather jackets and research tools — but animals are “bundles of emotion. They’re bundles of emotions. They aren’t tables and chairs.
To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.
I have known quite a few animals that are good at surprising people, naive and otherwise. I once found myself in a situation with my dog ' chickie, she's the youngest of the 9 dogs I have sharing my home, life and salary; she had taken a drink from her bowl and was sneaking up to me. I looked her straight in the eye and pointed my finger at her, warning in Konkani, “I have seen you!” She immediately stepped back, let some of the water dribble from her mouth. I certainly do not wish to claim that she understands Konkani, but she must have sensed that I knew what she was up to, and that I was not going to be an easy target. She is absolutely mischievous and down right naughty, needless to say, cheeky too! She had plans of goosing me! J Not a very pleasant feeling but loads of fun to her!
Now, no doubt even a casual reader will have noticed that in describing Chickie's actions, I’ve implied human qualities such as intentions, the ability to interpret my own awareness, and a tendency toward mischief. Yet scientific tradition says I should avoid such language - I am committing the sin of anthropomorphism, of turning nonhumans into humans. The word comes from the Greek, meaning “human form,” and it was the ancient Greeks who first gave the practice a bad reputation. They did not have dogs in mind: the philosopher Xenophanes objected to Homer’s poetry because it treated Zeus and the other gods as if they were people. How could we be so arrogant, Xenophanes asked, as to think that the gods should look like us? If horses could draw pictures, he suggested mockingly, they would no doubt make their gods look like horses.
Do animals have feelings?
Do they experience love and grief, for instance, or are those emotions reserved for our own kind?
Can emotions in other species really be measured?
Can certain animals with high levels of cognition express feelings while other, “lower” organisms cannot?
But understanding possible links between our own species and others arguably ups the ante.
Should we treat other species differently if we perceive that the line that divides them from ourselves is narrower than we’d thought?
Is there now an even greater ethical imperative for us to conserve wild creatures?
Some sociobiologists researchers who look for the roots of behavior in evolution–depict animals as “survival machines” and “pre-programmed robots” put on Earth to serve their “selfish” genes. There is a certain metaphorical value to these concepts, but it has been negated by the misunderstanding they’ve created. Such language can give the impression that only genes are entitled to an inner life. No more delusively anthropomorphizing idea has been put forward since the pet-rock craze of the 1970s. In fact, during evolution, genes - a mere batch of molecules - simply multiply at different rates, depending on the traits they produce in an individual. To say that genes are selfish is like saying a snowball growing in size as it rolls down a hill is greedy for snow.
Logically, these agnostic attitudes toward a mental life in animals can be valid only if they’re applied to our own species as well. Yet it’s uncommon to find researchers who try to study human behavior as purely a matter of reward and punishment. Describe a person as having intentions, feelings, and thoughts and you most likely won’t encounter much resistance. Our own familiarity with our inner lives overrules whatever some school of thought might claim about us. Yet despite this double standard toward behavior in humans and animals, modern biology leaves us no choice other than to conclude that we too are animals. In terms of anatomy, physiology, and neurology we are really no more exceptional than, say, an elephant or a platypus is in its own way. Even such presumed hallmarks of humanity as warfare, politics, culture, morality, and language may not be completely unprecedented. For example, different groups of wild chimpanzees employ different technologies - some fish for termites with sticks, others crack nuts with stones - that are transmitted from one generation to the next through a process reminiscent of human culture.
Given these discoveries, we must be very careful not to exaggerate the uniqueness of our species. The ancients apparently never gave much thought to this practice, the opposite of anthropomorphism, and so we lack a word for it. I will call it anthropodenial: blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.
Those who are in anthropodenial try to build a brick wall to separate humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. They carry on the tradition of Rene Descartes, who declared that while humans possessed souls, animals were mere automatons. This produced a serious dilemma when Charles Darwin came along: If we descended from such automatons, were we not automatons ourselves? If not, how did we get to be so damned different?
Each time we must ask such a question, another brick is pulled out of the dividing wall, and to me this wall is beginning to look like a slice of Swiss cheese.
As soon as we admit that animals are far more like our relatives than like machines, then anthropodenial becomes impossible and anthropomorphism becomes inevitable -and scientifically acceptable. But not all forms of anthropomorphism, of course. Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock. While in the
Perhaps that was the intent.
Sometime back on "Amazing Videos" I remember seeing a footage of an ape saving a three-year-old boy. The child, had fallen 20 feet into the primate exhibit at
Some scientists were also interviewed and they cautioned that gorilla's motives might have been less noble than they appeared, pointing out that this gorilla had been raised by people and had been taught parental skills with a stuffed animal. The whole affair might have been one of a confused maternal instinct, they claimed.
The intriguing thing about this flurry of alternative explanations was that nobody would think of raising similar doubts when a person saves a dog hit by a car. We justify the actions by saying that the rescuer might have grown up around a kennel, have been praised for being kind to animals, have a nurturing personality, yet we would still see his behavior as an act of caring. Why then, in gorilla's case, was her background held against her? I am not saying that I know what went through the gorilla's head, but I do know that no one had prepared her for this kind of emergency and that it is unlikely that, with her own 17-month-old infant on her back, she was “maternally confused.” How in the world could such a highly intelligent animal mistake a blond boy in sneakers and a red T-shirt for a juvenile gorilla? Actually, the biggest surprise was how surprised most people were. Students of ape behavior did not feel that gorilla had done anything unusual. Infact they had also interviewed a Swiss gorilla expert, who put it most bluntly, “The incident can be sensational only for people who don’t know a thing about gorillas.”
The Gorilla's action made a deep impression on me mainly because it benefited a member of our own species. I have seen on the telly and encountered numerous instances of animals caring for one another. For example, on Animal Planet I have seen a chimpanzee consoles a victim after a violent attack, placing an arm around him and patting his back. And bonobos (or pygmy chimpanzees) have been known to assist companions new to their quarters in zoos, taking them by the hand to “rude them through the maze of corridors connecting parts of their building. I've seen my own dog that cared for and helped raise a kitten. I still have both of them and they are in inseparable. I have seen near my house a cow and a dog that go everywhere and while it was raining the dog slept close to the cow despite the fact that it was getting wet!
These kinds of cases don’t reach the newspapers but are consistent with the gorilla's assistance to the unfortunate boy and the idea that apes have a capacity for sympathy.
The traditional bulwark against this sort of cognitive interpretation is the principle of parsimony - that we must make as few assumptions as possible when trying to construct a scientific explanation, and that assuming an ape is capable of something like sympathy is too great a leap. But doesn’t that same principle of parsimony argue against assuming a huge cognitive gap when the evolutionary distance between humans and apes is so small? If two closely related species act in the same manner, their underlying mental processes are probably the same, too. The incident at the Brookfield Zoo shows how hard it is to avoid anthropodenial and anthropomorphism at the same time: in trying to avoid thinking of the Gorilla as a human being, we run straight into the realization that the Gorilla’s actions make little sense if we refuse to assume intentions and feelings.
In the end we must ask - what kind of risk we are willing to take - the risk of underestimating animal mental life or the risk of overestimating it. There is no simple answer. But from an evolutionary perspective, the Gorilla's kindness, like Chickie's mischief, is most parsimoniously explained in the same way we explain our own behavior - as the result of a complex, and familiar, inner life.
