Somewhere in India, a blind river dolphin seeks her companion. Under the dark waters of the Ganges she will sleep next to him. She has never needed to see. These dolphins find everything they want and need by listening to echoes. Above them in the sky, two cranes from the east are flying back from China to their western breeding territory in Siberia. The cranes are a mile up in the sky, looking down with their golden eyes. What is in their hearts, or in the hearts of the dolphins? Wholly apart from us, their lives of turmoil and satisfaction are not beyond our imagination. When the dolphin rises out of the muddy waters, or the cranes stretch their necks in flight, we are filled with a sudden sense of familiarity, the recognition that we share an emotional heritage. They feel and we feel, no matter how difficult it is to know just what their feelings are.
After a promising start over 120 years ago, when Darwin explored the terrain in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, very few scientists have acknowledged, researched, or even speculated about animal emotions. So persistent are the forces that militate against even admitting the possibility of emotions in the lives of animals that the topic seems disreputable, almost taboo. The scholarly literature on animals contains many observations, accounts, and anecdotes that suggest emotions the animals may be experiencing or expressing, or at least call for further research into this possibility. Yet little to none is forthcoming.
G. G. Rushby, a game warden doing “elephant control work” in Tanzania (then Tanganyika), saw three female elephants and a half-grown male in tall grass. Since his job was to keep the elephant population down, he shot the females—and slightly wounded the half-grown animal. To his dismay, he suddenly saw two elephant calves, who had been with the females but had been hidden in the grass. He moved toward them, shouting and waving his hat, hoping to drive them back to the larger herd, where other elephants would adopt them. The wounded elephant was dazed and helpless and did not know which way to turn. Instead of fleeing, the orphaned calves pressed themselves against him and supported him, and led him away from danger.
Terror, compassion, bravery—accounts like this, systematically developed, could provide evidence for a world of deep emotional experience on the part of animals, but there appears little place for them in scientific literature. Onetime incidents are dismissed as “anecdotes,” yet there is no reason to ignore rare events. And when it is feasible to collect other instances or even to repeat rare events, this is seldom done, so scathing do scientists find the charge of “using anecdotal evidence.” Discussing the ability of two symbol-using chimpanzees, Sherman and Austin, to improvise unusual and impressive combinations of symbols, primate researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh calls such spontaneous occurrences “arguably the most important sort of data we have,” yet notes, “we have avoided describing these in our published reports.”
Without question, anecdotes do present hurdles for scientists, including the inability to control the circumstances around the event, the frequent lack of documentation, and the impossibility of generating statistics from a single occurrence. But even when an event is meticulously recorded and takes place in a controlled situation, like the symbol combinations used by Sherman and Austin, the onetime nature of the event precludes its use in many scientists’ eyes. Experimental evidence is given almost exclusive credibility over personal experience to a degree that seems almost religious rather than logical.
Jane Goodall finds the scientific reluctance to accept anecdotal evidence a serious problem, one that colors all of science. “I’ve always collected anecdotes, because I think they’re just terribly, terribly important—whereas most scientists scorn the anecdotal. ‘Oh, that’s merely anecdotal.’ What is anecdotal? It’s a careful description of an unusual event.” She tells of a research assistant in a laboratory charged with logging the response of male rhesus monkeys to females, some of whom were being treated with hormones or had had their ovaries removed. “She told me . . . the most fascinating thing to her was that there was one old female that she observed in all these different states, ending with having her ovaries out, and whatever state she was in, she was the most popular. But she was one monkey, and that was ignored. There must be literally millions of observations like that that have never crept into the literature.” Such observations would provide a rich and suggestive ground for analysis and further investigation, yet there are almost none. While it is possible and customary to describe such events without using words that connote emotion, such a lean description is not necessarily more accurate.
This book defines emotions as subjective experiences, as what people refer to when they say “I feel sad,” or “I am happy,” or “I am disappointed,” or “I miss my children.” An emotion is not distinguished from a feeling, a passion, a sentiment, or what scientists call “affect.”Mood refers to a feeling that lasts for some protracted time. These words refer simply to inner feeling states, to something that is felt.
Most people who work closely with animals, such as animal trainers, take it as a matter of fact that animals have emotions. Accounts by those who work with elephants, for example, make it clear that one ignores an elephant’s “mood” at one’s peril. The British philosopher Mary Midgley puts it well:
Obviously the mahouts may have many beliefs about the elephants which are false because they are “anthropomorphic”—that is, they misinterpret some outlying aspects of elephant behaviour by relying on a human pattern which is inappropriate. But if they were doing this about the basic everyday feelings—about whether their elephant is pleased, annoyed, frightened, excited, tired, sore, suspicious or angry—they would not only be out of business, they would often simply be dead.
Training an animal will meet with little success if the trainer has no insight into the animal’s feelings. Some trainers say they work with certain animals better than others because they understand the feelings of that species or individual better. Circus trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams noted individual differences in the emotions of the tigers with whom he worked: “Not every tiger . . . can be trained to jump through a ring of fire. When I incorporated that trick into the tiger act I had to find several from among the twenty I was working with at the time who were not afraid of fire. That was no easy task, because most tigers will not go near flames.”
The fear of committing anthropomorphism can handicap an animal trainer, says Mike Del Ross, training supervisor at Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California: “The more you open yourself up to trying to read the dog, the more you concentrate and read the dog better.”
Asked whether they would still want to work with dogs if dogs had no emotions, trainers were startled by the very idea. Kathy Finger replied, “Probably not, because I think reading emotions is part of dealing with dogs—loving them, respecting them.” Del Ross exclaimed, “No way. What would there be if they didn’t have emotions?”
Such empathy in the direct scientific observation of animals is controversial. But wondering what one would feel in the place of an animal can be fruitful. Most scientists working with animals in the wild make inferences based on empathy, to make sense of their behavior, such as, “If I had just lost my closest companion, I, too, would not feel like eating for some time.” Thinking about feelings has proven to be a valuable way of thinking about behavior.
Evidence of emotion in captive animals and pets is often discounted as irrelevant. Captive animals, the argument goes, are in unnatural situations, and what domesticated animals do is irrelevant to what animals are really like, as if they are not really animals. While genuinely domesticated animals are different from wild animals, domestic and tame do not mean the same thing. Domestic animals are animals that have been bred to live with humans—they have been changed genetically. Dogs, cats, and cows are domestic animals. Captive animals like elephants are not, since through the generations that people have trained elephants, they have almost invariably caught and tamed wild elephants, rather than bred elephants. Since the nature of elephants remains unchanged, observations on tame or captive elephants are in fact highly relevant to free-living elephants.
While domesticated animals and wild animals may not be the same, they still have much in common; information about one can be relevant to the other. As field biologist George Schaller has written, “A loving dog-owner can tell you more about animal awareness than some laboratory behaviorists.” Biologist Lory Frame studied wild dogs in the Serengeti and made the intriguing observation that the dominant animals (the only ones in a pack who usually breed), seemed much less like domestic dogs. “Intuitively I seemed to understand Maya and Apache. And that, I realized, was because their subordinate behavior reminded me of domestic dogs. Not that my family’s dog was the cringing sort—on the contrary, he bullied me when I was a child. But Maya’s tail-wagging manner was reminiscent of the behavior people expect, and usually get, from their pet dogs. Dominant wild dogs, how ever, are something else. . . . I seldom saw one grin or wag his tail. Serious they seemed, and dangerous. If I met Sioux on foot I’d get up the nearest tree. With Maya I’d be more likely to pat her on the head and offer her a biscuit.” What she knew from her experience with domesticated dogs helped inform her observations of wild dogs.
That captive and domestic animals are in “an unnatural situation” is simply not a valid reason to treat observations of them less seriously. Humans are in just as unnatural a situation. We did not evolve in the world in which we now live either, with its deferred rewards and strange demands (sitting in classrooms or punching time clocks). All the same, we do not dismiss our emotions as not existing or inauthentic simply because they don’t take place in small groups of hunter-gatherers on an African savanna, where human life is thought to have begun. We are ourselves domesticated animals. We can be at a distance from our “origins” and still claim that our emotions are real and characteristic of our species. Why can’t the same be true of animals? It is not natural for humans to be in prison. Yet if we are put in prison and feel emotions that we don’t usually feel, no one doubts that they are real emotions. An animal in a zoo, or kept as a pet, may feel emotions that it would not otherwise have felt, but these are no less real.
To find out if her observations of captive dwarf mongooses told her anything accurate about mongooses in a natural state, Anne Rasa, author of Mongoose Watch, went to Kenya to study them in the bush for several years. She discovered that the behavior of captive mongoose groups in large enclosures closely followed that of wild ones with two exceptions. The wild mongooses had to spend much more time gathering food, and hence less time playing and socializing. Their lives were also strongly colored by the actions of other species. Eagles and snakes preyed on them, so they spent a significant time mobbing snakes to drive them away. They quarreled with the larger blacktip mongooses. They usually ignored lizards and ground squirrels, but occasionally tried to play with them. In other words, their emotional range was to some extent determined by the opportunities that presented themselves, but curiosity and play were common to both captive mongooses and those in a natural state.
On the other hand, the conditions of captivity can certainly change the way animals behave. Female baboons kept together in a cage form a rigid hierarchy unlike anything seen in the species in the wild. The point is not that captivity never changes emotions and behavior, only that both captive and wild animals appear to have feelings, and that the emotions of captive animals are as real as those of wild animals, and therefore equally worthy of study.
Emotions seldom come pure, in isolation from other emotions. In people, anger and fear, fear and love, love and shame, shame and sorrow often converge in particular situations. Animals may also experience a mix of emotions. Perhaps a dolphin mother who carries her dead baby around with her for several days feels both love and sorrow. Hope Ryden describes a half-grown elk calf guarding the body of another calf killed by coyotes after the elk herd had moved on. For at least two days the calf straddled the body, aggressively chased coyotes away, and from time to time sniffed and nuzzled the face of the dead calf. Eventually (after coyotes had succeeded in partly eating the body) the calf moved on. The calf may have felt grief; it may have felt lonely for the rest of the herd; it may have felt anger at the coyotes; it may have feared the coyotes. Perhaps it felt love for the dead calf. That feelings may be complex and multifaceted or difficult to interpret does not mean they do not exist.
Animals do not all have the same emotions, any more than humans do. Just as the behavior of animal species differs, their feeling lives may differ as well. This is often overlooked when people argue from animal examples. “Geese mate for life,” people declare. Or, “Robins kick their young out of the nest when they’re old enough to be on their own.” “The dog doesn’t stay and help the bitch raise the puppies—that’s just the way it is.” This wrongly assumes that all animals are the same and therefore we can draw the same conclusions about people. But while geese mate for life, grouse do not. The male grouse mates with as many females as he can and leaves them to raise the young on their own. The female Tasmanian native hen often mates with two males and the trio raises the young together. While robins fledge at an early age, condors stay with their parents for years. Male and female wolves raise their puppies together. These differences often produce a kind of sociobiology parlor game in which people try to prove points about human behavior by pointing to an animal species that exhibits the behavior they want to define as “natural” for humans. But animal species may also differ in the content of their emotions. Evidence that elephants feel compassion or sorrow does not mean that hippos feel compassion or that penguins feel sorrow. Perhaps they do, perhaps not.
Animals also differ from one another as individuals. Among elephants, for example, one may be timid and another bold. One may be prone to attacks of rage, another peaceable. One Victorian commented on working elephants in Rangoon, “There are willing workers and there are skulkers; there are gentle tempers, and there are others as dour as a door-nail. Some of them will drag a log two tons in weight without a groan; while others, who are equally powerful but less willing, will make a dreadful fuss over a stick that is, comparatively speaking, nothing.” Of a species he hunted, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: “[B]ears differ individually in courage and ferocity precisely as men do. . . . One grizzly can scarcely be bullied into resistance; the next may fight to the end, against any odds, without flinching, or even attack unprovoked. . . . Even old hunters—who indeed, as a class, are very narrow-minded and opinionated—often generalize just as rashly as beginners.”
Most ordinary people who have direct contact with animals freely concede the reality of animal emotions. Their belief arises from the evidence of their senses and logical deduction. A person who hears birds attacking a cat near their nest usually experiences them as angry. When we see a squirrel flee from us, we think that it is afraid. We see a cat licking its kittens and feel it loves them. We see a bird throbbing with song and suppose it to be happy. Even those with only indirect experience of animals often recognize what they see to be an emotional state, a feeling, which they correlate to a similar human feeling. In this respect the layperson’s description of animal life may be more accurate and is certainly richer than the standard behaviorist’s description, which shows no effort to investigate animal emotions systematically or in depth.
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 “[O]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 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 alexithymia 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.
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, however, as the Polish linguist 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 likely 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 tided Mental Function in Inferior Societies, written by L. Lévy-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 sociobiological 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.
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 Ockham’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 unassailable. Many questionable assumptions lie buried in the 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.
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 funktionslust 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 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 unadaptive 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 primatologist 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 benefit 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?
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 feelings, 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 light 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 have proved not only faulty but pernicious; care should be taken to avoid the same mistake in explaining animal behavior.
Belying the closely held belief that emotions are the exclusively human products of our unparalleled mental powers, the physical pathways of human emotion are among the most primitive. The part of the brain called the limbic system, which is thought to mediate emotion, is one of the most phylogenetically ancient parts of the human brain, so much so that it is sometimes called “the reptile brain.” From a purely physical standpoint, it would be a biological miracle if humans were the only animals to feel. Can it then be shown, say, that a cat loves her kittens or that kittens love their mother? If measurements showed hormone levels surging in the cat’s bloodstream when she sees her kittens, and electrical activity spiking in certain parts of the cat’s brain, would that be accepted as proof? Many scientists would still say no; we can never know if a cat loves. Yet most observers already believe that the cat loves the kittens, simply on the basis of her behavior. Scientists prefer not to say so.
Could it be that the statement “The ape is clearly sad” is not so different from “John is clearly sad”? The clearly signals an interpretation; it refers to clues that are socially agreed upon to indicate sadness. John is staring at the ground for hours and sighing. So is the ape. John may refuse to eat. So might the ape. John refuses to speak; when asked how he feels, he stares past the speaker. We do not, for that reason, say that he cannot feel sorrow or he would say so. We can be wrong about the ape. We can also be wrong about John. John might, in fact, be feeling something entirely different—apathy, perhaps, or existential despair. We may have misunderstood his actions, his facial expressions, and his vocalizations. Clearly is a statement about the kind of evidence we think we have, but our evidence may not be as good for people, nor as poor for other animals, as we have assumed.
Humans do have the advantage of language, one of the biggest differences between humans and other animals. Animals cannot speak of their feelings in a way humans can reliably understand, although the language barrier between humans and animals is not absolute. But language is not entirely trustworthy as a yardstick of feeling between humans. Verbal assertion of a feeling does not prove the emotion exists, nor does the inability to verbalize an emotion prove it does not. Some profoundly retarded humans cannot speak their feelings; this does not mean they do not have them. Mute humans feel. Intellectually sophisticated people can lie about their feelings or conceal them. Intellectual capacity may distinguish people from other animals, even if only in degree, but even among humans, intelligence and emotion are not closely correlated.
Language is a part of culture, and cultures around the world seem to make many of the same distinctions between emotions and to refer to similar experiences. But can we feel an emotion for which our culture provides no word or no examples? No doubt there are emotions promoted in one culture and not another, but this does not mean they are not experienced in all of them. It may be difficult to define or express them, given the language to which one is born; it may even be difficult to think about them, and especially to convey them to another person. Yet the feelings themselves may have a certain autonomy such that they may nonetheless be felt. Similarly, animals may have emotional experiences it would be hard to express or put into words, even if they had the capacity to use words, but they would not for that reason cease to be real feelings. The language barrier notwithstanding, humans may well share with animals the vast majority of feelings of which they are capable.
The prejudice has long existed that only humans think and feel because only humans can communicate thoughts and feelings in words, whether written or spoken. Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, believed animals to be “thoughtless brutes,”automata, machines:
There are [no men] so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same . . . the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts.
An unknown contemporary of Descartes put this position starkly:
The [Cartesian] scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them to see the circulation of the blood, which was a great subject of controversy.
Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. “Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines,” he wrote. “Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?” Elsewhere, in Le philosophe ignorant, he criticizes Descartes by saying that he “dared to say that animals are pure machines who looked for food when they had no appetite, who had the organs for feeling only to never have the slightest feeling, who screamed without pain, who showed their pleasure without joy, who possessed a brain only to have in it not even the slightest idea, and who were in this way a perpetual contradiction of nature.” As early as 1738, Voltaire talked about the humane feelings of the great English physicist Isaac Newton and how, like the philosopher John Locke, he was convinced that animals had the same sentiments man did. Voltaire writes: “He [Newton] believed that it was a very terrible contradiction to believe that animals could feel, and yet cause them to suffer.”
It is true that most animals have no speech that humans yet understand. But is the absence of speech, after all, as important an indication of feelings as some philosophers have imagined it to be? Several chimpanzees and other great apes have American Sign Language (ASL) vocabularies of more than a hundred words. They communicate not only with humans but with members of their own species. Would it not be parsimonious to suppose that they had previously communicated some of these same thoughts to other apes via means other than human sign language? Why would they wait for scientists before doing something they were already capable of doing? The fact that apes do not have human vocal cords does not mean that they must remain uncommunicative. Following a first flush of excitement, the overwhelming response of the scientific community to signing apes has been to ignore or disbelieve them, both as individuals and as a species. Given that statements made by apes about food and toys are attacked, one can only imagine the reaction to statements about their feelings. Rooted prejudice claims that animal feelings cannot be known because animals cannot speak; when they do speak in a human tongue, the claim is that what they are saying cannot possibly mean what humans mean.
Even when animals speak our language, humans do not always take them at their word. For sixteen years Alex, an African grey parrot, has been trained by psychologist Irene Pepperberg, who researches the bird’s cognitive abilities. Alex is one of the few parrots in the world who has been demonstrated to understand the meaning of the words he speaks. He knows the names of fifty objects, seven colors, and five shapes. He can enumerate up to six objects and say which of two objects is smaller. Alex has also picked up many “functional” phrases. He has learned “I’m gonna go now,” something he hears people say in Pepperberg’s laboratory. Pepperberg describes how, when Alex is scolded, “We say, ‘No! Bad boy!’ We walk out. And he knows what to say contextually, applicably. He brings us back in by saying, ‘Come here! I’m sorry!’” Alex learned to say he was sorry by hearing humans say it. He knows when to say it. Does he feel regret? “He bites, he says, ‘I’m sorry’ and he bites again,” says Pepperberg, somewhat irritably. “There’s no contrition!” Just like many people.
Here is an animal who appears to be verbally reporting an emotional state—regret—but we don’t believe him. If he were really sorry (as we understand the term) for biting, would he immediately bite again? Perhaps he would. Whatever is going on inside Alex, he is motivated enough to learn human words for human feelings—possibly to make humans into more satisfactory parrot companions. Alex may not feel contrition about hurting someone. Pepperberg may have no word for what Alex wants from her either; she may never have felt what Alex feels. Humans are surprisingly deficient in vocabulary for positive social emotions, and unduly successful at naming negative individualistic ones. Could there not be gradations of social proximity and affection at the top of the forest canopy for which humans are functionally emotional illiterates? Maybe we have something to learn.
Nonverbal communication among humans has sparked increasing interest among academics and therapists in the last few years. Many complex mental states are conveyed more conveniently by gestures than by sentences, while others appear to escape verbal language entirely. Attempts to convey subtle or elusive feelings leave everybody with a sense of the inadequacy of speech. Poetry, after all, is an attempt to convey feelings, moods, states, and even thoughts that are hard to grasp and that seem to defy language in prose. And some feelings do in fact elude language, even poetry, altogether. The fine arts and silence pick up where words leave off.
There is little doubt that humans communicate thoughts and feelings without words; indeed, there is growing evidence that a great part of communication with others takes place outside verbal speech. Just as humans communicate through body language, gestures, and expressive acts, formalized through mime and dance, consideration should be given to the nonverbal statements about feelings that animals make.
Animals communicate information through posture, vocalizations, gestures, and actions, both to other animals and to humans who are attentive. Although study of these patterns is improving, even specialists can be rather poor at interpreting this information; this is especially true for those unfamiliar with the species. The animals themselves are much better at understanding these signals, even across species. Indeed, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas speculates that animals are much better at reading human body signals than humans are at reading animal signals of any kind. “Our kind may be able to bully other species not because we are good at communication but because we aren’t.” De Waal complains that apes are so good at reading human body language as to leave people who work with them feeling transparent.
After fifteen years of studying red foxes, raising them and living with them, David Macdonald understands their body language. He can tell at a glance a happy fox, an excited fox, a nervous fox. He freely writes of them as playful, furious, besotted, fearful, confident, contented, flirtatious, or humiliated. His Running with the Fox illustrates fox body language so that those less familiar with foxes can figure it out. Yet because the emotions of animals are not scientifically respectable, when Macdonald discusses whether foxes enjoy killing, he retreats, with the caveat, “assuming they are subject to emotions recognizable to humans . . .” He calls this question “philosophically unanswerable.” But to most lay people it is no more philosophically unanswerable than the question of whether other humans have emotions, including sadism.
In Konrad Lorenz’s The Year of the Greylag Goose, the caption to one photograph of a gander reads: “After Ado [another gander] had appropriated Selma [his former mate], Gurnemanz went to pieces, as can be seen in this picture.”To a person only casually familiar with geese, this cannot be seen at all. It might as easily be a happy goose or a furious goose. A goose does not have a mobile face, so there is little by way of facial expression. Lorenz, from long experience, knows a goose’s body language and can read it. Gurnemanz’s posture and neck position tell of his submission and demoralization. Elsewhere Lorenz describes goose postures, gestures, and sounds as victorious, uncertain, tense, glad, sad, alert, relaxed, or threatening.
The point is that a goose or other animal may be a quivering mass of emotion. Its feelings may be “written all over its face,” and it may only take practice to read that writing. We are restricted only by ignorance, lack of interest, desire for exploitation (like wanting to eat them), or by anthropocentric prejudices that preclude us, as if by divine fiat, from recognizing commonality where it might exist. How can we be gods if animals are like us?
The standards for defining the existence of emotions in animals begin with those in common use for humans. One should demand no more proof that an animal feels an emotion than would be demanded of a human—and, like humans, the animal should be permitted to speak its own emotional language, which it is up to the beholder to understand.
Human emotions, too, escape exact scientific scrutiny. There is, in fact, no universally accepted scientific proof of human feelings. What one person feels is never entirely available to another. Not only is it uncertain our feelings are communicable; whether or not anyone understands the landscape of anyone else’s inner life is ultimately unknowable. We think we know that people are sad, or lonely, or joyous, but it is hard to know the particularity of the accompanying mood. We may not be locked away in private universes of feeling, but another person’s inner life, to the extent that it is individual, remains ultimately mysterious.
A history of human affairs in which fear, anger, love, pride, and guilt played no part would be strangely inadequate. Biographies without grief, sadness, and nostalgia would appear unreal. An ordinary person’s life in which no one loves, is loved, or wants to be loved; in which no one fears anything; in which no one becomes angry or makes anyone else angry; in which the depths of despair remain unfathomed; in which no one feels pride in anything they do; in which no one is ever ashamed to do anything or feels guilty if they do—this would be an unnatural, unrealistic, paltry description. It would be neither believable nor accurate. It would be called inhuman. To describe the lives of animals without including their emotions may be just as inaccurate, just as superficial and distorted, and may strip them of their wholeness just as profoundly. To understand animals, it is essential to understand what they feel.