Post by Brooke on Jan 21, 2004 17:53:12 GMT -5
Animal Emotions
Pet owners have long believed their companions love them back. Scientists once scoffed, but now they’re coming around
By Mary Carmichael
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Aug. 18 issue — Everyone who’s ever owned a pet has at least one story (usually many, actually) of an animal that seems just as emotional as any human. Take Michiyo Takemoto of Tokyo, who swears she can tell whether her West Highland white terrier, Mook, is sad, happy or excited just by looking at his face. “He is happiest when he takes a walk and runs into his friends—other dogs,” she says. Or Godefroy Clair in Paris. Clair noticed that whenever his girlfriend, Alison, was with him, his cat, Sharkan, would begin to pout, even snarling at Alison when he left the two of them alone. Finally one day the couple kissed in front of the feline, and Sharkan urinated on Alison’s handbag. (Clair found the cat a new home and kept the girlfriend.)
THEN THERE’S JOHN Van Zante. Recently he watched Max, a Labrador retriever mix, sit lovingly by a woman in a wheelchair in a convalescent home while she patted his head for several minutes. It wasn’t until the elderly woman wheeled off down the hall that Van Zante realized she had been parked on Max’s tail the entire time. Max hadn’t complained at all. “He was in pain, clearly, but he seemed to know that she had special needs, so he just sat through it,” says Van Zante, communications director for the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Van Zante doesn’t understand why some scientists argue that animals have no emotions, that they merely respond to incentives like so many automatons. “If we were purely a source for food, I’m certain that Max’s reaction would have been different,” he says. “Haven’t these scientists noticed that their cats can’t wait to rub up against their legs and reclaim ownership of their people after a day at work? Don’t they take the time to greet their tail-wagging dogs when they get home?”
Well, yes. But they’re not as starry-eyed about what they see. For decades, psychologists have discounted the idea that pets can love their humans back. They have argued that animals that appear to express emotions are merely reacting to hormonal rushes triggered—in cold, but typical, technical language—by “outside stimuli.” But that view is changing, thanks to a loosely knit band of researchers working in fields as far-flung as neurobiology and behavioral observation. With new evidence gleaned from studies of dogs, chimps and sundry other creatures, science is starting to catch up to what pet owners have always suspected: animals experience surges of deep-seated fear, jealousy and grief—and, most important, love. Unlike the few researchers who came before them, the scientists leading the new movement actually have solid evidence. “Five years ago my colleagues would have thought I was off my rocker,” says biologist Marc Bekoff. “But now scientists are finally starting to talk about animal emotions in public. It’s like they’re coming out of the closet.”
And at an apt time, too—more and more pet owners now depend on their furry and feathered friends for emotional support. “People are delaying having children, but they still need that connection, that love,” says Tamar Geller, owner of The Loved Dog Co. in Los Angeles, California. For many in that crowd, she says, pets are serving as surrogate kids. That may explain the sudden surge in interest; the push to find out what pets and other animals are thinking is being driven largely by those who love them. After all, if you’re going to devote years of affection to an animal, isn’t it nice to think it’s not unrequited?
Aside from Charles Darwin, most students of animal behavior in the past believed that animals didn’t have emotions—or that if they did, we’d never know. Over the years, the belief hardened into dogma. Then, in the mid-’60s, came Jane Goodall. Since she had little scientific training, she had never been indoctrinated with behaviorist theory. “But I’d had this amazing teacher my whole life,” she says. That would be Rusty, a little black mongrel who lived at a hotel in her childhood neighborhood. “He went everywhere with me, and he didn’t even belong to me,” she says. “At the hotel he was disobedient, but he was beautifully behaved and sensitive with me. Of course, I thought animals had emotions, personalities, minds. How could I not?” Goodall unknowingly rebelled against standard scientific practices in the wilds of Africa, giving her chimps names instead of impersonal numbers and describing their —behavior with words like “joy,” “depression” and “grief.” The dons at Cambridge University rolled their eyes, but her studies were ultimately irrefutable. They might never have happened, Goodall notes, if she hadn’t preferred Rusty to “the scientific treadmill.”
Today, thanks to those studies, the treadmill is a rather different exercise. Researchers carrying on Goodall’s legacy are finding that it extends far beyond chimps, to dogs, cats, birds, rats and even animals as “simple” as the lowly octopus. All of them experience fear—the most ancient of the emotions, mediated by the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ in the brain. Many animals may feel something akin to love as well. Chimpanzees sometimes adopt baby chimps unrelated to them; horses have been known to form bonds so intense they refuse to spend the night in different stalls; whales have been spotted (albeit rarely) performing a peculiar dance that may be the equivalent of a human’s postcoital cuddling.
(cont. below)
Pet owners have long believed their companions love them back. Scientists once scoffed, but now they’re coming around
By Mary Carmichael
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
Aug. 18 issue — Everyone who’s ever owned a pet has at least one story (usually many, actually) of an animal that seems just as emotional as any human. Take Michiyo Takemoto of Tokyo, who swears she can tell whether her West Highland white terrier, Mook, is sad, happy or excited just by looking at his face. “He is happiest when he takes a walk and runs into his friends—other dogs,” she says. Or Godefroy Clair in Paris. Clair noticed that whenever his girlfriend, Alison, was with him, his cat, Sharkan, would begin to pout, even snarling at Alison when he left the two of them alone. Finally one day the couple kissed in front of the feline, and Sharkan urinated on Alison’s handbag. (Clair found the cat a new home and kept the girlfriend.)
THEN THERE’S JOHN Van Zante. Recently he watched Max, a Labrador retriever mix, sit lovingly by a woman in a wheelchair in a convalescent home while she patted his head for several minutes. It wasn’t until the elderly woman wheeled off down the hall that Van Zante realized she had been parked on Max’s tail the entire time. Max hadn’t complained at all. “He was in pain, clearly, but he seemed to know that she had special needs, so he just sat through it,” says Van Zante, communications director for the Helen Woodward Animal Center in Rancho Santa Fe, California.
Van Zante doesn’t understand why some scientists argue that animals have no emotions, that they merely respond to incentives like so many automatons. “If we were purely a source for food, I’m certain that Max’s reaction would have been different,” he says. “Haven’t these scientists noticed that their cats can’t wait to rub up against their legs and reclaim ownership of their people after a day at work? Don’t they take the time to greet their tail-wagging dogs when they get home?”
Well, yes. But they’re not as starry-eyed about what they see. For decades, psychologists have discounted the idea that pets can love their humans back. They have argued that animals that appear to express emotions are merely reacting to hormonal rushes triggered—in cold, but typical, technical language—by “outside stimuli.” But that view is changing, thanks to a loosely knit band of researchers working in fields as far-flung as neurobiology and behavioral observation. With new evidence gleaned from studies of dogs, chimps and sundry other creatures, science is starting to catch up to what pet owners have always suspected: animals experience surges of deep-seated fear, jealousy and grief—and, most important, love. Unlike the few researchers who came before them, the scientists leading the new movement actually have solid evidence. “Five years ago my colleagues would have thought I was off my rocker,” says biologist Marc Bekoff. “But now scientists are finally starting to talk about animal emotions in public. It’s like they’re coming out of the closet.”
And at an apt time, too—more and more pet owners now depend on their furry and feathered friends for emotional support. “People are delaying having children, but they still need that connection, that love,” says Tamar Geller, owner of The Loved Dog Co. in Los Angeles, California. For many in that crowd, she says, pets are serving as surrogate kids. That may explain the sudden surge in interest; the push to find out what pets and other animals are thinking is being driven largely by those who love them. After all, if you’re going to devote years of affection to an animal, isn’t it nice to think it’s not unrequited?
Aside from Charles Darwin, most students of animal behavior in the past believed that animals didn’t have emotions—or that if they did, we’d never know. Over the years, the belief hardened into dogma. Then, in the mid-’60s, came Jane Goodall. Since she had little scientific training, she had never been indoctrinated with behaviorist theory. “But I’d had this amazing teacher my whole life,” she says. That would be Rusty, a little black mongrel who lived at a hotel in her childhood neighborhood. “He went everywhere with me, and he didn’t even belong to me,” she says. “At the hotel he was disobedient, but he was beautifully behaved and sensitive with me. Of course, I thought animals had emotions, personalities, minds. How could I not?” Goodall unknowingly rebelled against standard scientific practices in the wilds of Africa, giving her chimps names instead of impersonal numbers and describing their —behavior with words like “joy,” “depression” and “grief.” The dons at Cambridge University rolled their eyes, but her studies were ultimately irrefutable. They might never have happened, Goodall notes, if she hadn’t preferred Rusty to “the scientific treadmill.”
Today, thanks to those studies, the treadmill is a rather different exercise. Researchers carrying on Goodall’s legacy are finding that it extends far beyond chimps, to dogs, cats, birds, rats and even animals as “simple” as the lowly octopus. All of them experience fear—the most ancient of the emotions, mediated by the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ in the brain. Many animals may feel something akin to love as well. Chimpanzees sometimes adopt baby chimps unrelated to them; horses have been known to form bonds so intense they refuse to spend the night in different stalls; whales have been spotted (albeit rarely) performing a peculiar dance that may be the equivalent of a human’s postcoital cuddling.
(cont. below)