Capt. Stansbury found on a salt lake in Utah an old and completely blind pelican, which was very fat, and must have been well fed for a long time by his companions.… Mr. Blyth, as he informs me, saw Indian crows feeding two or three of their companions which were blind; and I have heard of an analogous case with the domestic cock. I have myself seen a dog, who never passed a cat who lay sick in a basket, and was a great friend of his, without giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog.… Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts, which in us would be called moral.”1
Thus wrote Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century. If we observe that a hundred and fifty years earlier, Descartes and Malebranche declared confidently that animals were nothing more than “unconscious automatons, possessing neither thought, nor sensitivity, nor mental life of any kind,” we can see how far we had come by Darwin’s time.
Since then, studies have emerged that shed light on the wealth of animals’ mental lives. As Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, and many other ethologists have observed, the basic signals we use to express pain, fear, anger, love, joy, surprise, impatience, boredom, sexual excitement, and many other mental and emotional states are not unique to our species. Darwin devoted an entire treatise to this subject, entitled The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.2
If you think about it, this shouldn’t be very surprising. If intelligence, empathy, and altruism exist in humans, how could they have appeared out of nowhere? If they represent the result of millions of years of gradual evolution, one would expect to observe in animals the forerunners of all the human emotions. That was Darwin’s outlook when he wrote in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex:3
With respect to animals very low in the scale, I shall give some additional facts, showing that their mental powers are much higher than might have been expected.
An overall view of the evolution of the species allows us to understand better that evolutionary trees reflect the building up of increased levels of complexity.
Our intention in this chapter is to explore empathy and altruistic behavior among animals. Now, this does not entail denying the omnipresence of violence in the animal kingdom. Here, by violence, we mean all hostile and aggressive behaviors and attitudes, including the act of wounding or killing another individual and using force to exercise a constraint, to obtain something against the other’s will. Most species we are going to discuss are capable of extremely violent behavior. The “chimpanzee war” that Jane Goodall observed in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, has caused a lot of ink to flow on mankind’s possible warlike origins, a subject to which we will return. Jane Goodall and her collaborators were stunned to see chimpanzees killing one of their former group members, who had joined a new group that split apart from their group but was living in a shared part of the territory. We should note that they were observing this behavior for the first time, though they had been closely following the life of these chimpanzees for years. Other researchers also observed this phenomenon, the elimination of a competing group, but these cases remain relatively rare. Infanticide is also occasionally committed by males on infants of females from other communities.
We should note, too, that violence—both among animals and human beings—always attracts our attention more than peaceful behavior does. No scientific data, however, allows us yet to conclude that violence is an internal, dominant impulse among men and animals.
After forty years devoted to studying animal behavior, mainly among the great apes, one of the preeminent primatologists of our time, Frans de Waal, thinks that the focal point of his research is no longer to prove the existence of empathy among animals, but to study how it is expressed. Yet the existence of animal empathy has long been misunderstood. Frans tells about hearing a renowned psychologist4 state that animals cooperated occasionally, but unfailingly gave priority to their own survival. And as if to prove once and for all the correctness of his point of view, he concluded: “An ape will never jump into a lake to save another.”
Hearing this statement, Frans de Waal began searching through his memory and remembered Washoe, a female chimpanzee who, upon hearing cries of distress from a female friend, raced across two electric wires to reach her companion, who was struggling desperately in a moat. Wading in the slippery mud at the edge, Washoe managed to grasp her friend’s outstretched hand and pull her to dry land. This is no minor feat, for chimpanzees do not know how to swim and are overcome with panic as soon as water reaches their knees. Fear of water can only be overcome by a powerful motivation; explanations involving self-interested calculations like “if I help her now, she’ll help me later” don’t work any better in this case than they do in the one mentioned earlier of Wesley Autrey jumping onto the tracks in the New York subway to save a passenger fallen in front of an approaching train. Only a spontaneous altruistic impulse can incite someone to abandon all caution. On other occasions, chimpanzees have been observed drowning while trying to help their young who had fallen in the water.
Among primates, examples of mutual aid abound. Chimpanzees taking care of companions wounded by leopards have been observed. They licked the blood from their wounds, delicately removed dirt from them, and chased away the flies buzzing around them. They then continued to watch over the wounded and, when they moved, they walked more slowly to keep pace with their weakened companions.5
At the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, a small female rhesus macaque was suffering from such serious motor impediments that she could barely complete the ordinary functions of everyday life like walking, climbing, and eating. Far from rejecting her, the members of her family and the group took special care of her, grooming her, in fact, twice as much as the other females of the same age.6 It should be noted that mutual grooming is one of the main forms of care and social interaction among primates. Such acts of caring for their sick or handicapped fellows are frequent among the great apes.
Animals associate with each other in various, more or less complex, ways, from simple gregariousness—the fact of being attracted by the company of their fellows—to stages of complex social organization where adults cooperate in taking care of the young, feeding them, and protecting them. As the complexity and diversity of interactions increase, it becomes useful to animals to take into account the behavior of their fellows with as much exactitude as possible. This tendency culminates with the ability to perceive the intentions of the other and to imagine what the other is thinking and feeling. That is how empathy is born.
Before we question the “theory of mind”—the ability, mentally, to take the place of the other in order to understand the other’s intentions or needs—let’s first consider a series of animal behaviors that illustrate their aptitude for empathy.
Benevolent behavior can take various forms: coming to the aid of one’s fellows; protecting them; rescuing them from danger; showing them sympathy and friendship, even gratitude; consoling them when they’re suffering; forging ties of friendship with them not connected to reproduction or kinship; and, finally, showing signs of mourning at the death of one of their fellows.
A number of observations show that animals are capable of spontaneously helping a fellow who is in danger, or who has specific needs he is incapable of addressing alone. Here are a few examples.
On a highway in Chile, in the middle of traffic, a dog is wandering, obviously disoriented, avoiding the passing cars as best he can. Soon, he is hit by one of them. The security cameras recording the scene show it lying on the road. Suddenly a yellow dog appears in the midst of the traffic, grips his hindquarters with its teeth, and, at the cost of great effort and after two attempts, drags his unconscious fellow to the side of the highway. Both miraculously escape the vehicles that are trying to avoid them.7
On a lighter note, I heard on the BBC the testimony of a kennel guard who was completely surprised one morning when he saw that three dogs had gotten out of their cages and had amply refreshed themselves in the kitchens. After that, he made sure the cages were closed, but the same scenario occurred again the next night. Intrigued, he hid in a corner of the kennel to see what was happening. Soon after the employees had left, he saw one of the dogs open the outer latch of his cage by passing his paw through the bars, which already was an impressive feat. But—surprise—instead of rushing to the kitchens, the animal first went to open the cages of two other dogs who were his friends, and only then did he and his eager companions head for the food.
Several qualities of this dog deserve to be noted: the ingenuity he showed to get out of his cage; his sense of friendship; and his ability to delay a gratification he had been waiting for all day (an expedition to the kitchens!) just in order to let other dogs consume a large part of what he could have eaten by himself.
Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has studied elephants in the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya for forty years, one day saw an elephant whose trunk had been partly severed in a trap. The elephant was very agitated and couldn’t feed himself. Iain then saw another elephant approach him. After touching the wound several times with his trunk, the newcomer carried reeds he had torn up from the river’s edge and brought them directly to the wounded elephant’s mouth. Finally, the wounded elephant was again able to feed himself, but only with these reeds that were tender enough for him to gather his stump. The most extraordinary thing is that the entire herd, so as not to abandon their injured fellow, settled near the reeds, which comprised the main source of its nourishment. This observation reveals not only a group solidarity, but also an intelligence about the specific needs of the other.
Primates have shown they are capable of forming lasting friendships. Frans de Waal cites the case of two female macaques, not related, who always stayed together and constantly exhibited affection for each other, kissed each other’s babies warmly, and lent a helping hand in conflicts, to the point that one of them (who had a lower rank in the hierarchy) cried out to her friend in warning every time another monkey approached with a threatening attitude.8
Lucy was a female chimpanzee raised by humans, and for company, she was given a kitten. The first meeting was not a success. Lucy, obviously annoyed, pushed the kitten over and even tried to bite her. The second meeting wasn’t much better but, during the third meeting, Lucy kept her calm. The kitten then began to follow her everywhere and, after half an hour, the female chimpanzee, forgetting her earlier reservations, took the kitten in her hands, kissed it, and completely changed her attitude. Very quickly, the two became inseparable. Lucy groomed the cat, rocked her in her arms, made her a little nest, and protected her from humans. The kitten was not inclined to climb up Lucy’s flanks, as young chimpanzees do, but readily jumped onto her back and stayed there while Lucy moved. Or else Lucy would carry her in the palm of her hand. Lucy, who communicated with researchers with the help of sign language and had a relatively rich vocabulary, even gave the kitten the pet name “All Ball.”9
In a zoo, two adult male chimpanzees who had lived in the same group, and then had lived apart for a long time, were reunited one day. The people in charge were afraid they’d fight, but the two great apes fell into each other’s arms and exchanged kisses with great emotion, slapping each other on the back like old friends. They then spent a long time grooming each other.10
Reunions between two groups of elephant friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time also give rise to exhibitions of exuberance. Cynthia Moss recounts the reunion of two herds that had spotted each other from afar (aside from trumpeting, elephants also communicate over long distances using very low frequency sounds, inaudible to the human ear). They began trumpeting as soon as they were half a kilometer away from each other, guiding each other by these calls and showing signs of cheerfulness. When they were finally within sight of each other, they began running and trumpeting loudly. The two matriarchs went straight for each other, crossing tusks, entwining their trunks, flapping their ears and rubbing against each other. All the other elephants followed suit.11
There have also been many cases of animal friends who, after living together for a long time, lose all interest in their usual occupations when one of their companions dies, and then let themselves die of malnutrition. J.Y. Henderson, who was a veterinarian in a circus for years, recounts the example of two horses who had long shared the same stable.12 When one of them died, the other began moaning constantly. He barely slept or ate. They tried to put him with other horses, give him special care, and improve his diet. All to no avail; he died within two months, and the veterinarian couldn’t diagnose any specific physical illness.
One also knows of a friendship between a goat and a donkey who had lived together for ten years rather neglected by their owner. When they were rescued and sent to different animal sanctuaries, the goat refused to eat for six consecutive days, lying in his stall, visibly depressed. When the new caretakers figured out that was due to his being separated from his best friend, one of them drove fourteen hours to get the donkey. As soon as he heard the donkey, the goat jumped to his feet, his behavior completely changed, and he began eating again, barely twenty minutes after his friend’s arrival.13
In The Age of Empathy, de Waal reports a number of cases of empathy among the great apes, which reveal a precise understanding of the needs of the other, along with the appropriate reactions:
At our primate center, we have an old female, Peony, who spends her days with other chimpanzees in a large outdoor enclosure. On bad days, when her arthritis is flaring up, she has great trouble walking and climbing. But other females help her out. For example, Peony is huffing and puffing to get up into the climbing frame in which several apes have gathered for a grooming session. An unrelated younger female moves behind her, places both hands on her ample behind, and pushes her up with quite a bit of effort, until Peony has joined the rest.14
Removing someone from imminent danger is another way of protecting them. For that, one needs to anticipate and understand that the other is in danger but is not aware of that danger, and that one must intervene before it’s too late.
Jane Goodall recalls observing in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania a young, nine-year-old female named Pom give an alarm call at the sight of a large snake and rush up a tree. Prof, aged three, who was following, did not hear or did not understand the alarm call and continued along the trail. As Prof was getting closer and closer to the snake, Pom’s grimace of fear widened, till she rushed down to gather Prof and climbed back up the tree, bringing him to safety.15 “Even more amazing,” says Jane Goodall, “was when Gremlin, aged about the same as Pom, ‘rescued’ her little brother from ticks. The little brother was following his mother through a patch of tall grass, and Gremlin was following him. Suddenly she grabbed him and pulled him away—he screamed and tried to follow their mother—but she would not let go and pulled him around the grass. I went to look—and hundreds of ticks must have just hatched and were clinging to the grass stems. Later the mother sat and removed ticks!”16
Chimpanzees raised by humans are capable of showing empathic behavior well adapted to situations. In the former USSR, isolated from the rest of the scientific world, the Russian ethologist Nadia Kohts studied the behavior of a young chimpanzee, Yoni, for years, whom she had raised with love along with her own son. The following passage, written by Kohts and quoted by de Waal, illustrates the concern shown by Yoni for his adoptive mother:
If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Yoni immediately stops his play or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists… The more sorrowful and disconsolate my crying, the warmer his sympathy.17
Toward those who have taken care of them, primates often convey gratitude by mutual delousing but also by clearly showing their joy. One evening a pioneer in primatology, Wolfgang Köhler, saw that two chimpanzees had been forgotten outside under a driving rain. He hurried to their rescue, managed to open the locked door of their shelter, and stood aside to let them regain their warm, dry beds as quickly as possible. But, even though the rain continued to stream over the bodies of the chimpanzees chilled to the bone, and even as they continued to show their unhappiness and impatience, before retreating to the comfort of their shelter, they turned to Köhler and embraced him, one around his chest and the other around his legs. It was only after thus exuberantly showing their appreciation that they moved to the welcoming straw of the shelter.18 A recent video also shows how a chimpanzee who has been brought back to health from the verge of death hugs the legendary ethologist Jane Goodall for a long time, before heading to the jungle, as she was being released into the wild.19
In the ecosystem of Amboseli, in southern Kenya, Cynthia Moss and her collaborators have, for thirty-five years, studied the behavior of about two thousand elephants, each of whom is identified and bears a name. The elephants have a very rich social life and possess complex auditory, olfactory, and visual systems of communication. Among those who live in the African savannahs, the females remain in the same herd all their lives, and the mothers often take care of the young of other females, which is an important factor in survival.20 Among the mass of observations recorded over the years, the researchers have isolated over 250 significant examples of empathic reaction to a companion’s distress.21 Among these reactions are behaviors as diverse as coming to face danger together, protecting others, comforting them, helping them move, taking care of the children of other mothers, or extracting foreign objects from a companion’s body.
Adult elephants often coordinate their forces when a threat presents itself in the form of a predator or a hostile elephant. When a wounded young animal or adult is in danger, another elephant usually comes to protect him. Most often, it is mothers who protect their young, by preventing them from approaching a treacherous spot, like the steep edge of a swamp, or by standing between two young elephants who are fighting, but mother friends can also intervene. When a mother has to be separated from her offspring for a few hours, the assistant mothers take over.
When an elephant has gotten stuck or has fallen and is unable to get up, often other elephants try to pull him up with their trunks, push him with their legs, or lift him with their tusks.
When a veterinarian’s tranquilizer dart, or sometimes a spear, becomes stuck in an elephant’s body, other elephants frequently touch the wounded spot, and sometimes manage to extract the foreign object. A mother has also been observed removing a plastic bag from her child’s mouth and throwing it far away.
Dolphins, as countless observations recorded by the ethologists Melba and David Caldwell testify, are capable of offering the same kind of targeted aid as humans, great apes and elephants.22
John Lilly reports the example of a young dolphin off the coast of the Antilles who had wandered away from its group. He was attacked by three sharks and uttered distress cries. Immediately, the adults in the pod who, until then, had been conversing with each other, fell silent and swam quickly toward the young dolphin in danger. Having reached the spot like torpedoes, they crashed full-speed (60 kilometers per hour) into the sharks, who were stunned and driven to escape into the depths of the sea. During this time, the females took care of the young wounded dolphin, who could no longer surface in order to breathe. Two of the females lifted him by swimming beneath him, until its head emerged from the water. From time to time, other females took over so the first pair could breathe too.23
In some cases, it was observed that such rescue operations could last up to two weeks, until the handicapped dolphin recovered, or else until he died. During all this time, the rescuers stopped eating, and surfaced only long enough to breathe.24
There are also accounts of cetaceans coming to the rescue of people. In Harbin, China, in the Polar Land theme park, the swimmer Yang Yun was participating in a free-diving competition without breathing equipment, in a twenty-three-foot-deep pool kept at temperatures near freezing for the beluga whales it contained. The swimmer was overcome with such powerful cramps in her legs that she began to sink and thought she would die. A beluga named Mila delicately took one of her legs in his mouth and brought her back to the surface, while another beluga pushed her from below with his back.25
In New Zealand, four swimmers were suddenly surrounded by a band of dolphins that were swimming around them in ever tighter circles, like a sheepdog herding its sheep. When one of the swimmers tried to break away, two dolphins forced him to rejoin the group. Soon after, one of the swimmers saw a great white shark pass by and realized that the dolphins had been preventing them from swimming into harm’s way. The dolphins didn’t let their charges go until forty minutes later.26
As for whales, they almost always come to the aid of a fellow whale attacked by whalers. They come between the whaler and their wounded companion, and sometimes capsize the whaling boat. Whalers often exploit this behavior. If they manage to get hold of a live baby, they know all the adults will gather around him. Then they kill the lot.27
Mutual aid behavior has also been observed among walruses, who create powerful social bonds, share their food, take care of the young of others, and come to the rescue of another when it is attacked.28 For example, walruses wounded on land by a hunter’s bullets are, whenever possible, dragged by others to the water’s edge, and, if they have trouble swimming, other walruses carry them on their backs to keep their heads above water so they can breathe.29
Mutual aid among individuals of different species is rarer, but not unheard of. Researchers regard it as an extension of the maternal instinct and the instinct of protection.
In his memoirs, the ethologist Ralph Helfer reports a scene he witnessed in East Africa. During the rainy season, a mother rhinoceros and her baby had reached a clearing near a salt lick, when the little one got stuck in thick mud. He called for his mother, who approached, sniffed him, and then, not knowing what to do, returned to the shelter of the trees. The little one continued to emit distress calls and the mother approached again but seemed powerless. A herd of elephants arrived, also interested in the salt lick. The mother rhinoceros, fearing for her offspring, charged the elephants, who moved away and returned to the forest. A few moments later, a large elephant came back, approached the baby rhinoceros, smelled him with its trunk, knelt down, and slipped its tusks beneath him to lift him. The mother immediately rushed forward and charged the elephant, who moved away. This sequence was repeated for several hours. Each time the mother rhinoceros went back to the forest, the elephant returned to try to pull the little one out of the mud, then would give up when the mother charged. The herd of elephants ended up leaving. The next morning, Helfer and a forest ranger approached to try to free the young rhinoceros. He became frightened and in his efforts to flee managed to extract himself from the mud, and finally joined his mother, who was approaching, alerted again by his cries.30
Consoling behavior has been observed among the great apes and the Canidae (dogs and wolves), but also among members of the crow family. Teresa Romero and her colleagues have recorded over 3,000 cases among chimpanzees.31 It emerges from their study that this behavior is more frequent among individuals who are socially close, and is more usually observed among females than males (with the exception, however, of dominant males, who are generous with acts of consolation, which helps reinforce the social cohesion of the group).
Generally, a chimpanzee will come to console the loser in an altercation that didn’t result in reconciliation. On the other hand, when the protagonists have reconciled after a fight,32 this behavior is rare, which shows that the consoler is capable of evaluating the other’s needs. Consolation is expressed in various ways: the victim is offered a grooming session; he is held, touched gently, or kissed. The consolation is reciprocal: those who do the consoling will often be consoled when their turn comes to lose a dispute.
The expression of mourning is particularly remarkable among elephants. When one of them is about to die, his fellows press around him and try to lift him up, sometimes even to feed him. Then, if they see that he has died, they go in search of branches, which they then place on and around his body, sometimes covering it up. The herd also performs rituals: elephants sometimes arrange themselves in a circle around the corpse, heads facing outwards, or file one by one past the corpse, each one touching it with his trunk or foot, and pausing in front of it before making room for the next one in line. One can’t help but be reminded of the ritual of human funerals during which everyone takes turns placing a flower on the coffin. When the herd finally moves away, if the dead elephant was young, the mother often remains behind for a while and, when she has rejoined the herd, she shows signs of dejection for several days, walking behind all the others.
Elephants also seem to be systematically attracted by the bones of their fellows, which they seem to have no trouble identifying. They sometimes spend an hour turning the bones over in every direction and sniffing them, and they sometimes carry a fragment away with them. Cynthia Moss tells how she had brought back to her camp the jawbones of a female elephant to determine its age. A few weeks later, the herd to which the dead elephant had belonged was passing nearby. The elephants made a detour to examine the bones, then went away. But one young elephant, later identified as the dead female’s orphan, remained for a long time after the herd had left, touching its mother’s jawbone, turning it delicately over with its feet, and picking it up with its trunk.33 There is no doubt that it had recognized where the bones had come from and that this discovery aroused in it memories and emotions. Moss also observed a female elephant named Agatha who, fifteen months after the death of her mother, often returned to the place of her death and manipulated her skull for a long time.
Chimpanzees also show signs of consternation when one of their own dies, and they sometimes linger for a long time, observing the dead body in silence.
Jane Goodall tells how an eight-year-old chimpanzee named Flint, who was very attached to his mother, Flo, fell into a deep depression when Flo died. Three days later, he climbed up to the nest of branches where his mother usually rested, contemplated it for a long time, then climbed back down and lay in the grass, prostrate, his eyes wide open, gazing into the void. He almost completely stopped eating and died three weeks later.
An intriguing case of mourning for another species has even been observed. In Zimbabwe, a young elephant had adopted a young rhinoceros as his playmate. When the rhinoceros was killed by poachers who buried him after cutting off its horn, the young elephant dug down for up to a meter to unearth his friend’s body, all the while emitting cries of distress, while two older elephants surrounded him and tried to console him, supporting him with their bodies.34
Mourning has been observed among a number of other species, including pets. In 1858 in Scotland, a Skye terrier stayed near his master’s grave for fourteen years, refusing to leave it. Neighbors fed him until he died, then buried him near his master. The villagers then made a statue of him in the little cemetery, in homage to his faithfulness.
In both monkeys and apes, infants under six months cannot survive without a mother—unless adopted. Sisters and brothers can make good caregivers when a mother dies. But there are also cases of adoption by unrelated individuals. In Chimps of Gombe, Jane Goodall describes how a twelve-year-old chimpanzee adopted a three-month-old orphan, thus saving his life.35 Christophe Boesch and his colleagues observed frequent adoptions among chimpanzees in the Taï forest in eastern Africa.36 Out of the thirty-six young who lost their mothers followed by Boesch, eighteen were adopted. It is remarkable to note that, among those eighteen, half were adopted by males, including one by its own father, the others having no direct connection with their protégés. Usually the males do not associate with any particular female, and generally don’t take care of their offspring. But the adoptive fathers carry the orphans on their backs during their daily journeys (an average of five miles a day) and share their food for years, which represents a considerable investment in the survival of the adopted chimpanzee. Researchers think that this behavior of solidarity was encouraged by the fact that these chimpanzees live in a zone where there are many leopards, an enemy of theirs.
We have seen that elaborate cultures, implying a cumulative transmission of knowledge, have developed extensively only among humans. But that does not mean that animals are without culture. Within a species, cultural variants are observed from one group to another, variants not of genetic origin.
The chimpanzees of neighboring regions in Africa have developed grooming styles that differ from one group to another, while among the orangutans of Sumatra, it is the tools used that vary according to the region. These variations are not due to the influence of the ecological milieus, but to the diversification of social learning. In a few weeks, entire communities of monkeys, birds, dolphins, whales, wolves, and bears, to mention only a few, can adopt a new habit “discovered” by one of their members. The example is often cited of titmice in England who, a few decades ago, began piercing the aluminum caps of bottles of milk to peck at the cream floating on the surface. Over a few weeks, this behavior spread throughout the entire country. The elaborate mourning of elephants we mentioned above belongs to what humans regard as a culture.
The notion of animal culture was first introduced by Jane Goodall in her Ph.D thesis in 1963 and later elaborated by Scottish primatologist William McGrew and others.37 As the ethologist Dominique Lestel stresses, even though animal cultures are distinguished from human cultures by the fact that they are not based on language, art, religion, or other specific aspects of human cultures, they are still cultures, since they are transmitted socially and not genetically. Nevertheless, these cultures remain much more limited than those among humans, since they do not seem to accumulate over generations.
Are animals capable of having some idea of what is going on in someone else’s mind? They are certainly able to observe the behavior of their fellows and take it into account, but that does not imply that they are capable of envisioning the actual mental states.
We know that animals can show dissimulation and orchestrate scenes in order to deceive their fellows. When a jay, for instance, stores food and sees he is being watched by another jay, he pretends he hasn’t noticed the other jay, and then, as soon as the other jay leaves, he returns to his hiding place, takes out the food and goes to hide it elsewhere. So he has understood that other jays would like to steal his food. But to what extent can he put himself in the other’s place and imagine what the other is thinking? Emil Menzel38 was one of the first ethologists to explore this question, while the concept of “theory of mind”—theory about what the other is thinking—was formulated by David Premack and Guy Woodruff.39
Do the observations available to us allow us to draw a precise conclusion on this? According to a study by Brian Hare on the chimpanzees in the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, near downtown Atlanta, the apes who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy take account of what a dominant competitor knows before they approach food.40 Thomas Bugnyar has observed similar behavior among ravens: When a raven approaches a food cache, it looks to see who is nearby. If it sees a fellow raven that might have noticed it storing the food, it hurries to the hiding place to be sure of recovering the booty before the other raven can. If it sees only individuals whom it knows are ignorant of where the hiding place is, it takes its time.41 So in this case there is an awareness of what the other knows or does not know. Similar behavior has also been observed among capuchin monkeys, dogs and wolves, and, as we will see, dolphins.42 According to Frans de Waal, the idea that the theory of mind applies only to humans is invalidated by all his observations.43
A study by Shinya Yamamoto and his colleagues has shown that not only do chimpanzees help each other, but they are also capable of evaluating precisely the needs of the other.44 In this experiment, two chimpanzees who know each other are placed in adjoining cages. A small window allows objects to be passed from one cage to the other. The first chimpanzee receives in his cage a box containing seven objects: a stick, a drinking straw, a lasso, a chain, a piece of rope, a large flat brush, and a belt.
The second chimpanzee is then placed in a situation where he needs a specific tool, which turns out to be either a stick, or a straw, to obtain some fruit juice. The second chimpanzee signals to the first, by gestures and voice, that he needs help. The first chimpanzee looks, evaluates the situation, chooses the right tool nine times out of ten from the seven tools available, and hands it to his companion through the window. He himself receives no reward.
If the first chimpanzee’s view is blocked by an opaque panel, he still wants to help when he hears the other asking for help, but since he can’t evaluate his precise needs by sight, he hands over any of the seven objects at random. This experiment was repeated with several chimpanzees and, in one case, the chimpanzee with the tools went to look through a small hole he had spotted on top of the opaque panel, in order to evaluate the other’s situation and hand him the correct tool!
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, the dolphin trainers had the idea of recruiting the dolphins to help clean the pool. It wasn’t long before the dolphins understood that they could exchange a piece of plastic or cardboard for a fish, and the pool soon became immaculate. But Kelly, a female, developed a stratagem to increase the yield: When she found a large piece of trash—a newspaper or a cardboard box—instead of exchanging it right away for a fish, she hid it in a rocky crevice at the bottom of the pool, then shredded it into small pieces, which she carried one after the other to her instructor to exchange for fish. A good investment, which implies at least two abilities. The first is the ability to resist the temptation of receiving a fish right away by exchanging the trash she had just found. We know, by comparison, in the famous marshmallow experiment, that more than half the time a child cannot resist the temptation of eating one marshmallow immediately, rather than two marshmallows ten minutes later.45 The second ability the dolphin manifested is to understand that the important thing is neither the size of the paper, nor the fact of immediately giving what one has found, but that each fragment has the same value as the whole.
Kelly’s ingenuity didn’t stop there. She also had the idea of hiding pieces of fish (again, delaying her reward till later), which she brought from time to time to the water’s surface to attract seagulls while she remained invisible below. Soon, a seagull spotted the bait and, when he was about to seize it, Kelly trapped his feet in her jaw without wounding him. Then she would wait for a trainer, who, hoping to prevent the seagull’s death, would hurry over and throw a fish to Kelly, who would immediately release the bird. After noting the success of her stratagem, Kelly taught it to her calf, and soon gull-baiting became the favorite sport for all the dolphins in the pool.46 Thus Kelly demonstrated that she was capable of reasoning, using tools, making plans, having recourse to very elaborate tricks, and teaching them to others.
Frans de Waal tells the story of a bonobo named Kuni who, after seeing a starling stun itself against the glass wall of his enclosure, grasped it delicately and encouraged it to fly with hand gestures. After this attempt failed, Kuni brought it to the top of a tree, unfolded its wings with both hands, as if it were a miniature airplane, and threw the swallow into the air, hoping, we might assume, that it would take off flying. So Kuni had remembered what birds usually do. The bird, too ill, fell to the ground. Kuni climbed back down from the tree and, for a long time, protected the dying starling from the young chimpanzees that approached it.47
This question may seem strange, but it is important with respect to the development of empathy. We know, in fact, that human children begin to display empathy between eighteen and twenty-four months, about the time they begin to recognize themselves in the mirror. The classic test consists of making a red mark on the child’s forehead without his noticing: When he recognizes himself in the mirror, he touches the red spot and usually tries to erase it. Since there aren’t any mirrors in the jungle or the ocean, it is all the more remarkable that many animals have passed this mirror test. The first were the great apes, as the psychologist and evolutionary specialist Gordon Gallup showed in 1970,48 followed by dolphins, elephants, and magpies.
In 1999, a team of neuroscientists noticed that very particular neurons, the von Economo neurons (also called “VEN”), which are spindle-shaped, were, out of the twenty-eight families of primates, present only among humans and the four species of great apes.49 These are precisely the species that passed the mirror test. Later on, the presence of VEN was also discovered among whales, dolphins, and elephants.50
There are correlations, then, between recognizing oneself in the mirror, the presence of von Economo neurons, and an advanced capacity for empathy. Researchers are in agreement, however, that empathy can take many different forms, and that the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror is not a necessary precondition for understanding oneself and others.
Can one demonstrate the existence of altruism as a “motivation whose ultimate goal is the well-being of others” among animals? We have seen with Daniel Batson’s experiments how hard it is to prove unambiguously the existence of this motivation among humans. One can imagine the obstacles the ethologist must face who undertakes similar experimentations among animals, with whom it is naturally much harder to communicate.
Some of the observations that have been carried out, however, clearly point to an altruistic motivation. Frans de Waal told me the following anecdote: “An old mother chimpanzee was having more and more trouble moving, especially getting to the watering hole that was far from her home. When she slowly started moving toward the watering hole, one of the young females would go ahead, fill her cheeks with water, return to the old mother, who would open her mouth wide, and the young female would spit the water into the grandmother’s mouth.” Christophe Boesch similarly describes a female, observed in the wild, who took water in her mouth to her old grandmother.
Daniel Batson agrees that, in this case, everything indicates the presence of real empathic concern, but that this kind of example, touching as it may be, does not constitute a proof of altruism, since we are not able to know what motivation the subject is obeying.51 It is with this uncertainty in mind that researchers have tried to imagine experimental protocols that will allow us to answer this question convincingly.
Many of these experiments came about because of Michael Tomasello, Felix Warneken, and their colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. Warneken, in particular, wanted to find out if chimpanzees were capable of coming to the aid of one of their fellows gratuitously—that is, in the absence of a reward involved.52 The scene takes place in Uganda, in a reserve where the chimpanzees spend their days on a vast enclosed terrain. At night, they are gathered into a building.
During the test, an experimenter stands against the bars separating him from the animals, pretending to want to get hold of a stick that’s on the chimpanzees’ side and out of his reach. Soon, one of the chimpanzees will pick up the stick and hand it to the experimenter. Then the stick is placed in a spot that is harder to reach, requiring that the chimpanzee climb up to a platform eight feet high.53 The chimpanzee, however, still goes there. It is interesting that the fact of rewarding the chimpanzee does not increase the frequency of aid. Warneken notes that young eighteen-month-old children react spontaneously in the same way.
Did the chimpanzees want to please the humans? Nothing indicates this, since they didn’t know the experimenters, who were not the same people who normally took care of them and fed them. To find out if the chimpanzees were willing to help their fellows in a disinterested way, Warneken used a second protocol.
Two chimpanzees are in adjoining enclosures separated by bars. One of them tries several times to open a door leading to a room both chimpanzees know contains food. The door is locked with a hook. This hook is arranged in such a way that it is out of reach of the chimpanzee trying to open the door, but within reach of a neighbor who cannot access the room containing the food. Will the latter give a helping hand to the former, knowing perfectly well that no reward is likely? Against all expectations, the answer is yes. Aware of the other’s need and witnessing his powerlessness, the neighbor lifts the hook holding the chain, thus allowing his companion to eat his fill.
In an old film made by Meredith Crawford during one of the original studies on cooperative behavior among chimpanzees,54 we see a tray of food placed outside two cages. A cord is passed through the two handles of the tray and one end of the cord stretches into each cage. If a single chimpanzee pulls the cord, it slips out of the handles and the tray doesn’t move. One of the two chimpanzees has been amply fed, so he is not very motivated to pull on his end of the cord. But the other one is hungry and wants his neighbor to cooperate. We see him pick up his end of the cord and, with gestures, urge his fellow to pull on the other end. The latter does so unenthusiastically, pulls on the cord for a few instants, then stops. The first animal then slips an arm through the bars and encourages his colleague by tapping him on the shoulder, the way we’d say to a friend, “Come on!” The second chimpanzee, after some encouragement, ends up pulling the cord until the tray comes within reach of the hungry chimpanzee.
This observation was made public in 1937, to show that chimpanzees understood the cooperative nature of the task presented to them.55 But it also seems to plead in favor of altruism, since the one who lent a hand to the other had nothing to gain from it except, one could no doubt object, the maintenance of mutually beneficial ties.
A similar experiment was carried out in Thailand with elephants. Joshua Plotnik and his colleagues taught elephants to pull together on the two ends of a rope to make a large wooden food-filled tray, placed thirty feet away, reach them.56 The rope was wrapped around the tray; if one of the two elephants began to pull by itself, the rope slipped around the tray, which didn’t move.
The elephants soon learned to carry out this operation, and on the second day, they succeeded eight times out of ten in bringing the tray to them by perfectly synchronizing their movements. The task was then made more complicated by bringing one elephant to the rope, then waiting a little while before the second was brought. The elephants understood there would be no point in starting all alone, and in the majority of cases, they waited (up to forty-five seconds) for the other to arrive. One of them was even cleverer and was content to block his end of the rope by putting his foot on it, letting the other one do all the hauling work! Implying that there are also free riders among elephants.
These examples concern “instrumental” collaboration. An animal can decide whether or not to cooperate. But researchers also wanted to observe prosocial choices, those that consist of choosing between two ways of acting, one beneficial to another individual, without involving cost to oneself, and the other, which does not take into account the other’s situation or wishes.
To do this, Victoria Horner, Malini Suchak, and their colleagues placed two chimpanzees in neighboring cages where each could easily observe the behavior and reactions of the other. One of the two animals had thirty plastic chips in a pot: fifteen blue ones and fifteen red ones. Outside the cages, in full view of the two chimpanzees, was a tray on which two bowls of food were placed. The chimpanzee who had the chips was trained beforehand to exchange chips for food. But this time, if he gave a blue chip, he’d be the only one to eat, and if he gave a red chip, the food would be distributed to both chimpanzees.
In the beginning, the one who had the chips gave them at random, but soon the two chimpanzees realized that with the “selfish” chips, only the chip-giver would feast. In this case, the chimpanzee who received nothing showed his disappointment and appealed to his colleague with cries and body language. The experiment shows that most of the chip-owners ended up choosing mostly the “altruistic” chips.57
One might think that the first chimpanzee made this choice not by altruism, but in order to be able to eat calmly, without having to put up with a frantic companion expressing his disapproval noisily when the chosen chip brought him nothing. Attracting the attention of the chip-owner clearly influenced the chip-owner’s choice, but when the frustrated chimpanzee expressed his desire too vehemently (by spitting at the chip-owner, aggressively passing his fingers through the bars, shaking the cage, etc.), the chip-owner chose the “altruistic” chips less often, as if these intemperate demands made him unwilling to share with his fellow. It was the moderate reactions, the ones that seemed simply to have the aim of attracting the other’s attention without harassing him, that led to the largest number of prosocial choices.
Is this altruism as we understand it among humans? Although the research carried out over the last thirty years still gives rise to controversy, it does indicate that some animals are capable of empathic concern, that is, altruism. In the final analysis, that’s not surprising, insofar as we expect to find among animals all the precursors of human altruism.
The scientists who have most clearly highlighted the wealth of emotions expressed by many animal species have often been accused of anthropomorphism—a cardinal sin among specialists in animal behavior. At the beginning of her career, Jane Goodall was criticized for giving names to the chimpanzees she was studying. Instead, she should simply have assigned them numbers. She was even more sternly reproached for describing their personalities and emotions, for using words like motivation, for saying that they could solve problems by thinking—and all the rest of it. Similarly, Frans de Waal was also reproached for using terms reserved for human behavior to describe the behavior of chimpanzees or bonobos.
To this day, a number of academics still refuse to use terms for animals that refer to mental states like anger, fear, suffering, affection, joy, or any other emotion similar to our own. Bernard Rollin,58 professor of philosophy and animal sciences at Colorado State University, explains that researchers, in their effort not to use terms for animals that describe human emotions, speak not of fear but of “retreat behavior”; they don’t describe the “suffering” of a rat placed on a burning piece of metal, but simply count the “number of its leaps or convulsions”; they don’t speak of cries or moans of pain, but of “vocalizations.” The vocabulary of common sense is replaced by a jargon that stems more from denial than from scientific objectivity.
As Frans de Waal notes,
Except for a small group of academics, basically everyone in the world believes that animals have similar emotions, similar reactions and similar decision making to those that we have. But you enter a psychology department and all of a sudden you hear “Oh, oh, I don’t know that. If a dog scratches at the door and barks, you say that he wants to go out. But how do you know he wants to go out? All he has learned is that barking and scratching gets doors open.”59
It would obviously be absurd to attribute to an earthworm complex emotions like pride, jealousy, or romantic passion, but when an animal is obviously happy, sad, or playful, why not call a spade a spade? Such stubbornness goes against common sense and fails to recognize the very nature of evolution. “If someone wishes to violate the principle of continuity,” Bernard Rollin writes, “and assert quantum jumps between animals, while remaining a proponent of evolution, the burden of proof is on him.”60 The theory of evolution implies that psychology, like anatomy, has developed gradually. So it is inconceivable that emotions, intelligence, and awareness appeared suddenly among humans. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,61 Darwin cannot be more explicit:
If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind.
Frans de Waal describes as anthropodenial the insistence on wanting to give man a monopoly over certain emotions:62
People willfully suppress knowledge most have had since childhood, which is that animals do have feelings and do care about others. How and why half the world drops this conviction once they grow beards or breasts will always baffle me, but the result is the common fallacy that we are unique in this regard. Human we are, and humane as well, but the idea that the latter may be older than the former, that our kindness is part of a much larger picture, still has to catch on.63
In the West, many cultural factors contribute to this anthropocentrism; in it we can find remnants of Judeo-Christian ideology, in which only man possesses a soul; the scorn of seventeenth-century thinkers like Descartes and Malebranche, for whom animals were only “flesh-and-blood automatons”; and, in our time, the chauvinistic and prideful view that adding mankind to the continuity of the evolution of animals is an insult to human dignity and its immeasurable superiority.
There is no doubt another reason why many of us stubbornly cling to the idea of a definitive boundary between humans and animals. If we acknowledged that animals are not basically different from us, we could no longer treat them like instruments for our own pleasure. The following statement made by a researcher to Bernard Rollin testifies to this: “It makes my job as a researcher a hell of a lot easier if I just act as if animals have no awareness.”64
The realization that all sentient beings, from the simplest to the most complex, are part of an evolving continuum, and that there is no basic rupture between the different degrees of their evolution, should naturally lead us to respect other species and to use our superior intelligence not to profit from them as if they were simple instruments in the service of our well-being, but to promote their well-being at the same time as our own.
Curiously, the study of empathy itself has come up against blockages in the framework of the study of human emotions. Many researchers in this field have shared their disappointments. Frans de Waal deplores the absence in science, until recently, of consideration for empathy: “Even with regards to our own species, it was considered to be an absurd, laughable topic classed with supernatural phenomena such as astrology and telepathy.”65 Richard Davidson had a similar experience when he began studying the neuroscience of emotions among humans. In the beginning, his scientific advisers told him that he’d be wasting his time and that this line of research had no future. But Davidson persevered and made this field of research one of the most active branches of the neurosciences.66
Even recently, Tania Singer, one of the major specialists in empathy and compassion in the neurosciences, confided to me that many traditional researchers regard her field of research as “light.” When the two researchers quoted above, with whom I have had the privilege of collaborating for over twelve years, undertook to study the effects of meditation on the brain and on empathic capacities, they came up against the amused indulgence of many colleagues. But groundbreaking results were accumulated, and little by little, research on empathy, altruism, compassion, positive emotions, and the effects of mind-training on the brain and on our way of life has gained respectability in the scientific world.