When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (4 page)

Despite the lack of sustained scholarly work on animal emotions, there is today a greater interest in the realities of the lives of animals than ever before. Practitioners in a wide range of disciplines share an increasing awareness of the complexity of animal actions—cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral, individual and social—and correspondingly greater humility in the face of questions of animal capacities. Humans are no longer as prepared to pronounce upon what an animal can and cannot be and do. We are starting to be clear that we do not know and are only beginning to learn.

While the study of emotion is a respectable field, those who work in it are usually academic psychologists who confine their studies to human emotions. The standard reference work. The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, advises animal behaviorists that "[0]ne is well advised to study the behaviour, rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion." Why? They may be elusive or difficult to measure, but this does not mean animal feelings do not exist and are not important.

Human beings are not always aware of what they are feeling. Like animals, they may not be able to put their feelings into words. This does not mean they have no feelings. Sigmund Freud once speculated that a man could be in love with a woman for six years and not know it until many years later. Such a man, with all the goodwill in the world, could not have verbalized what he did not know. He had the feelings, but he did not know about them. It may sound like a paradox—paradoxical because when we think of a feeling, we think of something that we are consciously aware of feeling. As Freud put it in his 1915 article "The Unconscious": "It is

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surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it." Yet it is beyond question that we can "have" feelings that we do not know about.

Psychiatric lexicons contain the term akxithymia for the condition of certain people who cannot describe or recognize emotions, who are able to define them "only in terms of somatic sensations or of behavioral reaction rather than relating them to accompanying thoughts." Such people are handicapped by their inability to understand what feelings are. It is curious that the study of animal behavior should demand that its practitioners turn themselves into alexithymics.

Defining tne Emotions

Psychological theorists speak of a set of fundamental human emotions that are universal, discrete, and which they consider innate. These fundamental emotions are like the primary colors and can give rise to many variations. One psychologist compiled a list of 154 emotion names, from abhorrence to worry. Theorists do not agree on which emotions are the basic ones. Rene Descartes said there were six basic emotions: love, hate, astonishment, desire, joy, and sorrow. Immanuel Kant found five: love, hope, modesty, joy, and sorrow. William James defined four: love, fear, grief, and rage. Behaviorist J. B. Watson postulated three basic emotions, X, Y, and Z, roughly equivalent to fear, anger, and love. Modern theorists like Robert Plutchik, Carroll Izard, and Silvan Tomkins found either six or eight basic emotions—but not the same ones. On most modern lists love is not included as an emotion. Many scientists prefer to call it a drive or a motivation, if they refer to it at all. All the emotions in these commonly used and accepted lists have been thought by some researchers to be observed among animals.

In addition to these, there are probably other emotions and variations within them that from time to time everybody, from whatever culture, feels. Compiling a full list can be hazardous,

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however, as the Polish Hnguist Anna Wierzbicka points out when she observes that in some non-Western cultures, for example in Aboriginal Australia, a concept related but not identical to shame plays a social role evidently missing in our culture. The word describing this emotion can include the English concept of "shame," "embarrassment," "shyness" and "respect." Yet it seems hkely that the feeling itself would be recognizable at least approximately to somebody from another culture.

We should be wary of confining any emotion to only one part of the world. After all, it was not so long ago that ethnologists thought that there were some cultures (obviously inferior) where the full range of Western emotions could not be expressed, and thus were probably not experienced. It seemed then as pointless to inquire into compassion or aesthetic awe among certain hill tribes as it now appears to catalog aesthetic rapture among bears. One of the "great" anthropological texts of the beginning of this century was titled Mental Function in Inferior Societies, written by L. Levy-Bruhl, who was professor at the Sorbonne. Such prejudice is slowly receding. The capacity to feel all emotions may be universal. Great literature suggests that certain feeling states are universal, or at least that the capacity to experience them crosses cultures, although different cultures and different individuals may describe them differently, or attach differing importance to subtleties of feeling. If feelings can cross cultures, it seems likely they can cross species.

This book discusses animal emotions following the order in which people find them plausible. Humans are most ready to consider the possibility of other animals having the emotion of fear. Love, sorrow, and joy are considered "nobler," hence less likely to be granted to others, especially animals. Although many people are very ready to speak of anger in animals, some experienced animal trainers argue that animals do not feel this emotion. The sociobio-logical debate over altruism has resulted in a widespread denial of the possibility of compassion in animals. As for shame, a feeling for beauty, creativity, a sense of justice, and other even more elusive capacities: these are the least likely to be ascribed to animals.

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Tne Functions ana Benerits or Emotion

What are feelings for? Most nonscientists will find this a strange question. Feelings just are. They justify themselves. Emotions give meaning and depth to life. They need serve no other purpose in order to exist. On the other hand, many evolutionary biologists, in contrast to animal behaviorists, acknowledge some emotions primarily for their survival function. For both animals and humans, fear motivates the avoidance of danger, love is necessary to care for young, anger prepares one to hold ground. But the fact that a behavior functions to serve survival need not mean that that is why it is done. Other scientists have attributed the same behavior to conditioning, to learned responses. Certainly reflexes and fixed action patterns can occur without feeling or conscious thought. A gull chick pecks at a red spot above it. The parent has a red spot on its bill; the chick pecks the parent's bill. The gull parent feeds its chick when pecked on the bill. The baby gets fed. The interaction need have no emotional content.

At the same time, there is no reason why such actions cannot have emotional content. In mammals—including humans—that have given birth, milk is often released automatically when a new baby cries. This is not under voluntary control; it is reflex. Yet this does not mean that feeding a new baby is exclusively reflex and expresses no feelings like love. Humans have feelings about their behavior even if it is conditioned or reflexive. Yet since reflexes exist, and conditioned behavior is widespread, measurable, and observable, most scientists try to explain animal behavior using only these concepts. It is simpler.

Those who argue against speaking of emotion and consciousness in animals often appeal to the principle of parsimony, or Ock-ham's razor. This principle holds that one should choose the simplest explanation for a phenomenon. Animal behaviorist Lloyd Morgan's version reads: "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of an exercise of a higher physical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale." This rule of giving credence to only the lowest or simplest explanation for behavior is not unassail-

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able. Many questionable assumptions lie buried in die assessment of faculties as higher and lower. Emotions are typically considered higher faculties for no very clear reason. Moreover, the world is not necessarily a parsimonious place. As Gordon Burghardt has pointed out, "The origin of life by creation is simpler than the indirect methods of evolution."

Preferring to explain behavior in ways that fit science's methods most easily, many scientists have refused to consider any causes for animal behavior other than reflexive and conditioned ones. Scientific orthodoxy holds that what cannot be readily measured or tested cannot exist, or is unworthy of serious attention. But emotional explanations for animal behavior need not be impossibly complex or untestable. They are just more difficult for the scientific method to verify in the usual ways. Cleverer and more sophisticated approaches are called for. Most branches of science are more willing to make successive approximations to what may prove ultimately unknowable, rather than ignoring it altogether.

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Evolutionary biology offers further support for the view that animals feel. In this model, anything that enhances survival has selective value. Emotions can motivate survival behavior. An animal who is afraid of danger and runs away may survive over the one who does not, while another animal that angrily defends its territory may live longer and better. An animal that loves and protects its offspring may leave more descendants. An animal may take pleasure in the ability to run swiftly, fly strongly, or burrow deeply. The old German term fiinktionsliist refers to pleasure taken in what one can do best—the pleasure a cat takes in climbing trees, or monkeys take in swinging from branch to branch. This pleasure, this happiness, may increase an animal's tendency to do these things, and will also increase the likelihood of its survival.

But not all actions driven by emotion have survival value. A loving animal may leave more offspring, thus making love an aid to survival; but a loving animal may also care for disabled offspring or

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companions that have no chance of surviving, or expose itself to hazards mourning dead ones. It may adopt the babies of others, not passing on its own genes. These actions would not enhance, and would probably decrease, its own fitness. Perhaps animals take certain actions because of what they feel, not simply because of any survival advantage conferred. Yet lovingness could still have survival value, because the net effect would be to leave more offspring. If a behavior that is usually adaptive also occurs when it has no survival advantage, this may mean that an overarching emotion, not a narrow adaptation, drives the behavior. Systematic observations of this sort could promote theorizing on emotions, even test their existence. If a usually adaptive behavior occurs in an unadap-tive situation, an overarching emotion, not a narrow adaptation, may drive the behavior.

Biologists often point to a behavior's evolutionary advantage as a way to sidestep the question of emotions. Scientists sometimes argue that the songbird is not singing with joy, nor singing because he finds his song beautiful, but because he is establishing territory and advertising his fitness to possible mates. Thus to view birdsong as an aggressive and sexual act provides a genetic explanation for the behavior. The bird's song may announce his territorial claims, and may indeed attract a mate, but that does not preclude the bird singing because he is happy and finds his song beautiful. As pri-matologist Frans de Waal points out, "When I see a pair of parrots tenderly and patiently preening each other, my first thought is not that they are doing this to help the survival of their genes. This is a misleading manner of speaking, as it employs the present tense, whereas evolutionary explanations can deal only with the past." Instead de Waal views the birds as expressing love and expectation, or, retreating a little, "an exclusive bond."

Similarly, human behavior that can be viewed as increasing survival fitness often cannot be explained from that standpoint only, as sociobiologists sometimes attempt to do. When monogamous humans have affairs, they are not generally thinking about maximizing reproductive chances by impregnating females other than the one with whom a substantial parental investment is being made, or about mating with genetically superior males for the ben-

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efit of their progeny. Indeed, adulterers usually try to avoid reproduction. Sexual abuse of children has no survival value either, yet is common. If humans are subject to evolution but have feelings that are inexplicable in survival terms, if they are prone to emotions that do not seem to confer any advantage, why should we suppose that animals act on genetic investment alone?

A Double Standard.

As human beings, we clearly apply different standards to ourselves than to other animals. Humans are conceded to have emotions. The usual reason given is that feelings are expressed in language, using words like "I love you," or "I don't care," or "I am sad." People live much of their lives according to expressions of feelings in themselves or in others. Although it is widely agreed that some people lie about their feelings to gain an advantage, and some people make mistakes about their feeHngs, or do not know what they really feel, or express them without credibility, few doubt that feelings exist—one's own, and those of others. The primary method of reasoning seems to be analogy and empathy: we know we have feelings because we feel moved by them, and others do and express similar things, so we believe that they have feelings too.

Such reasoning has its limitations. We learn from personal experience that other humans can feel gratitude because they say so and act as though they do. By itself, this sheds no Hght on whether a lion can feel gratitude. On the other hand, humans, even when embedded in sophisticated cultural environments, remain very much a species of animal; the relation of the physical to the psychic ingredients of emotions may well be shared. While emotions cannot be reduced simply to a blend of hormones, to whatever extent hormones contribute to emotional states in humans, they probably also do so in animals. Substances like oxytocin, epinephrine, serotonin, and testosterone—all of which are thought to affect human actions and feelings—are found in animals as well. Grossly oversimplified explanations of human behavior in terms of hormones