Dr. Franz de Waal has coined a powerful word: Anthropodenial. It aptly describes the quasi-religious conviction of behavioral "scientists" who dominated the study of animal and human behavior for at least a half century. We have them to thank for the still-common view of animals as strictly instinct-driven automatons, and even of young humans as nearly the same. So babies didn't smile, we were told, they were just reacting to "gas". Fish didn't feel pain when on the hook, they were struggling against the force of the fishing line pulling them in an unexpected direction. Every reaction that "the rest of us" might interpret as an emotional response, or even, "gasp!", as a feeling, was explained in some neutral way.
Even today, Dr. de Waal reports, it is rare to find a catalog of human emotions that includes love and attachment. Strict behaviorists claim that there is no "love face", as there is a face for anger, disgust, and so forth; in fact, they are generally lacking in their regard for positive emotions other than a generalized "happy face" and "play face". They might find it useful to learn from popular music, particularly the older stuff: A 200-year-old French "love" song (it's more about betrayal) that was written to a tune later used for "Twinkle Star" contains the lines, "Depuis que j'ai vu Silvandre / Me regarder d'un air tendre", which I translate, "Ever since I saw Silvandre / View me with a tender air" (I have a translation that rhymes, but loses some of the sense). What is this "tender air?" I'd claim it is the "love face", and we are so used to seeing it—I think of a bride glowing at her groom, for example—that we don't grasp its importance. A similar look is seen in a photo of my father holding our day-old son, and I see a loving look on my wife's face when she pulls our cat onto her lap. Perhaps dogmatic behaviorism has blinded its practitioners to our more positive affects.
The book is Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves, a sequel or companion volume to Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, published in 2016. The prior paragraphs refer to items on pages 50 and 168 of the book.
"Mama" in the title was an elderly female chimpanzee. The opening chapter describes the last meeting between Mama and her human friend Jan van Hooff. To enter the cage of an adult chimp alone is tantamount to suicide. But Dr. van Hooff did so in this case, and Mama, in painful sleep, slowly awoke and was then thrilled to see him. She pulled him into a big hug, and patted him as if to say, "It's OK, I am really happy to see you!". Less than a month later she died. Can anyone doubt her love and joy? She was wearing a love face, even through her pain.
For the rest of the chapter the author introduces his learnings about animal emotions and feelings (emotions are visible to others, feelings are subjective and within), and he also stresses his viewpoint, that emotions are universal among animals, so far as he can determine. Can we deny that they have feelings to go along with them? Every animal that has been studied, from spiders almost to small to see to whales, responds to stimuli, whether painful or pleasurable, with similar actions, and similar biochemical shifts. All display either approach or avoidance behavior related to any anticipation of the same stimulus, depending on whether they liked it, or not. All have memories and all can plan.
The book's chapters take us through several aspects of our emotional lives, and the way that primates, mostly (the author's own field of study), have similar emotional lives. A proud primate, from human to ape to a tiny tamarin, stands taller with chest out and chin up. A sad one can hardly look you in the eye and tends to sit partly curled up. It may be that a mammalian brain, with its neocortex, is needed to laugh, although a differently-shaped structure in the brains of birds and lizards is probably their version of the neocortex. Maybe they can laugh also; when a parrot laughs maniacally, is it mimicking something or is it truly amused?
The last full chapter is titled "Sentience". Although it shifts to a discussion of the way we treat animals captive or not, and the ethics thereof, the author dwells much on the possible self-knowledge and consciousness of animals. A few mammals and birds respond to the "mirror test" in a way that shows they can recognize themselves, and thus that they know themselves as individuals. I think our house cat, though she could never "pass" the mirror test, knows who she is, and knows she is something other than an undersize, furry human. Will a scientific experiment one day be devised that can determine what she really thinks of herself, and of us? I guess we can only "stay tuned."
This book is the latest of several I have seen in the past few years, that fully backs up something I have long contended:
It is not anthropomorphic to say that animals are like us; the proper view is that we are like them, because we came from them.A delightful book, and not only because the author agrees with me. He has had the opportunity and the skills to back up such a supposition with scientific data. I love it.
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