A turning point in psychozoology

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, animal behavior, animal psychology

Those who care enough to read the keyword list will note the term "animal psychology". Not so many years ago this was considered a serous error. No biologist would admit that animals could think or feel pain, and one must never, ever impute emotions to them. Thankfully, that is changing, and the new book Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind, by researchers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, celebrates this sea change in the "professional" understanding of what animals feel and think…or even that they do feel and think.

I hope we never again are subjected to cries of "Anthropomorphism!" when describing a pet, domestic animal, or any animal in the wild as "wanting", "loving", or even "planning". As the authors note, even paramecia (single celled, rather largish protozoa) can remember and plan. To recall a motto from an earlier post of mine:

We are like Them because We came from Them

The supposed "sin" of Anthropomorphism is to consider an animal as being in some way like a human. That takes it backwards. Everything in our psychology is based on animal psychology, and even to some extent on protozoan psychology.

The 54 essays in the book range across the Kingdom Animalia, though I don't think they managed to touch on every one of the 9 animal phyla. The majority of the stories are of vertebrates (Phylum Vertebrata, animals with an internal, bony skeleton), the next largest number are of octopuses (formerly octopi or octopodes), which are mollusks (Phylum Mollusca and class Cephalopoda). If playfulness is a sign of high intellegence, compared to creatures that don't play, the ordinary octopus is as playful as a cat or dog (or deer or horse or otter). One section does delve into other invertebrate phyla, with stories of slugs (also Mollusca), worms (Phylum Annelida), bumble bees (Phylum Arthropoda), and water bears (Phylum Tardigrada), plus the vertebrates known as amphibians, mainly frogs.

Can a bumble bee feel cheerful or downcast? Indeed it can, based on some clever research using sugar water, colored signs, and a chemical that blocks dopamine, the "happy" neurochemical. Charles Darwin wrote, "Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy and love." Biologists pooh-poohed this for 150 years. You might say that "human chauvinism" held back psychozoology by more than a century!

Of course, we are more prone to expect sorta-human responses from "charismatic megafauna" such as horses, tigers and elephants, and "charismatic mesofauna" such as typical house pets and other animals of a size that we can pick up, if they are tame enough to permit it (my cat hates being picked up and held; how tame is she?). What about chickens? One of the essays, titled "Chicken Indestructible", chronicles the day a beloved but elderly hen went missing. When she showed up a few days later, after much worry on Ms Montgomery's part about the many predators and other dangers she might have succumbed to, a little detective work showed that on a suddenly squally day, the intrepid hen had taken refuge in a hayloft until the stormy weather passed, happily eating whatever bugs were to be found there.

Wonderful stories abound in this enjoyable book, and I won't ruin any more of them by repeating them here. It's worth anybody's while to curl up with this one and devour it from end to end.