ANIMAL EMOTIONS

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http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fe20070912rh.html

 

Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2007

 

NATURAL SELECTIONS

ANIMAL EMOTIONS

Feelings we share?

 

By ROWAN HOOPER

 

To what extent do animals consciously experience

emotions?

 

The question is one that until recently could not have

been asked with any seriousness at a scientific

conference without risking snorts of derision.

Heretofore it just wasn't done to speculate on animal

emotions, because to do so ran the risk of

" anthropomorphizing " your subject.

 

Conscious experience

Yet at an animal behavior meeting I attended last week

at the University of Newcastle in northeast England, a

session of talks was devoted to just that.

 

We might assume that animals have some level of

conscious experience, said Mike Mendl, a biologist at

the University of Bristol in southwest England — but

how on earth can we measure emotion?

 

You can't ask a pig if it's happy, or a rat if it is

anxious. Or rather, you can ask them anything you

want; they just won't answer.

 

The way round this, Mendl says, is to put animals in

carefully designed environments and watch how they

behave. Those raised in environments that are

unpredictable, for example, become " pessimistic " about

the future, whereas those used to living in stable,

settled conditions tend to be more " optimistic. " The

outlook of the animal provides a clue to the emotion

it may be experiencing.

 

One of the themes of the Newcastle meeting was that

humans can provide a model for understanding animal

behavior, rather than the other way around. For

example, we know that anxious and depressed people

tend to expect bad things to happen — they see the

glass as half empty rather than half full — while the

opposite is true for happy people. Mendl's technique

allows him to assess whether this is also the case

with animals.

 

To pursue this assessment, Mendl's team trained rats

to recognize that a sound of a particular pitch

predicted a good event (the arrival of food) whereas

another sound — of a different pitch — predicted a bad

event (no food).

 

The rats were then presented with sounds of

intermediate pitch to see whether they treated these

ambiguous sounds as indicating the good or bad event.

 

The experiment showed that rats kept in unpredictable

housing conditions were less likely to treat these

ambiguous sounds as heralding the arrival of the good

event than were rats housed in stable environments.

 

Similar work has been done with pigs, mice and birds.

The judgments made by the animals show parallels with

the negative outlook seen in some depressed people,

suggesting that a disrupted home life also disrupts

their mood.

 

For most of the 20th century, and before, the idea

that animals had emotions and feelings was simply not

considered. But the great thing about work such as

Mendl's is that it allows the assessment of emotions

without requiring subjective interpretation. So why

has it taken so long to get scientists to consider the

question of emotions in animals?

 

One reason is that it is dangerously easy to

anthropomorphize. If we are not careful, we start to

assume lots of unlikely things. It's all too easy to

assume that animals have a sophisticated " theory of

mind " like us — that they can understand what we are

thinking and act accordingly. In fact, only the great

apes are able to do this.

 

Humans can do many complex things without being

consciously aware of them, so it seems unnecessary to

invoke consciousness in animals. Perhaps another

reason is simply that allowing the idea that animals

have emotions makes it harder to exploit them. If we

start empathizing with animals, it makes it unpleasant

to put them to the knife.

 

Nevertheless, we have always empathized with animals.

Anyone with a pet will agree that it's easy to detect

the sort of mood the animal is in. If we see an animal

in pain, we feel sorry for it. Another biologist from

the University of Bristol, John Bradshaw, said at the

meeting that it is this empathy for animals that has

led to the human habit of keeping pets.

 

Hunting prerequisite

Empathy with animals, Bradshaw said, might have been a

prerequisite for hunting, because it enabled people to

better predict animal behavior. It could have been

this, he said, that was the difference between more

modern Cro-Magnon man and the Neanderthals. These

days, pets might hijack our desire to nurture baby

animals. Witness the " evolution " of the teddy bear,

Bradshaw said.

 

Originally, teddy bears were realistically bearlike,

but they have " evolved " to become more babylike. It's

the same with Mickey Mouse. When Walt Disney first

drew Mickey, the mouse was very rodentlike. Now he is

more babylike. The ultimate baby-type toy, Bradshaw

said, is Hello Kitty. Any more babylike and it would

be a fetus.

 

It seems unlikely to me that empathy with animals is

what drives our desire to keep pets. But the very fact

that such things are being discussed at respectable

scientific conferences is pleasing and encouraging.

 

As well as offering a way of assessing emotion in

animals, the kind of experiments that Mendl and others

are doing will help design more welfare-friendly

animal housing. This can only be a good thing. And

it's cute to get some scientific insight into the

Hello Kitty phenomenon, too.

 

The second volume of Natural Selections columns

translated into Japanese is published by Shinchosha at

¥1,500. The title is " Hito wa Ima Mo Shinka Shiteru

(The Evolving Human: How New Biology Explains Your

Journey Through Life). "