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Animals are no less emotional than we are.

By

Dr. de Waal is a primatologist who studies chimps and their relations.

Credit... JooHee Yoon

Uniquely human emotions don't exist. More and more, I believe that we share all emotions with other species in the same way that we share virtually every organ in our bodies with them. No exceptions.

Like organs, the emotions evolved over millions of years to serve essential functions. Their usefulness has been tested again and again, giving them the wisdom of ages. They nudge us to do what is best for us. Some emotions may be more developed in humans, or apply to a wider range of circumstances, but none is fundamentally new.

This is not the prevailing view in science, though. The most popular theory proposes only six "primary" or "basic" emotions, which are universally recognized by their facial expressions, like anger (frowning stare), happiness (laugh and smile), and fear (eyes wide open, lips stretched horizontally). All other emotions are "secondary," which means that they are cultural constructs that make us human.

But does anyone truly believe that just because an emotion lacks a specific face, we can claim it for ourselves? Open your front door and tell your dog that you are going out for a walk, then close the door and return to your seat. Your dog, who had been barking and wriggling with excitement, now slinks back to his basket and puts his head down on his paws. You have just witnessed both hope and disappointment in another species, even though neither counts as a basic emotion.

You may say that it is impossible to know what a dog feels. True, yet his behavior clearly reflects an abrupt change in his emotional state. Expressed in the body, these states are perfectly observable and measurable even if the associated private experiences are not.

In fact, the possibility of animal hope was experimented upon nearly a century ago by the psychologist Otto Tinklepaugh. He first let a monkey watch a banana being hidden under a cup, then allowed her into the room where this had been done. If she found the banana, everything proceeded smoothly. But if the experimenter had surreptitiously replaced the banana with a piece of lettuce, the monkey would frantically look around, lifting up the cup, while shrieking at the experimenter. Her expectations had been violated, for which she rightly blamed the sneaky experimenter.

We share so many so-called secondary emotions with other species that the whole concept is questionable. There is one exception, though, which keeps being proposed as definitely cultural: guilt.

This is despite the many dog owners who seem to recognize it in their pets when they hide under the table after a transgression. One expert in animal cognition at Barnard, Alexandra Horowitz, tested this out by having dogs meet an angry owner both when they had not broken any rules and when they had; she also had them meet a relaxed owner in the same two situations. Dr. Horowitz concluded that whether dogs take on a guilty look - lowered gaze, ears pressed back, tail rapidly beating between the legs - is unrelated to whether or not they followed orders. If the owner scolds them, they look extremely guilty. If the owner doesn't, they still sometimes look like this, but less often.

Image

Credit... Getty Images

One problem, however, is that our rules are of our own making, such as "Don't jump on that couch!" or "Keep your nails off my leather chair!" It must be as tough for our pets to grasp these prohibitions as it was for me to understand why I couldn't chew gum in Singapore.

It would be better to test behavior that is wrong by almost any standard, including that of their own species. The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz gave one of my favorite examples, about his dog, Bully, who broke the fundamental rule never to bite your superior.

Humans don't need to teach this rule, and indeed Bully had never been punished for it. The dog bit his master's hand when Dr. Lorenz tried to break up a dogfight. Even though Dr. Lorenz petted him right away, Bully suffered a complete nervous breakdown. For days, he was virtually paralyzed and ignored his food. He would lie on the rug breathing shallowly, occasionally interrupted by a deep sigh. He had violated a natural taboo, which among ancestral canines could have had the worst imaginable consequences, such as expulsion from the pack.

Among the primates, the most suggestive cases of remorse concern bonobos. These apes are as close to us as chimpanzees, but far more peaceful and gentle, which means that they almost never hurt one another. Whereas in most primates reconciliation after a fight is typically sought by the subordinate party, in bonobos it is the dominant animal that seeks to make amends, especially if he has inflicted an injury. He may return to his victim and unerringly reach for the exact same toe that he has bitten and carefully inspect the damage. He obviously knows precisely what he has done and where. Then he spends half an hour or more licking and cleaning the wound that he himself inflicted.

Another human emotion that has been elevated to a special status is disgust. In his book "Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique," the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga views disgust as one of the five emotional modules that set us apart from all other animals. Here, too, dogs are a prime example, given that they eat feces and lick their testicles. This is taken as proof that dogs must lack disgust. But give your dog a cut lemon (not recommended) and you will see a full-blown yuck! response with curled-up lips, drooling and withdrawal from the sour smell.

Disgust is an incredibly adaptive response. Every organism needs to avoid parasites and prevent the ingestion of harmful foods (citrus fruits can be poisonous to canines). Ignoring this mundane origin, however, psychologists have fallen in love with the moral connotations of this emotion. We are disgusted, for example, by someone who fakes a racist attack on himself to gain positive media attention. We "turn up our noses" at such people, showing our typical disgust face with wrinkled nose and narrowed eyes.

But even if moral disgust is special, it is no accident that our facial expression also blocks wafts of foul air from getting into our eyes and nostrils. This hints at the emotion's origin. Chimpanzees show the same expression when it rains, something they hate. As soon as a downpour starts, young and old pull an ugly face known as the "rain face," in which they bring their upper lip close to their nose and stick out their lower lip.

Having grown up in the Netherlands, I know this expression firsthand from watching the throngs of cyclists in Dutch cities. Whenever it pours, they show rain faces inside their plastic ponchos, evidence of their dismay over the prospect of wet clothes for the rest of the day.

Disgust is in fact so predictable in apes that an adolescent chimp I saw regularly at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, in Georgia, turned it into a game. The chimp, Tara, would occasionally find a dead rat in the outdoor enclosure and carry it around by its tail, careful to keep it away from her own body, then stealthily lay it on the back or head of a sleeping group mate. Her victim would startle as soon as she felt (or smelled) the dead animal, loudly screaming and wildly shaking her body to get this foul thing off her. She might even rub the spot on her body with a fistful of grass, to make sure the smell was gone.

Tara, for her part, would simply pick up the rat and move on to her next target. Apart from the question of why she considered this game fun, and why we humans immediately see its humor value, it would obviously never have worked in a species that lacked disgust.

But that is not all. We also have experimental studies, such as those by the primatologists Cécile Sarabian and Andrew MacIntosh at Kyoto University, who explore the yuck! factor in wild macaques on a Japanese beach. They place small food items, like grains or peanuts, on top of a variety of objects. Some of these objects are piles of plastic made to look like feces; some are actual piles of fresh feces. Most of the monkeys are disgusted enough by the latter to forgo the food. And if they do pick up food from the feces, they frantically rub their hands afterward. Tested in the same way, bonobos refuse to touch banana slices contaminated by feces. Given how much apes love bananas, this attests to their deep revulsion.

For the longest time, science has depicted animals as stimulus-response machines while declaring their inner lives barren. This has helped us sustain our customary "anthropodenial": the denial that we are animals. We like to see ourselves as special, but whatever the difference between humans and animals may be, it is unlikely to be found in the emotional domain.

Frans de Waal, a primatologist and professor of psychology at Emory University, is the author, most recently, of "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves," from which this essay is adapted.
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Opinion | Your Dog Feels as Guilty as She Looks

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Animals are no less emotional than we are. By Dr. de Waal is a primatologist who studies chimps and their relations. Uniquely human emotions don't exist. More and more, I believe that we share all emotions with other species in the same way that we share virtually every organ in our bodies with them.

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Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers? | Inside the Animal Mind | BBC Earth

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Racoon Demonstrates Problem Solving Skills

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Racoon Demonstrates Problem Solving Skills

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Racoon Demonstrates Problem Solving Skills | BBC Earth Explore

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7 of the Most Impressive Feats of Animal Intelligence

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7 of the Most Impressive Feats of Animal Intelligence

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Animals are far smarter than we ever realized.

If we've learned one thing from the past few decades of animal research, it's that many species have much more going on inside their brains than we previously thought. Experiments show that animals can solve puzzles, learn words, and communicate with each other in remarkably sophisticated ways.

Here are a few of the most impressive feats we've seen thus far.

1) Crows can solve puzzles as well as five-year-olds

A series of recent experiments have revealed crows' remarkably sophisticated problem-solving skills.

In one study conducted at the University of Auckland, researchers found that when presented with tubes of water that contained a floating treat, crows figured out that dropping other objects into the tubes would cause the water level to rise, making the treat accessible. They also figured out that they could get the treats fastest if they chose tubes with higher water levels to start, and if they dropped objects that sank, rather than ones that floated.

Other research, meanwhile, has shown that crows can intentionally bend a piece of wire in order to fish a treat out of a narrow tube. On the whole, researchers put their problem-solving skills roughly on par with those of 5 to 7 year-old children.

2) Dolphins call each other by unique names

Dolphins are remarkably intelligent in all sorts of ways. In captivity, they can be quickly trained to complete tasks for treats and are known to mimic human behavior solely for the fun of it. In the wild, they're been observed putting sponges over their snouts to protect themselves from spiny fish while hunting, and killing spiny fish so they can use their spines to extract eels from crevices.

a dolphin's whistle seems to be much like its name

But one of the most striking examples of how smart they are is the fact that each dolphin seems to have a characteristic whistle that represents itself. In other words, a dolphin's whistle seems to be much like its name.

In experiments, dolphins will swim towards a speaker emitting the whistle of a family member much more often than an unknown dolphin's, and when a mother dolphin is separated from her calf, she'll emit the calve's whistle until they're reunited. Most recently, researchers found that dolphins behave differently upon hearing the whistle of a dolphin they'd last seen 20 years earlier, compared to a stranger's - they're much more likely to approach the speaker and whistle at it repeatedly, trying to get it to whistle back.

3) Elephants can cooperate and show empathy

For years, researchers in the field have observed elephants cooperating in sophisticated ways. Families of related elephants travel together in clans, communicating via low-frequency rumbles. At times, they'll form circles around calves to protect them from predators, or carry out coordinated kidnappings of calves from competing clans in shows of dominance.

More recently, the same levels of coordination have been observed in controlled experiments. In one, pairs of elephants quickly learned to pull on a rope at the same time to get a treat - and not to pull alone, as that would have ruined the chance of getting it.

Other work seems to suggest that elephants can show genuine empathy.

In general, animals show little interest in dead members of their species - typically, they briefly sniff them before walking away or eating them. Elephants, however, show a special interest in elephant remains, lingering near them and in some cases becoming agitated around them. One study quantified this behavior: when shown an elephant skull, African elephants spent twice as long looking at it as buffalo or rhino skulls, and they investigated sticks of ivory for six times as long as pieces of wood.

Finally, field researchers have observed elephants consoling each other - something seldom seen in other species. Typically, when an elephant becomes perturbed, it'll make squeaking noises and perk its ears up. Frequently, other elephants from the same clan will come and stroke its head with their trunks, or put their trunk in its mouth.

4) Dogs can learn hundreds of words

There are many different examples of canine intelligence, but one of the most remarkable is a border collie named Chaser. A psychology researcher named John Pilley has trained Chaser to recognize the names of 1,022 different toys. When Pilley names a specific toy, Chaser is able to retrieve the correct one more than 95 percent of the time.

Recently, Pilley taught Chaser verbs, in addition to nouns: she can follow instructions to pick a toy up, put her nose on it, or put her paw on it. All this took countless hours of training - and all dogs might not be capable of it - but it's still a remarkable achievement of canine intelligence.

5) Chimps are crazy good at memory puzzles

It may not be a huge surprise that chimps are smart, given that they're our closest relatives. But the degree of their intelligence - and, in some areas, the way it rivals human intelligence - is remarkable.

A chimp named Ayumu who lives at a research institute in Kyoto, Japan, for instance, has become world-famous for his performance on a speed and memory-based game. As part of the game, 9 numbers are shown are shown in particular spots on a screen for a fraction of a second, and the player must remember their location and reproduce it afterward. You can play a simplified version of the game here.

ayumu is better than any human who's challenged him thus far

Ayumu is not only capable of playing this game, but is better than any human who's challenged him so far. When the numbers are shown for an extremely short amount of time (as little as 60 milliseconds), Ayumu is significantly more accurate than people, including college students and memory champions.

Scientists still don't entirely understand how he's so good, but they hypothesize he's doing something called subitizing - looking at a number of objects and immediately taking them in without sequentially counting them. Most humans can do this for up to four items, but Ayumu may be capable of doing it for many more.

6) Cockatoos can pick locks

Cockatoos, like crows, can solve difficult puzzles in order to get treats. And a 2013 study showed just how complex these puzzles can be: they required the birds to open a box (which contained a cashew) by removing a pin, unscrewing a screw, pulling out a bolt, turning a wheel, and finally sliding out a latch.

Obviously, this takes a long time for an animal that doesn't have opposable thumbs. But one cockatoo worked at it for a full two hours, ultimately solving the puzzle and showing that the birds are capable of striving towards goals that are much more distant than the researchers had previously thought.

Other birds in the experiment, meanwhile, learned from the first bird and completed the whole puzzle much more quickly. And when the puzzle was altered so that the five steps had to be completed in a different order, the birds seemed to understand this, and attacked it accordingly instead of trying to replicate the previous solution.

7) Octopuses are weirdly intelligent in ways we don't understand

Octopus intelligence is tough to study for a few reasons: they're aquatic, difficult to keep alive in captivity, and most live relatively deep in the ocean. Most importantly, octopuses inhabit an environment dramatically different than ours - so it stands to reason that their intelligence is directed at solving very different goals.

But some scientists believe that they're smart in ways that are qualitatively different from us and the other species on this list. One reason is that they have the largest brains of any invertebrate - but though they actually have more neurons than humans, sixty percent of these cells are in their arms, not their brains. As a result, t heir arms seem to be individually intelligent: when cut off, they can crawl away, grab food items, and lift them up to where the octopus' mouth would be if they were still connected.

Meanwhile, octopuses seem to have a keen sense of aesthetics, even though they're likely colorblind. Field researchers have observed octopuses collect rocks of a specific color to camouflage their den, and many species can change color to blend in with their environment. The way they accomplish this, it's hypothesized, is that they actually sense color with their skin itself and respond accordingly.

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7 of the most impressive feats of animal intelligence

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Vox is a general interest news site for the 21st century. Its mission: to help everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help shape it. In text, video and audio, our reporters explain politics, policy, world affairs, technology, culture, science, the climate crisis, money, health and everything else that matters.

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Dogs Are Smarter Than We Give Them Credit For

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Dogs Are Smarter Than We Give Them Credit For

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Dog lovers have been saying it for years: dogs are smarter than many people give them credit for.

Now, scientists are joining in. Over the past decade, research into canine behavior and intelligence has been blossoming, and a range of experiments have suggested that dogs are capable of surprisingly complex feats of social intelligence and emotional sensitivity. On the whole, psychologist and dog researcher Stanley Coren estimates, the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5-year-old baby's.
the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5-year-old baby's
So far, research has suggested that dogs can read our cues, show emotional connection to their owners, and even display jealousy. Studies have found that the brightest dogs appear to be capable of learning hundreds of words. It's likely that these abilities have been shaped by evolution - over thousands of years, we've selected those dogs best adapted to live with humans.

The field is still new, however, and researchers keep finding out a surprising amount. "Most labs have historically been invested in rodent and monkey models," says Gregory Berns, an Emory neuroscientist who conducts MRI research with dogs. "But dogs are unique animals, and I think in many ways they're one of the best animals for understanding social behaviors."

Using newer technologies such as MRI as well as carefully designed behavioral experiments, a handful of labs around the world have dug into the dog psyche - and found that they're much smarter than many people assume.

1) Dogs are adept at reading people - often better than chimps

Chimpanzees and human infants younger than a year or so usually fail a very simple test of implicit communication: a person sets two cups upside down on the ground and points at the one with a treat hidden underneath. It sounds absurdly simple, but both chimps and babies are unable to interpret this as a cue to find the food, and they investigate the correct cup first only about half the time.

Dogs are different. A series of experiments conducted by Brian Hare of Duke University found that dogs do interpret this cue, going for the correct cup at rates far higher than chance. (This was true even when both cups were scented to smell like the treat.) Dogs seemed capable of interpreting human stares and nods toward the right cup.

In other experiments, dogs that are trained not to take a piece of food do so much more often when an observing human has left the room, closed his or her eyes, or turned away. Again, it sounds very easy, but understanding the significance of a gaze in this way is something chimps do not seem to be capable of.

Still other studies show that dogs can pick up on our judgments of objects and act accordingly. In one, for instance, dogs observed their owners open two boxes but couldn't themselves see what was inside. The owner acted positively about the contents of one box (smiling, speaking in positive tones, and leaning toward it) and negatively for the other (recoiling in shock and speaking in angry tones). The dogs went to the former box 81 percent of the time - a finding that's similar to the results of the same experiment conducted with 18-month-old babies.

2) Dogs can learn hundreds of words

Dogs vary in their ability to remember things - just like humans and members of all animal species. But some dogs with particularly good memories, scientists have found, can be trained to remember more than 1,000 different words.

The most famous case is a border collie named Chaser, who has been trained by a retired psychology professor named John Pilley. As documented in a 2011 study in Behavioral Processes, Chaser has learned the names of 1,022 different toys - when directed to pick a specific toy up, she retrieves the correct one about 95 percent of the time. More recently, Pilley has trained Chaser to recognize verbs, as well: she now knows the difference between picking up something, putting her paw on it, and putting her nose on it.

Chaser's abilities might be unusual, but she's not unique. Another border collie named Rico has been shown to recognize more than 200 different words, and is capable of a cognitive process called " fast-mapping" - when he hears a new word, he knows to go get a new toy, rather than one he's already learned the word for.

3) Dogs pay attention to the words of our speech - not just our tone

Many people assume their dogs can only process the tone of their speech - but experiments by Victoria Ratcliffe, a psychology researcher at the University of Sussex, suggest their brains are processing the actual words, as well.

In human brains, the left hemisphere primarily processes language, and the right hemisphere primarily processes emotion and tone. Sound that enters our right ear is directed to the left hemisphere - and vice versa. So for most people, we disproportionately interpret language using sound from our right ear and interpret tone with the left.

Ratcliffe showed that dogs have the same bias. "We had speakers on either side of the dog and played a noise from both at the same time," she says. When they played commands the dogs were familiar with, the dogs disproportionately turned to the right, and when they played distorted speech, or commands in a language the dogs had never heard before, they mostly turned to the left.
"in both the human brain and the dog brain, these 'voice areas' are located in very similar places"
"This told us that they're paying attention to different calls, and processing words they already know in a different way than others," she says. In ongoing work, she's looking at exactly what information dogs associate with words they've learned.

Some fMRI work - which involves training dogs to lie still for up to 30 seconds in scanners, which track blood flow to different areas of the brain as a proxy for brain activity - has confirmed these findings. Experiments at Hungary's Eötvös Loránd University have shown that when dogs hear human voices, there's a specific area of their brain that shows significantly more activation than when they hear nonverbal noises.

"The very exciting finding is that in both the human brain and the dog brain, these 'voice areas' are located in very similar places," lead author Attila Andics told me for a previous Smithsonian article on the findings.

4) Dogs are emotionally connected to their owners

Some of the most fascinating canine MRI work has come from Berns's lab at Emory. In one of his most striking experiments, Berns found that when dogs sniffed a rag soaked in their owner's scent, activity spiked in their caudate nucleus - a reward center involved in emotional attachment. But it didn't spike when a stranger's scent was used instead. He also found that the same spike occurs when a dog's owner walks into the room, but not when strangers do.

In more recent experiments, Berns has put dogs in an fMRI and had various people show them a signal that means they're about to get a treat. "Dogs that scored lower on tests of aggressiveness had a caudate response that was really tuned just to their owner," he says.

More aggressive dogs, on the other hand, showed equal spikes in the reward system when any human gave the signal. His lab is now working with service dog organizations to see if this sort of test could be used to see which dogs are most suitable for service.

5) Dogs can feel jealousy

Traditionally, the emotion of jealousy was thought to occur only in primates. But a few different recent studies have provided evidence that dogs feel it, too.

In one experiment, researchers from the University of Vienna first trained dogs to present their paw (that is, "shake hands") in exchange for a treat. They then conducted the experiment with pairs of dogs, arbitrarily rewarding only one, and found that the other dog stopped participating. This wasn't just frustration at not getting a treat: when the same dogs participated in the experiment alone, and didn't have the chance to see another dog getting rewarded, they participated for a much longer period of time without rewards.
the emotion of jealousy was thought to occur only in primates
In another study, meanwhile, psychology researcher Christine Harris confirmed what many dog owners have long suspected: the animals also get jealous over attention given to other dogs.

In the experiment, she had owners ignore their dogs, giving attention to either a pop-up book or a robotic stuffed dog toy that could bark and wag its tail. When researchers blindly analyzed video of the experiment later, they found the dogs exhibited significantly more jealous behaviors (such as growling, snapping, and rubbing up against the owner) when the object was the stuffed dog, rather than the book. This result was the same in similar experiments conducted to measure responses of six-month-old babies.

Still, there are limits to dogs' intelligence

Many of these abilities likely stem from dogs' evolutionary history. Their ancestors, after all, were the wolves who were quickest to adapt to living around humans, and for tens of thousands of years since, they've been specifically bred for their ability to be trained by us. It's logical that this selective pressure would lead to animals that are especially attuned to human voices and emotions.

But some scientists feel that dogs' acute sensitivity to humans might actually lead us to overplay their intelligence. They're remarkably attuned to our actions, but they certainly don't always grasp the meaning behind them. As canine cognition researcher Clive D. L. Wynne told the New York Times, "It's a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do."
"we shouldn't kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do"
One good example of this - and of many dog owners' tendency to overestimate the animals' understanding of the world - is a series of experiments conducted at Barnard's Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab that studied what's commonly called the "guilty look."

Dog owners often report that they can tell from their dog's impression, upon arriving home, if the dog misbehaved while left alone. But the researchers, led by Julie Hecht, left dogs alone in a room with food that they'd been trained not to eat, then filmed and rigorously analyzed their interactions with their owners (who didn't know whether they'd misbehaved or not) when they returned.

It turned out that for the most part, the misbehaving dogs didn't really act any guiltier then the others: dogs from both groups basically just responded to getting chastised by their owners by showing characteristically "guilty" looks.

Dogs love humans, are good at reading us, and are eager to please us. But that doesn't mean they know right from wrong. Instead, they simply feel sad when they let us down.
Further reading: WATCH: 'John Oliver's all-dog supreme court argue Aereo'

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Why scientists believe dogs are smarter than we give them credit for

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Dog lovers have been saying it for years: dogs are smarter than many people give them credit for. Now, scientists are joining in. Over the past decade, research into canine behavior and intelligence has been blossoming, and a range of experiments have suggested that dogs are capable of surprisingly complex feats of social intelligence and emotional sensitivity.

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"I believe that so much research has come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities," said Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an author of several books on dogs.

Dr. Coren's work on intelligence, along with other research suggesting that the canine brain processes information something like the way people do, has drawn criticism. And there is good reason. For most of the last century the specter of a horse named Clever Hans hung over anyone who tried to prove that dogs were acting in thoughtful ways — not merely mimicking or manipulating people into believing that they in fact grasped human concepts.

Clever Hans was said to be able to count, make change and tell time by tapping his hoof, until investigators in the early 1900s learned that Hans was merely responding to his trainer's body language, tapping when the trainer nodded his head. This provided an enduring example for those who believed thought was the exclusive domain of humans.

But in 2004, German researchers reported that a border collie named Rico could learn the name of an object in one try, had 200 objects in his repertoire and remembered them all a month later, all very human. Even skeptical animal behavior researchers found the Rico results impressive and sound. Is it possible that Rico turned the tide on the Clever Hans problem, even though there is debate about how we can reliably measure what dogs know?

By giving dogs language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get "the idea of being a dog" by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.

But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.

He argues that it is dogs' deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn't mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog's entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.

"I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking," Dr. Wynne said. "It's a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do."

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"I believe that so much research has come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities," said Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an author of several books on dogs.

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How to Prepare for Your Dog to be Left Home Alone (Again)

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How to Prepare for Your Dog to be Left Home Alone (Again)

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Whether your dog is new or old, these tips will help ease its transition from lockdown to normal life.

Credit... Tristan Spinski for The New York Times

Did you get a new dog during the coronavirus lockdown? Or has your long-time four-legged companion gotten used to having you home?

"Dogs are highly social, which is why we get along with them so well," said Patricia B. McConnell, certified applied animal behaviorist and author of "The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs." "If all the sudden, they go from 'everybody home all the time' to 'nobody home all day long,' it can lead to some serious behavioral problems."

This can mean accidents in the house, chewing on the furniture when you are away, or worse.

Want to avoid that? Here's how to transition to a new normal, for both of you.

The members of your household probably haven't left the house for an extended period of time for what, weeks? Months? The 17 years this quarantine has felt like? So, start transitioning as cities and states reopen by leaving a little bit at a time. But not for too long. Start "unbelievably slow," said Dr. McConnell. Leave a handful of treats on the ground and, while the dog is eating them, "everybody walks out the door," she said. Come back in five seconds. Next time, leave for 10 seconds, then walk to the mailbox and back, then take a longer walk or a long drive.

Make sure you are mimicking the routine you'll have when you go back to work: Get your wallet and keys, leave through the door you'll go through. This way, the dog gets used to the cues that mean you are leaving - and coming back in through the same spot.

Make sure your dog is left in a safe space that it knows - and don't lock it in a room that's unfamiliar. That safe space might be a crate, though not all dogs like being in a crate. (My first dog, a Jack Russell terrier, loved her crate; the dog I have now, a cattle dog mix, couldn't be bothered.) Other dogs are just fine being left to lie wherever in the house they want.

The best space for your dog may not be one with a view either, said Sarah Wilson, dog trainer and author of "My Smart Puppy: Fun, Effective and Easy Puppy Training," especially if your dog barks a lot. "When they're screaming out the window at everyone who's going by, their brains are flooded with all of this confusing and upsetting brain chemistry, which doesn't go away on its own instantly," she said. "It's not a game for them when they're barking hysterically out the window." If a crate doesn't work for that dog, it may work to use a baby gate to keep it in a room it likes, but without access to a window.

If your dog has gotten used to walks every four or five hours, what's going to happen when that's not an easy option? Can you come home to walk the dog? Will you hire a dog walker, or take your dog to a doggie daycare?

Dr. McConnell suggests you figure out how you're going to engage your dogs' brain if the level of physical exercise you are currently providing it is not an option. You can teach them new tricks, or try new walking routes, which engages their brains because dogs will work to analyze new smells.

"Even if it's just once or twice a week, pop your dog in the car and go somewhere different," said Dr. McConnell.

Dogs with separation anxiety may go to the bathroom in the house, or chew or rip up things that are not their toys. But don't punish the dog when you come home, said Katherine A. Houpt, professor emeritus of behavior medicine at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, because dogs will forget what they did and by then they will "no longer associate punishment with the action."

Your dog may also get clingy and follow you around the house, pace when it thinks you're leaving or drool. That also means the dog is experiencing separation anxiety and you need to work a little bit more to help it.

If you are frustrated or feel like nothing is working, reach out for help. Call your veterinarian to make sure that nothing is physically wrong with your dog. If it is behavioral, then your veterinarian may recommend calling a dog trainer or animal behaviorist. Dr. McConnell said to look for a certified applied animal behaviorist or a certified professional dog trainer. Trainers should use positive reinforcement instead of force and coercion.

Your veterinarian may also recommend anti-anxiety medication for your dog, if the anxiety persists despite making the recommended changes. You may also consider anti-anxiety medications if your dog's behavior is causing harm even if it's not destructive - such as if your dog's barking is annoying your neighbors to an extreme degree.

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How to Prepare Your Dog to Be Left at Home Alone (Again)

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Whether your dog is new or old, these tips will help ease its transition from lockdown to normal life. Did you get a new dog during the coronavirus lockdown? Or has your long-time four-legged companion gotten used to having you home? "Dogs are highly social, which is why we get along with them so well," said Patricia B.

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Sneezing Dogs, Dancing Bees- How Animals Vote (Make Decisions)

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Sneezing Dogs, Dancing Bees- How Animals Vote (Make Decisions)

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Credit... Eleanor Davis

The 2020 election is off to a complicated start. Maybe we can draw some comparative political lessons from the animal kingdom.

Are humans the only animals that caucus? As the early 2020 presidential election season suggests, there are probably more natural and efficient ways to make a group choice. But we're certainly not the only animals on Earth that vote. We're not even the only primates that primary.

Any animal living in a group needs to make decisions as a group, too. Even when they don't agree with their companions, animals rely on one another for protection or help finding food. So they have to find ways to reach consensus about what the group should do next, or where it should live. While they may not conduct continent-spanning electoral contests like this coming Super Tuesday, species ranging from primates all the way to insects have methods for finding agreement that are surprisingly democratic.

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Credit... Miguel a Lopes/EPA, via Shutterstock

As meerkats start each day, they emerge from their burrows into the sunlight, then begin searching for food. Each meerkat forages for itself, digging in the dirt for bugs and other morsels, but they travel in loose groups, each animal up to about 30 feet from its neighbors, says Marta Manser, an animal-behavior scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Nonetheless, the meerkats move as one unit, drifting across the desert while they search and munch.

The meerkats call to one another as they travel. One of their sounds is a gentle mew that researchers have called a "move call." It seems to mean, "I'm about ready to move on from this dirt patch. Who's with me?"

In a 2010 study, Dr. Manser and her colleagues studied move calls in a dozen meerkat groups living in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Groups ranged from six to 19 individuals. But the scientists found that only about three group members had to mew before the whole party decided to move along. The group didn't change direction, but it would double its speed to reach better foraging grounds.

Biologists call this phenomenon - when animals change their behavior in response to a critical mass of their peers doing something - a quorum response. Dr. Manser thinks quorum responses show up in human decision making, too.

"If you're in a group and somebody says, 'Let's go for a pizza,' and nobody joins in, nothing's going to happen," she said. But if the pizza craver is joined by a couple of friends, their argument becomes much more convincing.

In another set of experiments, Dr. Manser and a co-author found that it didn't matter whether meerkats making move calls were dominant or subordinate within the group. Rather, she said, "It depends on how determined an individual appears."

She thinks this also has a human parallel. "Even if you don't have the rank," she said, as long as you pretend you know what you're doing, "the group will follow."

In the spring, you may discover a swarm of bees dangling from a tree branch like a dangerous bunch of grapes. These insects are in the middle of a tough real estate decision.

When a honeybee colony splits in two, a queen and several thousand workers fly away from a hive together. The swarm finds someplace to pause for hours or days while a few hundred scouts fan out to search for a new home. When a scout finds a promising hole or hollow, she inspects it thoroughly. Then she flies back to the swarm, still buzzing on its tree branch. Walking on the swarm's surface, she does a waggling, repetitive dance that tells the other bees about the site she found - its quality, direction and how far away it is.

More scouts return to the swarm and do their own dances. Gradually, some of the scouts become convinced by others, and switch their choreography to match. Once every scout agrees, the swarm flies off to its new home.

In his 2010 book "Honeybee Democracy," Thomas D. Seeley, a Cornell University biologist, writes that we can learn a lesson from the bees:

"Even in a group composed of friendly individuals with common interests, conflict can be a useful element in a decision-making process."

Like pet dogs, African wild dogs spend some of their time enthusiastically socializing and some of it lazing around. Members of a pack jump up and greet one another in high-energy rituals called rallies. After a rally, the dogs may move off together to start a hunt - or they may go back to resting. In a 2017 study, researchers discovered that the decision to hunt or stay seems to be democratic. To cast a vote for hunting, the dogs sneeze.

The more sneezes there were during a rally, the more likely the dogs were to begin hunting afterward. If a dominant dog had gotten the rally started, the pack was easier to convince - just three sneezes might do the trick. But if a subordinate dog started the rally, it took a minimum of 10 sneezes to prompt a hunt.

The researchers note that dogs might actually cast their votes via some other, hidden signal. The sneezes could help the animals clear out their noses and get ready to sniff for prey. Either way, the wild dogs end their achoo-ing with a decision they all agree on.

Primates, our closest relatives, have provided lots of material for researchers studying how groups make decisions. Scientists have seen gibbons following female leaders, mountain gorillas grunting when they're ready to move and capuchins trilling to each other.

Sometimes the process is more subtle. A group may move across the landscape as a unit without any obvious signals from individuals about where they'd like to go next. To figure out how wild olive baboons manage this, the authors of a 2015 paper put GPS collars on 25 members of one troop in Kenya. They monitored the monkeys' every step for two weeks. Then they studied the movements of each individual baboon in numerous combinations to see who was pulling the group in new directions.

The data showed that any baboon might start moving away from the others as if to draw them on a new course - male or female, dominant or subordinate. When multiple baboons moved in the same direction, others were even more likely to come along. When there was disagreement, with trailblazing baboons moving in totally different directions, others would eventually follow the majority. But if two would-be leaders were tugging in directions less than 90 degrees apart, followers would compromise on a middle path. No matter what, the whole group ended up together.

Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin, an animal-behavior researcher at the University of Konstanz in Germany who led the baboon study, points out that unlike in humans, no one authority tallies up baboon votes and announces the result. The outcome emerges naturally. But the same kind of subtle consensus-building can be part of our voting process, too.

"For instance, we might influence one another's decisions on who to vote for in the lead-up to an election, before any ballots are cast," she said.

Like honeybees, ants often face important decisions about relocating their colonies. Rock ants, which live in stony crevices throughout Europe, use a caucus-like method to choose a new home.

Some rock ant scouts seem to be always on the lookout for better homes, writes Nigel Franks, an emeritus professor at the University of Bristol in England. These scouts investigate the quality of potential new nest sites. If enough scouts find themselves at the same site, they'll reach the minimum number needed to relocate the colony. They can also try to build such a quorum by going back to the original nest and recruiting other ants to follow them to the new site. They lead these ants one at a time, a follower tapping a leader with her antennae to stay on course.

Either way, once a critical number of ants have gathered at one new site, the colony's decision is official. The ants aren't quite patient enough to let the electoral process take its course, though. They bring over the rest of the colony by simply picking up their sisters and hauling them to their new home.

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Sneezing Dogs, Dancing Bees: How Animals Vote

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The 2020 election is off to a complicated start. Maybe we can draw some comparative political lessons from the animal kingdom. Are humans the only animals that caucus? As the early 2020 presidential election season suggests, there are probably more natural and efficient ways to make a group choice.

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Your Dog Can Hear When You're Happy or Sad 

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Your Dog Can Hear When You're Happy or Sad 

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Dogs' ability to communicate with humans is unlike any other species in the animal kingdom. They can sense our emotions, read our facial expressions, and even follow our pointing gestures. They seem to possess a special skill for knowing exactly how we're feeling. But not much is known about the role that hearing plays in that ability. Recent research from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Bari Aldo Moro in southern Italy looked at how dogs process human emotions based only on our vocalizations.

Previous studies have shown that dogs can combine hearing and sight to match happy and angry human faces with happy and angry vocalizations. When using only their hearing, researchers found that dogs can distinguish the positive sound of laughing from the negative sound of crying, and that negative sounds upset and arouse dogs more than positive ones. There are six basic emotions that humans can recognize from vocalizations, regardless of culture: fear, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise, and happiness. The current study aimed to investigate if dogs can recognize all six from nonverbal vocalizations alone.

Thirty dogs were tested in a simple setup. The dogs were given food in a bowl in the center of a testing room, and two speakers were evenly spaced on either side of the bowl. This put the dog an equal distance from each speaker. While the dogs were eating, the speakers played nonverbal human sounds. For example, fear sounds were screams and happy sounds were laughs. The reaction of the dogs to each sound was videotaped.

The scientists were interested in whether the dogs turned their heads to the right speaker or to the left, although both speakers were playing the same sounds. There are two reasons why this is important. The first is because dogs, like humans, use the left side of their brain to control the right side of their body, and vice versa. The second is that previous research has shown dogs tend to process emotionally positive sounds with the left side of their brain and emotionally negative sounds with the right. If the dog turned to the left upon hearing the sound, it would indicate he was processing that sound with the right side of his brain, and therefore, interpreted it as negative.

Results showed that dogs turned to the left for the fear and sadness vocalizations. The trend was the same for anger, but the results were not statistically significant. This indicates the dogs were processing these particular sounds on the right side of their brain, and therefore interpreted them as negative. For happy sounds, the dogs turned to the right, showing that they interpreted them as positive.

Disgust and surprise didn't show any significant trends, perhaps because those emotions are more context dependent. For example, poop may be disgusting to humans, but it's exciting to dogs. So, the dogs may not have known how to interpret the disgust and surprise without further information.

Overall, it seems that dogs can determine human emotions using only their ears, at least for happiness, fear, and sadness - using the right side of their brain for processing negative emotions and the left side for positive ones. Additional data collected on heart rate and behavior, such as tail wagging and yawning, supported these findings. That means future studies of head turning, matched with behavior and physiological data such as heart rate, could allow new insight into animal emotions. We can't ask dogs how they feel in a given situation, but by using these methods, we may be able to determine whether those feelings are positive or negative.

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Your Dog Can Hear Your Emotions, Research Shows

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Dogs' ability to communicate with humans is unlike any other species in the animal kingdom. They can sense our emotions, read our facial expressions, and even follow our pointing gestures. They seem to possess a special skill for knowing exactly how we're feeling. But not much is known about the role that hearing plays in that ability.

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If you live with a dog you just know when it's happy or miserable, don't you? Of course you do. Even the scientific community, now admits that dogs have emotions - even if scientists can't directly measure what they are experiencing.

People have had a close bond with domesticated dogs for centuries. In his 1764 Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire observed: "It seems that nature has given the dog to man for his defence and for his pleasure. Of all the animals it is the most faithful: it is the best friend man can have."

Research has shown time and time again the positive impact pet ownership can have on our lives. Indeed, a study of 975 dog-owning adults, found that in times of emotional distress most people were more likely to turn to their dogs than their mothers, fathers, siblings, best friends, or children.

It's not surprising then that dogs are now the most commonly used animal in therapy. Our canine pals are being increasingly used as participants in a variety of mental health programmes - offering companionship, happy associations and unconditional love.

In the UK, Pets As Therapy (PAT) has more than 5,000 active PAT dogs, which meet some 130,000 people a week. In the US, the American Kennel Club has a Therapy Dog Program which recognises six national therapy dog organisations and awards official titles to dogs who have worked to improve the lives of the people they have visited.

Dogs who heal

Sigmund Freud is generally acknowledged as the accidental pioneer of canine-assisted therapy. During his psychotherapy sessions in the 1930s, a chow chow called Jofi stayed alongside him in the office. Freud noticed that patients became more relaxed and open when Jofi was present, and it helped him to build a rapport.

But the official beginning of animal-assisted therapy is generally linked to World War II, when a Yorkshire terrier called Smoky accompanied corporal William Lynne when visiting service hospitals in New Guinea. Her presence lifted the spirits of wounded soldiers.

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Despite all this, it was not until the 1960s that the first documented case study of a dog working as a "co-therapist" was made. The US psychotherapist Boris M. Levinson maintained that the presence of his dog Jingles added a "new dimension to child psychotherapy". Despite opposition from peers, Levinson strongly defended the use of dogs as therapeutic aids.

How dogs feel

But while there is no question that dogs are very good at understanding us, sadly the reverse is not always so true. A classic example of this is when someone has had a little "accident" in the house and dog owners think that their pet looks guilty. But for the dog in question, that look is purely submission and is a way for the dog to say "don't hurt me" rather than an admission of guilt.

It is very difficult for humans to convince themselves that the canine brain is not able to understand the concepts of right and wrong - but without that ability it is not possible to experience guilt. The dog who is looking guilty is simply afraid of your reaction to the situation - usually based on past experience.

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Some of the main difficulties that happen between dogs and their owners are caused by a humans inability to read their pet's body language correctly. Combine this with the human notion that dogs understand abstract concepts and can use reason on complex issues, and the scene is set for problems.

Doggy hormones

Another way to tell how animals feel is to look at their hormonal environment. Studies have shown that when dogs are stroked by their owners they have increased levels of oxytocin. Among other functions, this hormone is thought to help relaxation. It helps to form bonds between mother and child - and between pet and owner.

So although we can't know for sure how a dog feels during pleasurable activities, it seems reasonable that oxytocin produces similar sensations in dogs to those that humans experience - suggesting that they are feeling affection towards and attachment to their owners.

Similarly, dogs that are in unpleasant circumstances show raised levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. One of the situations that produces this stress response is being left alone for any length of time. Dogs are pack animals and really need to have company. A solitary dog is rarely a happy dog - and this is something that all dog owners should take into account when planning their lives.

What this all shows is that for dogs and people to live together and work together - and for both parties to be happy about it - an understanding of each other's emotional state is vital. Even if dogs and people don't completely understand each other, it seems clear that each species is essential to the other's well-being and we can help each other to be happier and healthier.

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If you live with a dog you just know when it's happy or miserable, don't you? Of course you do. Even the scientific community, now admits that dogs have emotions - even if scientists can't directly measure what they are experiencing. People have had a close bond with domesticated dogs for centuries.

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Your Dog Knows Your Upset and Wants to Help

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Your Dog Knows Your Upset and Wants to Help

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Credit: Shutterstock

What's a surefire way to make a bad day a little bit better? Dog owners might say it's time spent with humankind's furry best friends. And according to a new study, your pet dog may be happy to help.

Previous research has shown that when humans cry, their dogs also feel distress. Now, the new study finds that dogs not only feel distress when they see that their owners are sad but will also try to do something to help.

The findings were published today (July 24) in the journal Learning and Behavior.

In the study, the researchers brought 34 pet dogs of various breeds and sizes into the lab, along with their owners. The owners were asked to sit (good human!) behind a glass door, where the dogs could see and hear them, and to say, "Help," every 15 seconds, in either a monotone or a distressed voice. [ In Photos: America's Favorite Pets]

In the trials in which the pet owners were acting out a nondistressed state, they were told to hum "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" in between their calls for help. Meanwhile, in the trials where they acted distressed, they were told to make crying sounds in between their calls. The researchers took a video of how the dogs behaved in both scenarios and measured the dogs' heart rates for variability between beats, which could indicate stress.

What's more, the dogs were also able to get through to door to their owners: The door was held shut by three small magnets, so to open it, the dogs just had to lightly touch it, such as with their paws or noses.

The researchers found that dogs didn't open the door more often when their owners cried than when they hummed. " Dogs want to be with their owners, so even in our condition where the dogs were exposed to humming, they still about half the time went to their owners," said senior study author Julia Meyers-Manor, an assistant professor of psychology at Ripon College.

But the dogs who did open the door opened it about 40 seconds faster when their owners were crying compared with when the owners were humming, Meyers-Manor said.

In addition, by comparing the behaviors of the dogs as they saw and heard their owners cry with how they normally behaved, the researchers found that dogs who pushed through the door showed less stress than those who didn't enter the door. The researchers quantified this via the rate of "stressful behaviors" the dogs exhibited per second.

"It seems like the dogs [who didn't go through the door] would get more and more stressed by the crying but that they then sort of became paralyzed and [were] not able to do anything," Meyers-Manor told Live Science. But she noted that the scientists saw a huge range of behaviors, including other dogs who were indifferent to their owners' cries.

The researchers noted that they found some variability in the heart rate of the stressed dogs as well, but this data was a bit more difficult to interpret, as you typically need about 2 minutes of data to get a good reading, Meyers-Manor said. However, in some cases, the researchers got only around 20 seconds before the dogs opened the door, ending the trial.

Another limitation of the study could be the varying abilities of the humans to act out signs of distress, the authors wrote. In other words, some people were bad at acting.

The final part of the study was a challenge called "impossible task," which measures the strength of a dog's bond with its owner. In this task, the dogs were shown into a room where their owner and a stranger stood on opposite sides of a testing apparatus. Both the owners and the strangers stood still and stared diagonally across the room; they didn't make eye contact with the dog. The dogs were taught to move a jar on the apparatus in order to retrieve food underneath it. After a couple of trials, the jar was then screwed onto its lid, so that the dogs couldn't retrieve the food.

The researchers found that in that last case, the dogs who had opened the door when they heard their owners crying spent more time gazing at their owners after unsuccessfully trying to retrieve the food than the dogs who didn't open the door. This may suggest that "openers in the distress condition may have a stronger bond with their owner than nonopeners," and the result is opposite for the task which involved humming, the researchers wrote. In the condition where the owner was humming, the dogs who didn't open the door gazed more at their owners than the dogs who did open the door.

And why did dogs with stronger bonds more often open the door when their owners were crying and less often when they were humming? That result may be "reflective of empathy," the authors wrote.

But it's difficult to conclude that for sure, Meyers-Manor said. And as to whether dogs want to help their owners or just want to alleviate their own sadness - that remains unclear.

Previous research has shown that dogs also show distress when they hear a stranger cry or a baby cry on a recording, Meyers-Manor said. "I think that they have a general response to this crying, but I think that taking the action to do the rescue may be a little bit more dependent on [the] relationship [with their owners]," she added.

This study "helps support what many owners already feel," Meyers-Manor said, "[that] their dogs are responsive to them when they are distressed ... and that they try to take action to alleviate that" distress.

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Your Dog Knows When You're Upset, and Wants to Help

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What's a surefire way to make a bad day a little bit better? Dog owners might say it's time spent with humankind's furry best friends. And according to a new study, your pet dog may be happy to help. Previous research has shown that when humans cry, their dogs also feel distress.

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Dogs Understand and React to Human Emotions

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Dogs Understand and React to Human Emotions

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Dogs Notice When People (or other dogs) Sound Sad

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Dogs Notice When People (or other dogs) Sound Sad

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Your dog may act like a good listener-but does she really notice when you're feeling down? Or does she just know how to deploy a wet nose and a tail-wag to earn treats? A new study says negative emotions are contagious for dogs. They'll pick up a companion's bad feelings just by sound, whether that companion is human or canine. "Emotional contagion" is the most basic form of empathy, write Annika Huber of the University of Vienna's Clever Dog Lab and her colleagues. We're not talking Counselor-Troi-level empathy, strong enough to reach between starships. Emotional contagion is just the automatic, unconscious matching of two animals' emotional states. Earlier studies have found evidence of this feeling-sharing in primates, rodents and birds. Studies of pet dogs have found signs of empathy, too: When people pretended to cry, dogs offered comfort. Dogs also responded negatively to the sound of babies crying. (But when owners faked a heart attack, their dogs failed to solicit help from a bystander. Thanks a lot, guys.) To learn more about emotional contagion in dogs, Huber and her colleagues recruited 53 adult pet dogs. The dogs were a variety of breeds, as well as mutts. Then the team tested the dogs' responses to sad sounds. In different trials, the dogs heard recordings of humans either laughing or crying. They heard other dogs barking during play, or whining when they were lonely. They also heard sounds that shouldn't carry any emotion, including crickets, birds, rain, and neutral human speech. The dogs heard the sounds coming from a speaker in an experimental room while their owners sat nearby (wearing headphones and reading a magazine, so they wouldn't sway the results by reacting to the sounds themselves). Researchers analyzed videos of the trials to see what reactions the dogs had. Did they look to their owners, or walk over to them? Did they look at or approach the loudspeaker? Did they have a negative or uneasy reaction, including barking, whining, scratching, yawning, licking their lips, stretching, shaking, wagging their tails, panting, or freezing? The researchers found that dogs showed more of these behaviors in response to emotional sounds (humans laughing or crying; dogs barking or whining) than non-emotional ones (nature sounds; neutral human talking). The dogs also reacted more strongly to the sounds of negative emotions than positive ones. After hearing a dog whining or a person crying, they showed more of the uneasy behaviors, and dogs that froze stayed frozen for longer. However, there was almost no difference between a dog's reactions to hearing a human in distress and another dog in distress. "Despite equal degrees of attentiveness," the authors write, dogs had a stronger negative reaction to hearing the negative emotions of people and other dogs. This could make sense evolutionarily, they add. If an animal is displaying negative emotions because it's in a dangerous situation, it would be wise for nearby animals to pick up on those feelings. Paying attention to other animals' positive feelings is less likely to keep you alive-though it might help you perfectly time your request for a game of fetch.

Image: by Ryan Register (via Flickr)

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Dogs Notice When People (or Other Dogs) Sound Sad

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Your dog may act like a good listener-but does she really notice when you're feeling down? Or does she just know how to deploy a wet nose and a tail-wag to earn treats? A new study says negative emotions are contagious for dogs.

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Does it ever seem like your dog is in tune with your emotions? You may be on to something.

In new experiments, dogs showed signs of understanding whether a human or a dog was happy or mad based on facial expressions and vocalizations.

The research, published in the journal Biology Letters, set out to explore the emotional connection between man and his best friend.

"We still didn't know if the dogs ... can somehow understand that, say, a happy facial expression is positive and a negative facial expression is negative," says study leader Natalia de Souza Albuquerque, a Ph.D. student in experimental psychology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

For the research, Albuquerque and her team recruited 17 pet dogs from around Lincoln, England, and put the canines through two rounds of experiments in their laboratory.

Doggy Trials

In the first trials, each dog was placed in front of two screens and presented with an image of a dog or human with either a happy or angry facial expression. The images were then paired with a variety of sounds-a playful or aggressive bark for dogs, and a phrase in an unfamiliar language-Brazilian Portuguese-in a happy or angry tone for people. ( Read why dogs are even more like us than we thought.)

When exposed to complimentary images and sounds in both humans and dogs-say, a happy dog facial expression and playful bark-the dogs looked at the screens longer than if the facial expression did not match the sound.

Their paying attention was a clue that the dogs recognized the emotions.

On the other hand, when dogs heard a neutral sound, the animals lost interest, looking around the room instead of at the screen-an indicator that the dogs had correctly discerned a lack of emotion.

Clever Pups

According to Albuquerque, dogs' ability to connect emotionally with humans and dogs is neither an instinct or learned behavior, but rather a sign of cognitive ability.

"The dogs had to extract the information from the sound, then associate this information with the image, and that involves very complex psychological mechanisms," she says. ( Read why dogs are so friendly.)

Surprisingly, the team discovered that the dogs were better at recognizing emotions of their fellow species than those of humans.

"That was quite interesting," Albuquerque says, "because it makes sense to think that dogs already have that ability [to emotionally connect] and use that, and develop that, to interact with humans."

Indeed, humans and dogs have lived side by side by some 30,000 years, and along the way, evolution seems to have given dogs the skills to read their owners' needs and emotions.

Tugging the Heartstrings

Next, Albuquerque plans to investigate dogs' emotional reactions, and how they use their understanding of emotion to interact with humans.

For instance, scientists have already been investigating how dogs may know their owners so well they can manipulate them for maximum effect.

An October study showed that dogs will make the classic "sad puppy face" -raising their inner eyebrows to make their eyes look larger and more infant-like-when looking into a human's eyes.

"They're very adapted to the human world and the human emotional world," she says.

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Does it ever seem like your dog is in tune with your emotions? You may be on to something. In new experiments, dogs showed signs of understanding whether a human or a dog was happy or mad based on facial expressions and vocalizations.

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Dog MRI | Studying The Dog Brain | Inside the Animal Mind | BBC Earth

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transcript

Unlikely Friends

Videos of unlikely animal friendships are popular on social media. Scientists are now considering how to define such relationships and why they are so fascinating to us.

Videos of unlikely animal friendships are massively popular on social media, so much so that scientists are now wondering how to define such relationships and why they are so fascinating to us.

Videos of unlikely animal friendships are popular on social media. Scientists are now considering how to define such relationships and why they are so fascinating to us. Credit Credit... Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

A goat frolics with a baby rhinoceros. A pig nestles up to a house cat. A rat snake makes nice with the dwarf hamster originally intended as its lunch.

Few things seem to capture the public imagination more reliably than friendly interactions between different species - a fact not lost on Anheuser-Busch, which during Sunday's Super Bowl will offer a sequel to "Puppy Love," its wildly popular 2014 Budweiser commercial about friendship between a Clydesdale and a yellow Labrador puppy. The earlier Super Bowl spot has drawn more than 55 million views on YouTube.

Videos of unlikely animal pairs romping or snuggling have become so common that they are piquing the interest of some scientists, who say they invite more systematic study. Among other things, researchers say, the alliances could add to an understanding of how species communicate, what propels certain animals to connect across species lines and the degree to which some animals can adopt the behaviors of other species.

"There's no question that studying these relationships can give you some insight into the factors that go into normal relationships," said Gordon Burghardt, a professor in the departments of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, who added that one video he liked to show students was of a small and persistent tortoise tussling over a ball with a Jack Russell terrier.

"Even one example raises the possibility that there's something interesting going on here," Dr. Burghardt said.

Science has not entirely ignored unusual interactions between species. Biologists have described relationships formed to achieve a specific goal, like the cooperative hunting between groupers and moray eels. And in the mid-1900s, Konrad Lorenz and other ethologists demonstrated that during critical periods after birth, certain birds and other animals would follow the first moving object they saw, whether animal, human or machine, a phenomenon known as imprinting. Dr. Lorenz was famously photographed with a gaggle of "imprinted" geese trailing behind him.

Yet until recently, any suggestion that interspecies relationships might be based simply on companionship would probably have been met with derision, dismissed as Pixar-like anthropomorphism. That has changed as research has gradually eroded some boundaries between homo sapiens and other animals. Other species, it turns out, share abilities once considered exclusive to humans, including some emotions, tool use, counting, certain aspects of language and even a moral sense.

To be sure, some scientists remain skeptical that the examples of cross-species relations offer much more to science than a hefty dose of cuteness.

Clive Wynne, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, said that the videos he has seen all portray interactions that take place "in a human-controlled environment."

"To me, that's what kind of removes what would otherwise be interesting," he said. "Because it ceases to be directly a story about animal behavior and becomes a story about human impact on the environment, like the difference between gardening and the beauty of natural landscape." But others see fertile ground for investigation even in bonds formed in captivity or other domesticated settings. "There are so many questions," said Barbara Smuts, a primate researcher at the University of Michigan who in 1985 shocked some of her colleagues by applying the word "friendship" to describe bonds between female baboons. "We know this is happening between all sorts of species. I think eventually the scientific community will catch up."

In the meantime, there is no shortage of stories about animals that have reached out across species barriers, some supplied by researchers like Dr. Smuts, who described watching her dog, Safi, an 80-pound German Shepherd mix, forge a friendship with a donkey named Wister on a ranch in Wyoming in the 1990s.

At first, Wister charged and kicked at the dog, recognizing her as a potential threat. But gradually, Safi coaxed Wister to interact, performing repeated play bows and running up and down along the fence of the corral where the donkey was penned.

Eventually, as Dr. Smuts wrote in a 2001 essay, "Each dawn, after being released from his corral, Wister would stand outside our door and bray until I let Safi out, and then they would play and wander together for hours."

The dog taught the donkey to pick up a stick and carry it in its mouth, although, Dr. Smuts said, "he looked like he didn't quite know why he was walking around with a stick in his mouth."

The two animals also appeared to work out a common language. When Wister, several times Safi's size, accidentally kicked the dog during play, the donkey would stand stock still, as if to say, "I didn't mean it." Safi, for her part, would jump up and nip Wister's neck, appearing to signal, "That hurt." Then the two would pick up playing where they had left off.

Barbara J. King, an anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, said that she hoped researchers would begin to collect examples of cross-species interactions to build a database that would merit scientific scrutiny. "I think we're not even at the point of being able to extract patterns because the database is so small," she said, adding that the topic could also benefit from a rigorous definition of what constitutes a "friendship" between members of different species.

Dr. King suggested some criteria. A relationship, she proposed, must be sustained for some period of time; there must be mutuality, with both of the animals engaged in the interaction; and some sort of accommodation must take place in the service of the relationship, whether a modification in behavior or in communication.

In some popular online videos, Dr. King noted, these criteria are clearly missing. In a YouTube clip depicting a hamster on the back of a snake, for example, it is unclear if the two are best buddies or whether the snake is simply not hungry.

Another video, showing a lioness in Kenya "adopting" a series of antelope calves, provides an idea of how perception may differ from reality. In the video, a conservationist who observed the lioness says, "Many people felt this had to be a message from God." She adds, "This was the lion and the lamb laying down together."

But Craig Packer, a lion researcher at the University of Minnesota who also appeared in the video, said in a recent interview that the lioness was likely toying with her prey before killing it.

"She was just keeping it around," Dr. Packer said. He added that amicable interactions between normally hostile species are unlikely to take place in the wild, where "they would end in tears every time." Even in captivity, however, sustained bonds evoke interesting observations. Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said examples that involve animals raised together from a young age illustrate the openness present in many species for some time after birth.

"It shows that young animals are really open doors," said Dr. Bekoff, who has long studied animal emotions.

That certainly appears to be the case at the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park, where since 1981 trainers have been pairing cheetahs with dogs at an early age. The dogs have a socializing effect on the skittish cats, the zoo has found, allowing trainers to take the cheetahs to public events as "ambassador animals."

Janet Rose-Hinostroza, an animal trainer in charge of cats at Safari Park, said that a particular canine personality type is needed to make such relationships work. In selecting puppies, she said, she looked for ones that were easygoing, and neither too dominant nor too submissive.

"A puppy that's going to run you over and take the toy or try to protect the food, that's not the puppy I'm looking for," she said.

The dog and the cheetah gradually work out a way to play together, Ms. Rose-Hinostroza said. Dogs like to wrestle, but cheetahs' preferred play is the chase - a way to hone their predatory skills.

"The cheetahs are like, 'No, no, you need to be the gazelle!' " Ms. Rose-Hinostroza said.

It is probably no coincidence that many of the better-known animal pairings involve dogs, which have honed the art of cross-species communication through millenniums of having lived with humans. The dogs at the safari park, each housed with a cheetah, are adept at reading body language and take a dominant role with their feline companions - Donna J. Haraway, a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of "When Species Meet," suggested that the dogs function almost as "social psychologists."

And sometimes that means figuring out how to speak the other species' language.

When one dog, Clifford, had trouble persuading his feline companion, Majani, to play, he adopted a new tactic, Ms. Rose-Hinostroza said. Having learned from a trainer how to fake a limp, Clifford tried it out on the cheetah, looking much like a wounded gazelle. The disability, she said, proved irresistible to the cheetah, who came down off its perch to join the game.

But it is grooming, not playing, that cements a dog-cheetah friendship, Ms. Rose-Hinostroza said. Initially, the young cheetahs are terrified by the puppies' attempts to play, but gradually the two animals begin to trust one another, and at some point, the cheetah begins to lick and groom the dog.

"When you see that happen, you go, 'Yes, the cat actually likes the dog now,' so that's a good day," she said.

Communing between species, researchers said, can inspire speculation not just about the animals but about the humans that are so fascinated by them.

Dr. Bekoff, for example, said that videos of interspecies interactions offer a way for people to connect with a natural world from which they feel increasingly detached.

"People are really craving to be 're-wilded,' " he said. "They're craving to be reconnected to nature, and it's these odd examples that are really seductive."

Others see in the meeting of dog and doe, goat and rhino, tiger and bear, an ideal of peaceful connection that humans too often find elusive.

At Haller Park in Kenya - where Mzee, a 130-year-old tortoise, tends to Owen, an orphaned baby hippo - a man visiting the park with his child gazed at the unlikely couple and remarked, during a documentary about the pair, "If two very different creatures get along like this, then why cannot Iraqis and the British, Americans, Palestinians, the Israelis not get on?"

Or as Dr. Haraway, put it: "In a situation in which terrorism is cultivated from every angle and we are taught to fear practically everything, why should anybody be surprised that there's a profound desire for the pleasures of the peaceable kingdom?"

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A goat frolics with a baby rhinoceros. A pig nestles up to a house cat. A rat snake makes nice with the dwarf hamster originally intended as its lunch.

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Do dogs experience emotions like humans?

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We love our pets -- often so much it's easy to be convinced they're lost in profound, important thought. So, just what ARE they thinking? We asked our resident animal lover Martha Teichner to investigate:
Fenway, the Boston terrier, is trying to figure out how to get at a treat hidden inside a puzzle. What's going on in his mind?

Teichner asked, "If somebody asks you, 'Is my dog smart like a human is smart?' how do you answer that question?"

"It's not fair or even correct to compare dog intelligence to human intelligence," said Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University. "The real question is, 'What is a dog good at?'"

About seven years ago, Dr. Berns had an idea: If he could train dogs to hold still in an MRI ... a big if ... he could get some answers.

Truffles is living proof it can be done. She's one of more than a hundred dogs who've taken part in MRI experiments involving everything from facial recognition to self-control.

In one experiment, Truffles is shown two toys, and knows "giraffe" means treat, "whale" no treat. But what about photographs of the toys?

Dr. Berns uses scans of Truffles to look at the reward center of his brain - right where it is in humans. "We're looking for activity in that location." The point: to find out if Truffles reacts to the toys and the photos in the same way.

Discussing another dog's scan results, Dr. Berns said, "It's too soon to say, 'cause this is just one dog, but what that tells me is they're not literally seeing the two equivalently." In other words, they seem to know that one is a photograph, and one is real.

Not to be outdone by a dog, Donna, a 34-year-old African elephant at the Oakland Zoo in California, makes the connection between a picture of a banana her trainer shows her and the real thing.

That's important, said Caitlin O'Connell Rodwell, an animal communication expert who studies elephants, and teaches at Stanford University. "Because if you can imagine an object in your mind, that means you can think about that object and plan around that object. Does Donna understand that that picture of the banana represents a real banana? 'Cause that means that she can imagine that in her mind.

"The elephant has the largest brain-per-body size, bigger than humans," said Rodwell. "If size matters, and it does appear that size matters, then elephants could possibly be smarter than us. Elephants are so much like us -- watching them caring about each other, watching their politics."

Elephant politics? "Oh, yes!"

As for communication, elephants understand us better than we understand them. Behaviors Donna was taught to aid in her own care led to the banana test.

"That's what's so exciting about these cognitive experiments with Donna, is that we can now ask her a lot of different questions," said Rodwell. "Donna understands English. So, there's probably a lot more that she understands about language than we've figured out how to ask her."

Thanks to technology, researchers are beginning to decipher dolphin language -- the chirps and clicks that come from their blowholes.

"We looked at how mothers would retrieve their calves, which we can ask them to do on cue," said Jill Richardson, a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science. Her work at the Dolphins Plus Sanctuary in Key Largo, Florida, has involved identifying each individual's signature whistle, which is like its name.

"It's like a mom in a room saying, like, 'Jill Lauren, come for dinner!' And then the calf responds immediately."

""It's like having the first and last name," said Teichner.

"Exactly. My kids always know they're in bigger trouble when I use the first and last name!" she laughed. "I really think we're scratching the surface. We know they're chatty. The next step really with their communication is learning how they might string acoustic signals together in different ways to have different meanings, like syntax."

Do dolphins speak in sentences? These dolphins obey more than 50 commands, but when given a hand signal that means "create" -- do whatever you want -- they do.

Teichner asked, "What have the dolphins taught you about humans?"

"Oh gosh, I think the most important thing is that maybe we're not as smart as we think we are," Richardson replied, "and that it's definitely opened my eyes to how we put some constraints on our understanding of intelligence, when it might be this much more colorful and broad experience for these animals."

Intelligence we underestimate, because we don't know any better.

For more info:
Story produced by Sari Aviv.

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We love our pets -- often so much it's easy to be convinced they're lost in profound, important thought. So, just what ARE they thinking? We asked our resident animal lover Martha Teichner to investigate: Fenway, the Boston terrier, is trying to figure out how to get at a treat hidden inside a puzzle.

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What Animals Teach Us About Measuring Intelligence

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What Animals Teach Us About Measuring Intelligence

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My dog Maebe gets very excited whenever my roommate comes home. Due to her heightened sense of smell, she starts her happy dance 30 seconds before the door actually opens, giving me time to sneak the bag of chips that he bought back into the cupboard. Does such olfactory aptitude mean she's a genius, on par with master sommeliers?

In the midst of her happy dance, she sometimes chases her tail. When she's feeling especially nifty, she'll catch and proceed to chew on it like it's a squeak-toy. Does her lack of awareness with respect to self-mutilation mean she's stupid?

Intelligence is notoriously difficult to measure. For humans, common measures are childhood IQ and SAT scores, metrics that are under constant attack. But this debacle becomes even more apparent when other species are involved. The study of animal intelligence, or cognition, is such a nascent field that most of what has been hypothesized has yet to be replicated in a lab. The biggest challenges to the field's development are that it relies too heavily on anecdotes, that controlled experiments with large-enough sample sizes are difficult to design, that many consider it irrelevant, and that "intelligence" as a concept has been overly anthropomorphized.

The most famous anecdote is that of Rico the dog. In 2004, German researchers discovered a border collie who could learn the name of an object in one try, had a vocabulary of 200 words, and remembered them all a month later. Rico was extraordinary, renewing public interest in an animal's language-processing abilities for the first time since the early 1900s, when the public thought Clever Hans the horse could count, make change, and tell time. (He was really just responding to his owner's body language.)
With the current infrastructure, analyzing animal intelligence is nearly impossible.
Similarly fascinating individuals exist across species. In 2011, Kandula the elephant couldn't reach a fruit branch, so he rolled a wooden box over with his trunk and used it as a stool. Beforehand, scientists did not think elephants knew how to use tools. In another instance, Ayumu the chimp repeatedly recalled random sequences of nine digits, even though the numbers had only been displayed for a fraction of a second. The next year, he was pitted against British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged victorious.

When studying animal intelligence, scientists typically analyze a subject's self-control, self-awareness, and memory. These abilities are integral to processing information and making rational choices-intelligence in its most generalized form.

The most popular intelligence-assessment tools among such researchers today are the "pointing test" and the "mirror test." In the "pointing test," an animal is trained to expect food in a certain place. The location of the food will then be switched, and a human will point to the new location. If the animal goes directly to the new location, it passes the test, and if it ignores the pointing motion and looks for food where it has been trained to look, it fails. The study assesses self-control and the ability to respond to new information. Human babies start passing the test around their first birthdays-but most animals, even chimps, fail. The ones that pass are typically domesticated mammals. Dogs are especially good at it.

The "mirror test" checks for self-awareness. A disfiguring mark, such as a red dot, is usually applied to the subject's forehead, and if the subject shows an indication-by touching its face, for example-of recognizing that it's looking at its own reflection, the animal passes. Recognizing oneself in a mirror is considered to be a sign of cognition, as doing so requires at least a rudimentary concept of identity.

Unfortunately, when measuring these capacities in animals, it is often difficult to achieve the sample sizes and conditions required for scientific accuracy. A 2013 study found that elephants pass the pointing test about two-thirds of the time. However, the experiment's sample size was 11, a number that leaves way too much room for error, as each elephant carries a 9 percent weight on the study. After another 2013 study showed that dolphins can remember one another after more than 20 years of separation, National Geographic's headline was "Dolphins Have Longest Memories in Animal Kingdom." In this case, the sample size was 43, much too small to be cast as definitive in any other behavioral science.

Along with underwhelming sample sizes, tests for animal intelligence often fail to replicate the animal's natural ecological context. An extreme example of such a design flaw is that Kandula, the elephant who used a stool, was initially given a stick for the purpose of batting down the food. However, elephants locate food with their sense of smell. Kandula didn't use the stick because he would've had to pick it up with his trunk, meaning he wouldn't have been able to smell the food. This is analogous to humans with eyes on their hands being told to use silverware.

The pointer and mirror tests might also be ecologically inconsistent. Irene Pepperberg, an animal psychologist at Harvard who works with parrots, explains, "Mirror tests check whether a subject has self-recognition, but the test can be tricky. We gave the mark-test to one of my parrots. He saw the mark in the mirror, scratched at it for a couple of seconds, the mark didn't go away, and he walked off. Parrots get gunk on their faces all the time when they feed, so what did the bird's actions mean? Ditto for the point test: If an animal doesn't have arms, hands, and fingers, what would pointing really mean?"

Therein lies a paradox: Scientists have difficulty accrediting experiments that are not properly controlled, but, with animals, properly controlled studies often cannot account for ecological context because animals would never encounter laboratory conditions in the course of their natural lives. This is why the field still relies mostly on anecdotes.

It follows that, with the current infrastructure, analyzing animal intelligence is nearly impossible. Perhaps with more funding, more complex studies could be done at a greater scale. Earlier this year, the Duke Canine Cognition Center was able to organize a study of 567 animals across 36 species for an assessment similar to the pointer test. The center has also built a network of over a thousand dogs on which they can conduct experiments. Brian Hare, a founder of the center, says his goal is to build a database large-enough to shed light on longstanding questions about behavior, breeding, and genetics.
"Smart" and "dumb" are irrelevant in cross-species comparisons.
Labs as resource-abundant as Duke's Canine Cognition Center are rare. Adam Pack, who studies dolphins at the University of Hawaii, explained in an email that researchers rely primarily on funding from the National Science Foundation and that many will set up nonprofit arms to enable donations from family foundations and philanthropic individuals. Universities, too, sometimes sponsor small, species-specific labs for just a few scientists. But, in general, it's difficult to get funding for robust animal-intelligence experiments because the field is competing for grants with areas of research, like those on cancer and AIDS, that have more possibility to improve human life. Animal intelligence is more like space exploration, a field in which the societal gains from additional knowledge appear to be purely academic.

And even when there's progress, it's often discredited. Frans de Waal, a primatologist, explains in a Wall Street Journal essay, "The one historical constant in my field is that each time a claim of human uniqueness bites the dust, other claims quickly take its place." Members of the animal-intelligence community think non-humans are unfairly written-off as less smart because marks for mental fitness have been overly anthropomorphized.

With animals, there is an emphasis on disentangling intelligence from mechanization. Intelligence is the ability to process information and make inferences, whereas mechanization is an automatic response to a certain stimulus. An octopus, for example, can change colors to blend into surroundings, something a sniper does by design. Scientists are trying to find out whether octopuses choose to change colors or do so mechanically. But does it matter? Ascribing such importance to design, visualization, and inference is incredibly arbitrary. Within this context, "intelligence" is really an indicator of how similar an animal is to humans.

Another argument from the animal-intelligence community is that the idea of "convergent intelligence" is often overlooked. It is common to believe that the more recently an animal shared an ancestor with humans, the smarter it is. This hypothesis, however, does not always hold. Pigs are very distantly related to humans, as it was over 100 million years ago that the ancestors of hogs and humans diverged. But much of pig and human DNA is identical. Proponents of convergence theory believe that pig and human DNA took different routes to the same solution. True to form, pigs have proven to be astute in very human ways. They can even employ deception, a very advanced cognitive tactic. Pig A will almost instantly follow Pig B if Pig B shows signs of knowing where food is stored, and Pig B will try to throw Pig A off its trail.

Simply put, researchers studying animal cognition believe the concept of intelligence has become caricatured.

For those outside of the community, an important side effect of studying this field is that it offers another way of exploring the quagmire of defining and measuring general intelligence. The challenges that come with this research arise because intelligence in its broadest sense is not something that's comparative. This is true not just across species, but also within them. For humans, tests such as the SAT will always be under attack because it's impossible to shrink intelligence to two dimensions. All that can be gleaned from these tests is that, due to whatever mix of circumstance and inherent ability, a person is currently better than a portion of population and worse than another at a particular type of reasoning.

Equally important, a person who exhibits or does not exhibit aptitude in one area can only be compared within the relevant frame. It's impossible, for example, to compare Mozart's musical talent to Einstein's facility with physics. As with animal intelligence, measuring human intelligence runs into problems when extrapolation extends beyond its boundaries. That is to say, the SAT might be a good measure of preparedness for college coursework, but no test can put a number on a person's innate intellectual ability across all domains.

So is Maebe a genius with her nose?

All that can be deduced is that, compared to humans, her ability to smell is spectacular. But "smart" and "dumb" are irrelevant in cross-species comparisons. Maebe occupies a different niche, and, for her, as with all animals, the main reason for testing 'intelligence' is to reveal the skills necessary for survival in her niche, not to examine how she would fair if she occupied the human one.

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What Animals Teach Us About Measuring Intelligence

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Brain power is not comparative and problems arise whenever we attempt to quantify it.

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From tool making to using zebra crossings to crack open nuts, Earth Unplugged runs down its favourite intelligent beasts.

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Yes, the Octopus is Smart as Heck, But Why?

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Yes, the Octopus is Smart as Heck, But Why?

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It has eight arms, three hearts - and a plan. Scientists aren't sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent.

An octopus in an aquarium in Brest, France. The animals are highly intelligent, but researchers are uncertain how the trait evolved. Credit... Fred Tanneau/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside. Later the animal stacks the shells together like nesting bowls - and carts them away.

"It suggests the octopus is carrying these tools around because it has some understanding they may be useful in the future," said Mr. Amodio, a graduate student studying animal intelligence at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

But his amazement is mixed with puzzlement.

For decades, researchers have studied how certain animals evolved to be intelligent, among them apes, elephants, dolphins and even some birds, such as crows and parrots.

But all the scientific theories fail when it comes to cephalopods, a group that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. Despite feats of creativity, they lack some hallmarks of intelligence seen in other species.

"It's an apparent paradox that's been largely overlooked in the past," said Mr. Amodio. He and five other experts on animal intelligence explore this paradox in a paper published this month in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

For scientists who study animal behavior, intelligence is not about acing a calculus test or taking a car apart and putting it back together. Intelligence comprises sophisticated cognitive skills that help an animal thrive.

That may include the ability to come up with solutions to the problem of finding food, for example, or a knack for planning for some challenge in the future. Intelligent animals don't rely on fixed responses to survive - they can invent new behaviors on the fly.

Only a few species stand out in these studies, and by comparing them, scientists have identified some shared factors. The animals have big brains relative to their body size, they live for a long time, and they can form long-lasting social bonds.

Those similarities have led to some promising explanations for how certain animals evolved to be smart.

One is known as the ecological intelligence hypothesis. It holds that intelligence evolves as an adaptation for finding food. While some animals have a reliable food supply, others have to cope with unpredictability.

"If you eat fruit, you have to remember where the fruiting trees are and when they're ripe," said Mr. Amadio. "It can be much more cognitively challenging than eating leaves."

Tools allow animals to get to food that they couldn't reach otherwise. And if they can make plans for the future, they can store food to survive hard times.

Other researchers have argued for what's known as the social intelligence hypothesis: Smarter animals "cooperate and learn from other members of the same species," said Mr. Amadio.

Together, these forces appear to have encouraged the development of bigger, more powerful brains.

Smart animals also tend to live for a long time, and it's possible that bigger brains drove the evolution of longevity. It takes years for juveniles to develop these complex organs, during which time they need help from adults to get enough food.

Cephalopods behave in ways that certainly suggest they're highly intelligent. An octopus named Inky, for example, made a notorious escape recently from the National Aquarium of New Zealand, exiting his enclosure and slithering into a floor drain and, apparently, out to sea.

Cuttlefish can scare off predators by forming eyespots on their bodies in order to look like giant fish. But they only use this trick against predators that rely on vision to find prey. If a predator that depends on smell shows up, the cuttlefish are smart enough just to flee.

Octopuses show the same flexibility when scientists bring them into labs. In one study, researchers at Hebrew University presented octopuses with an L-shaped box with food inside. The animals figured out how to push and pull the morsel through a tiny hole in the wall of their tank.

Another feature that cephalopods share with other smart animals is a relatively big brain. But that's where the similarities appear to end. Most of the neurons that do the computing, for example, are in the octopus's arms.
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Most strikingly, cephalopods die young. Some may live as long as two years, while others only last a few months. Nor do cephalopods form social bonds.

They get together to mate, but males and females don't stay together for long or care for their young. While chimpanzees and dolphins may live in societies of dozens of other animals, cephalopods seem to be loners.

Mr. Amodio and his colleagues think the evolutionary history of cephalopods may explain this intelligence paradox. About half a billion years ago, their snaillike ancestors evolved to use their shells as a buoyancy device. They could load chambers in the shell with gas to float up and down in the ocean.

Another cephalopod, the nautilus, still lives this way. Like the octopus, it has tentacles. It also has a somewhat enlarged brain, although it doesn't seem to be anywhere as intelligent as an octopus.

About 275 million years ago, the ancestor of the other cephalopods lost the external shell. It's not clear why, but it must have been liberating. Now the animals could start exploring places that had been off-limits to their shelled ancestors. Octopuses could slip into rocky crevices, for example, to hunt for prey.

On the other hand, losing their shells left cephalopods quite vulnerable to hungry predators. This threat may have driven cephalopods to become masters of disguise and escape. They did so by evolving big brains, the ability to solve new problems, and perhaps look into the future - knowing that coconut or clam shells may come in handy, for example.

An octopus pulls together two empty shells in order to hide off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Credit... Ethan Daniels, via Getty Images

Yet intelligence is not the perfect solution for cephalopods, Mr. Amodio suggested. Sooner or later, they get eaten. Natural selection has turned them into a paradox: a short-lived, intelligent animal.

Mr. Amodio said that scientists still need to learn a lot more about cephalopods before they can know if this hypothesis is sound. But the research may do more than shine a light on octopuses and their cousins: It could give us a deeper understanding of intelligence in general.

"We can't take for granted that there's just one way to intelligence," Mr. Amodio said. "There could be different paths."

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Yes, the Octopus Is Smart as Heck. But Why? (Published 2018)

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It has eight arms, three hearts - and a plan. Scientists aren't sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent. To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside.

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Humans set themselves apart from other animals in a number of ways, including our ability to make tools. When the anthropologist Jane Goodall discovered that wild chimpanzees frequently make and use tools, her advisor Louis Leakey famously quipped that "now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans".

Numerous other species have joined chimpanzees in knocking humans off their pedestal. Boxer crabs use stinging anemones as defensive weapons. American alligators place sticks on top of their snouts to catch egrets during their nesting season, when sticks become a valuable resource. Parrots frequently use a variety of objects to scratch themselves. A jay and a crow have once been observed to use sticks as weapons to jab at each other. Elephant bulls sometimes throw young elephants at fences to create a passage.

The list goes on, and continues to grow with new research. For example, we recently discovered that New Caledonian crows use tools to transport objects and that greater vasa parrots use pebbles to grind calcium powder from seashells for ingestion.

Despite the large variation in which species use tools and how, this behaviour still has special significance. New reports of tool use in animals often feature words such as "intelligent", "smart" or "clever". But is this really the case or is it time to abandon tool use as a measure of intelligence?

Nick Hobgood/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Termites build extraordinary structures that perfectly fit their needs. Their mounds have chambers that suit specific functions, connecting tunnels that allow large crowds to pass in both directions, and air flow that keeps the nest cool during the day and warm during the night. Designing such structures out of simple materials proves difficult even for human architects, yet it appears effortless for the tiny-brained termite. This is because building behaviour in termites is genetically encoded and often follows a fixed set of rules.

The same line of reasoning can apply to tool use. Simple rules and processes can lead to complex behaviours. Egyptian vultures can't break ostrich eggs with their beaks, so they throw stones at the eggs to crack them. Young birds are not picky in what tools they use - they also try small stones, soft wood and even dung. They quickly learn what works and what doesn't, but this doesn't necessarily mean that the animal understands the physical properties of objects simply because it can successfully use them as tools.

Humans don't always reason about their tool use either. Or have you often thought about how a ballpoint pen actually works?

Flexibility is key

Finding a single measure of intelligence for species as different as fish and elephants is extremely difficult. But one place to start is by looking at how flexibly animals can solve problems or, in other words, if they can learn more general rules and use these to solve new problems. For example, if an animal usually uses a stone to crack open a nut but there are no stones around, will they choose another heavy, hard object to crack open the nut? This would suggest a more abstract understanding about the type of object needed.

In the case of the Egyptian vulture and many other species, tool use occurs in one very specific context and is relatively inflexible. On the other hand, some species use a range of different tools to solve different problems. Chimpanzees, for example, have a broad toolkit: they use stones to crack nuts, leaf stems to fish for termites, stick tools to probe for honey and leaves to soak up water for drinking.

Similarly, New Caledonian crows make and use several different tools from different materials to probe for insects, and also use tools to explore new and potentially threatening objects.

This type of flexible tool use may allow individuals to innovate new and creative solutions to difficult problems. But even so, tool-using species aren't necessarily better at solving problems than species that don't use tools.

John Haslam/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Not surprisingly, New Caledonian crows excel in experiments that require them to use tools. What is surprising, however, is the performance of their close relatives that are not natural tool users. For example, researchers have shown that rooks, which do not habitually use tools in the wild, can select tools of an appropriate size and even bend a piece of wire into a hook to retrieve food in experiments when there's a reward at stake - their problem-solving skills help them work out how to use tools. In the same way, tool-using finches and apes are not necessarily better at problem-solving tasks, whether they involve tools or not, than species of finches and apes which do not typically use tools in the wild.

In addition to using problem-solving tasks, scientists can also compare species by calculating innovation rates, or how often members of different species adapt to new challenges. For example, blue tits invented a creative way to get food by pecking open the caps of milk bottles left on porches - a behaviour which spread quickly across the population.

With continued research on animal behaviour, scientists are constantly forced to reconsider what makes humans unique. Animals continue to surprise us, leading one researcher to ask: are we even smart enough to know how smart animals are?

Humans are clearly not the only animals to use tools for a wide variety of purposes. And while tool use may not always reflect the spark of a bright mind, it still provides a fascinating glimpse into how different species interact with their environments. Case in point: wild chimpanzees use leafy sponges to obtain fermenting sap from palms. Tools to tipple - another sign of intelligence?

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What makes an animal clever? Research shows intelligence is not just about using tools

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Humans set themselves apart from other animals in a number of ways, including our ability to make tools. When the anthropologist Jane Goodall discovered that wild chimpanzees frequently make and use tools, her advisor Louis Leakey famously quipped that "now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans".

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Surprising Stories of Animal Intelligence

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Surprising Stories of Animal Intelligence

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We all know the greatest hits when it comes to intelligence in the animal kingdom, but here are some unexpected additions.

If I asked you to name the smartest species around you'd almost certainly name at least one of these three: chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins. While these are undoubtably intelligent animals there are some creatures who might not be getting the recognition they deserve. One may even be purring in your lap right now...

House Cats

Cat owners the world over will have endless stories of their cat's cunning plans for finding food and evading baths; however, a cat's ability to process and apply information works far beyond getting tasty treats and avoiding water. Cats learn by observing and repeating observed behaviours, hence the term 'copycat'. One particular cat, named Nora, has shown the exceptional ability cats have to turn what they see into action. With her owner spending her days teaching children to play piano, Nora noticed the keen level of attention her owner would give to the notes the children were playing, and not to Nora. Always looking for the spotlight to be on her, Nora applied what she had been observing and perched herself up at the piano. Tapping the keys with her paws, just like the piano students, she was instantly lavished in the attention of her owner and the children. In playing the piano, Nora has been able to observe and pinpoint the exact action that wins attention, and act it out for herself, even replicating the way a piano student sits to the delight of all who watch her.

Rats

A favoured prey of our household cats, rats, are often relegated to the category of pest. However, researchers in Africa have been training rats to detect the smell of tuberculosis in saliva samples. Through a series of training exercises, the rats are taught how to sniff out the different samples, and then alert their trainers to which samples contain TB. Rats were chosen for this important process because not only can they detect the different scents needed to identify a sample, they are also highly intelligent and quick to train. Once fully trained, these rats take only 7 minutes to accurately identify a tuberculosis sample - a task that would take a human scientist a full day of testing.

Pigs

From disease stopping to showstopping, Nellie the pig demonstrates how animal intelligence runs deeper than just performing learnt tricks. When presented with a series of challenges, including putting different shaped items in a hoop, Nellie uses her creativity to try and solve the problem. While she has been taught to put round objects through a round hoop when asked, when presented with objects that are not round, she appears to compare the shape of the object with the hoop. Deciding that the object is the wrong shape and won't fit in the hoop, she chooses not to complete the task, despite her trainer's requests to attempt it. Nellie's ability to compare shapes gives us an insight into how pig brains process spatial awareness and can mentally problem solve different tasks.

So the next time you're looking for intelligent company, maybe try a piano lesson with a cat or a spatial awareness challenge with a pig!

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Surprising stories of animal intelligence

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We all know the greatest hits when it comes to intelligence in the animal kingdom, but here are some unexpected additions. If I asked you to name the smartest species around you'd almost certainly name at least one of these three: chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins.

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Top 5 Most Intelligent Animals | BBC Earth

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In one experiment, clever crows dropped rocks in a container of water to get at floating food. (Photocredit Sarah Jelbert)

Ever stare out into space and look for signs of intelligence? Well, we should be looking right here on Earth, primatologist Frans de Waal argues in his new book, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" (He'll discuss it at a Smithsonian Associates event Wednesday.)

For centuries, scientists have been obsessed with finding the one big difference that separates humans from other animals - things like tool use, observational learning and the ability to plan ahead. Almost as soon as that line gets drawn in the sand, chimps, crows and octopuses step, fly and swim right over it. It's time to stop this fruitless quest, de Waal argues: Instead of trying to prove humanity's superiority, let's use our big brains to see the world from the point of view of other species.

Why is animal intelligence research taking off now?
I think we got tired of behaviorism, which was dominant last century. More and more phenomena are coming to the fore, of animals doing things that couldn't be explained by simple instinct or by simple associative learning. And the younger generation is much more open to seeing what animals can do on their own terms.

Why should scientists stop comparing animal intelligence to human intelligence?
Why would you want to judge a bat or an octopus on human terms? They don't live human lives. In their own contexts, animals do things that we could never match. There are birds that remember 10,000 locations for the seeds that they hide. An octopus can adopt the color of the environment. A bat can detect the location of very small items in pitch-black darkness. We should stop asking who is better and start trying to explain how animals can do these amazing things.

It seems like sometimes we set up intelligence tests that are rigged against animals.
It's not intentional, it's just we don't take into consideration the animal's umwelt, or world view. For example, people thought that elephants were unable to recognize themselves in the mirror, [because of] a study where they had very small mirrors. But when someone thought to give elephants a mirror that is their size, and they can touch and smell behind it, suddenly they can pass the mirror test.

When we compare apes to children, it looks to us like they are being tested in identical settings, but it's not identical for the ape. The child is in a lab, interacting with members of his own species, getting instructions in a language he understands, maybe sitting on his mother's ap. The ape doesn't have any of these things, and so the child is at an enormous advantage.

And even with these disadvantages, sometimes animals outperform us. Like when chimps beat humans on memory tests and in strategy games. And now it turns out that elephants have more neurons than us?
That was a bit upsetting to people because some scientists had said the best criterion for intelligence, regardless of body size, regardless of overall brain size, was to just count the neurons. Humans were always assumed to be at the top of that list. Then the elephant turned out to have three times more neurons than we do, so now we are stuck with the elephant being at the top of that list. And that's always the issue. People come up with these criteria for intelligence, for consciousness, that separate us from the other animals, and they don't know what to do if particular animals surpass us in certain ways.

If chimps are so smart, why haven't they invented the iPhone, or at least one of those first-generation Nokias?
The iPhone is the accumulation of maybe 5,000 years of scientific knowledge. That is our species' specialty, the accumulation of knowledge through language, and it took a long time for us to get to this point. For a million years, our ancestors used the same hand axes. Only in the last 10,000 to 15,000 years have we had complex societies and made technological advances. In the last two centuries, the pace has accelerated. But we didn't start out like that.

What are the implications of humanity's dawning awareness that we are not the Earth's only intelligent life form?
Our relationship with animals is slowly changing. If you assume complex cognition and emotions in animals, you cannot treat them like garbage. Which is what people are doing in the agricultural industry, for example. It's also going to affect our way of looking at ourselves. We are going to stop seeing ourselves as totally divorced from nature, as some sort of totally unique brainy primate. Psychology, biology, all these disciplines are going to have to start rethinking their premises.

National Museum of the American Indian, Fourth Street and Independence Avenue SW; Wed., 6:45 p.m., sold out, call 202-633-3030 for the waitlist.

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Animal intelligence has been widely underestimated, says primatologist Frans de Waal

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Ever stare out into space and look for signs of intelligence? Well, we should be looking right here on Earth, primatologist Frans de Waal argues in his new book, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" (He'll discuss it at a Smithsonian Associates event Wednesday.)

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Watch Episode 18 with Marc Bekoff here:

How does compassion play a role in ecological conservation?

In what way does our treatment of animals impact the way we treat ourselves and the planet?

Marc Bekoff is an animal behaviorist who argues that turning away from human exceptionalism and theoretical prejudices are the keys to expanding our compassionate footprint and making our conservation efforts more effective.

As the author of more than 1,000 essays and 30 books, Marc is a leading voice in the fields of ecology, animal behavior, and cognitive ethology.

Among his many accomplishments, he, with Jane Goodall, is a co-founder of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and he was the first American to win his age class at the Tour du Haut Var bicycle race.

Marc joins us in this episode to discuss empathy, dissonance and connecting with who nonhuman animals are.

Listen to Episode 18 with Marc Bekoff here:

What we discuss in this episode:

What it means to rewild yourself, connect with nature, and acknowledge nonhuman animals for who they are

How overstimulation has made us discontent and disconnected from the natural world

What happens to your brain when you go outside? How nature affects your mood and mind

It's who we eat, not what we eat: How diet impacts our connection to the world

How we use convenience and nonhuman animals' perceived utility to create cognitive dissonance

Is there a connection between intelligence and suffering? What cognitive ethology teaches us about animals' emotional lives

The importance of spending time with "food animals": animal personalities, , and a story from Marc's

Do bees get depressed and do elephants mourn? Marc explains animal emotions and why they act the way they do

Marc's insights about domestication, animal advocacy, and diet

Follow Marc on Twitter at @MarcBekoff or on his website at marcbekoff.com

Connect with Switch4Good

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Marc Bekoff: Compassionate Conservation & the Lives of Animals

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How does compassion play a role in ecological conservation? In what way does our treatment of animals impact the way we treat ourselves and the planet? Marc Bekoff is an animal behaviorist who argues that turning away from human exceptionalism and theoretical prejudices are the keys to expanding our compassionate footprint and making our conservation efforts more effective.

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We have much in common with wolves, coyotes, red foxes, and domestic dogs. These social species - and other animals - have emotional lives, can experience emotions such as joy and grief. That's Marc Bekoff's conclusion after many years of studying these animals.

In his book, "The Emotional Lives of Animals," Bekoff writes that while animals may experience emotions that humans can't understand, we can understand many of their feelings. Observing is the key to understanding. Bekoff observes, for example, that wolves "have more varied facial expressions, and that they use these expressions to communicate their emotional states to others. Wolf tails are more expressive, and wolves use more tail positions than do dogs or coyotes to express their emotions."

Such body language revealed the grief a pack of wolves felt after losing a low-ranking female. He describes how the grieving animals lost their spirit and playfulness. How they no longer howled as a group, but rather sang alone in a slow mournful cry. How they held their heads and tails low and walked softly and slowly when they came upon the place where a mountain lion had killed their pack mate.

If wolves and coyotes experience many of the emotions that humans feel, can they also become mentally impaired? Bekoff asks and answers this intriguing question. "Because there are autistic humans, there likely are nonhuman animals who suffer from what might be called autism." He concludes that since many psychological disorders have been diagnosed in dogs, "there's no reason why this couldn't be true for their wild relatives." He describes a coyote and a wolf that exhibited what might be called bipolar behavior.

Bekoff also believes there is "honor among beasts," As he puts it: "Based on my long-term detailed studies of play in social carnivores - including wolves, coyotes, red foxes, and domestic dogs - I believe we can make the stronger claim that some animals might be moral beings."

If we believe that animals can experience emotions such as grief, can become mentally impaired, and can be moral beings, then, as Bekoff writes, we must make sure that our actions match our beliefs. He says that when he talks to researchers who conduct invasive research or to people who work on factory farms, he asks them: "Would you do that to your dog?" He says that some people are startled by this question, but that it's an important one to ask.

Once we believe that animals other than ourselves - animals such as wolves and coyotes - have emotional lives we must relate to those creatures in a certain way. We must, as Bekoff says, "treat other beings with respect, appreciation, compassion, and love. There's no doubt whatsoever that, when it comes to what we can and cannot do to other animals, it's their emotions that should inform our actions on their behalf, and we can always do more for them."

Rick Lamplugh is a wolf advocate and author of the Amazon Bestseller "In the Temple of Wolves: A Winter's Immersion in Wild Yellowstone." Available as eBook or paperback or as a signed copy from the author.

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Wolves And Coyotes Feel Sadness And Grieve Like Humans

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We have much in common with wolves, coyotes, red foxes, and domestic dogs. These social species - and other animals - have emotional lives, can experience emotions such as joy and grief. That's Marc Bekoff's conclusion after many years of studying these animals.

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Premiere date: Nov 7, 2012 | 00:03:47

In this video short, Dr. Marc Bekoff, former Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado featured in Animal Odd Couples, on the scientific study of animal emotions, animal friendships, and the elements of the brain that allow for such bonds to form.

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Animal Odd Couples | Studying the Emotional Lives of Animals | Nature | PBS

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Premiere date: Nov 7, 2012 | 00:03:47 In this video short, Dr. Marc Bekoff, former Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado featured in Animal Odd Couples, on the scientific study of animal emotions, animal friendships, and the elements of the brain that allow for such bonds to form.

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Emotional Lives of Animals: The Animal Issue

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Emotional Lives of Animals: The Animal Issue

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Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. And bats, dolphins, whales, frogs, and various rodents use high-frequency sounds to find food, communicate with others, and navigate.

Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It's not surprising that animals-especially, but not only, mammals-share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions. In many ways, human emotions are the gifts of our animal ancestors.

Grief in magpies and red foxes: saying goodbye to a friend

Many animals display profound grief at the loss or absence of a relative or companion. Sea lion mothers wail when watching their babies being eaten by killer whales. People have reported dolphins struggling to save a dead calf by pushing its body to the surface of the water. Chimpanzees and elephants grieve the loss of family and friends, and gorillas hold wakes for the dead. Donna Fernandes, president of the Buffalo Zoo, witnessed a wake for a female gorilla, Babs, who had died of cancer at Boston's Franklin Park Zoo. She says the gorilla's longtime mate howled and banged his chest, picked up a piece of celery, Babs' favorite food, put it in her hand, and tried to get her to wake up.

I once happened upon what seemed to be a magpie funeral service. A magpie had been hit by a car. Four of his flock mates stood around him silently and pecked gently at his body. One, then another, flew off and brought back pine needles and twigs and laid them by his body. They all stood vigil for a time, nodded their heads, and flew off.

I also watched a red fox bury her mate after a cougar had killed him. She gently laid dirt and twigs over his body, stopped, looked to make sure he was all covered, patted down the dirt and twigs with her forepaws, stood silently for a moment, then trotted off, tail down and ears laid back against her head. After publishing my stories I got emails from people all over the world who had seen similar behavior in various birds and mammals.

Empathy among elephants

A few years ago while I was watching elephants in the Samburu National Reserve in Northern Kenya with elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton, I noticed a teenaged female, Babyl, who walked very slowly and had difficulty taking each step. I learned she'd been crippled for years, but the other members of her herd never left her behind. They'd walk a while, then stop and look around to see where she was. If Babyl lagged, some would wait for her. If she'd been left alone, she would have fallen prey to a lion or other predator. Sometimes the matriarch would even feed Babyl. Babyl's friends had nothing to gain by helping her, as she could do nothing for them. Nonetheless, they adjusted their behavior to allow Babyl to remain with the group.

Waterfall dances: Do animals have spiritual experiences?

Do animals marvel at their surroundings, have a sense of awe when they see a rainbow, or wonder where lightning comes from? Sometimes a chimpanzee, usually an adult male, will dance at a waterfall with total abandon. Jane Goodall describes a chimpanzee approaching a waterfall with slightly bristled hair, a sign of heightened arousal:

"As he gets closer, and the roar of the falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This 'waterfall dance' may last 10 or 15 minutes." After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. Chimpanzees also dance at the onset of heavy rains and during violent gusts of wind.

In June 2006, Jane and I visited a chimpanzee sanctuary near Girona, Spain. We were told that Marco, one of the rescued chimpanzees, does a dance during thunderstorms during which he looks like he's in a trance.

Shirley and Jenny: remembering friends

Elephants have strong feelings. They also have great memory. They live in matriarchal societies in which strong social bonds among individuals endure for decades. Shirley and Jenny, two female elephants, were reunited after living apart for 22 years. They were brought separately to the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., to live out their lives in peace, absent the abuse they had suffered in the entertainment industry. When Shirley was introduced to Jenny, there was an urgency in Jenny's behavior. She wanted to get into the same stall with Shirley. They roared at each other, the traditional elephant greeting among friends when they reunite. Rather than being cautious and uncertain about one another, they touched through the bars separating them and remained in close contact. Their keepers were intrigued by how outgoing the elephants were. A search of records showed that Shirley and Jenny had lived together in a circus 22 years before, when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was in her 20s. They still remembered one another when they were inadvertently reunited.

A grateful whale

In December 2005, a 50-foot, 50-ton, female humpback whale got tangled in crab lines and was in danger of drowning. After a team of divers freed her, she nuzzled each of her rescuers in turn and flapped around in what one whale expert said was "a rare and remarkable encounter." James Moskito, one of the rescuers, recalled, "It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing it was free and that we had helped it." He said the whale "stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun." Mike Menigoz, another of the divers, was also deeply touched by the encounter: "The whale was doing little dives, and the guys were rubbing shoulders with it ... I don't know for sure what it was thinking, but it's something I will always remember."

Busy bees as mathematicians

We now know that bees are able to solve complex mathematical problems more rapidly than computers-specifically, what's called "the traveling salesman problem"-despite having a brain about the size of a grass seed. They save time and energy by finding the most efficient route between flowers. They do this daily, while it can take a computer days to solve the same problem.

Dogs sniffing out disease

As we know, dogs have a keen sense of smell. They sniff here and there trying to figure who's been around and also are notorious for sticking their noses in places they shouldn't. Compared to humans, dogs have about 25 times the area of nasal olfactory epithelium (which carries receptor cells) and many thousands more cells in the olfactory region of their brain. Dogs can differentiate dilutions of 1 part per billion, follow faint odor trails, and are 10,000 times more sensitive than humans to certain odors.

Dogs appear to be able to detect different cancers-ovarian, lung, bladder, prostate, and breast-and diabetes, perhaps by assessing a person's breath. Consider a collie named Tinker and his human companion, Paul Jackson, who has Type 2 diabetes. Paul's family noticed that whenever he was about to have an attack, Tinker would get agitated. Paul says, "He would lick my face, or cry gently, or bark even. And then we noticed that this behavior was happening while I was having a hypoglycemic attack so we just put two and two together." More research is needed, but initial studies by the Pine Street Foundation and others on using dogs for diagnosis are promising.

It's OK to be a birdbrain

Crows from the remote Pacific island of New Caledonia show incredibly high-level skills when they make and use tools. They get much of their food using tools, and they do this better than chimpanzees. With no prior training they can make hooks from straight pieces of wire to obtain out-of-reach food. They can add features to improve a tool, a skill supposedly unique to humans. For example, they make three different types of tools from the long, barbed leaves of the screw pine tree. They also modify tools for the situation at hand, a type of invention not seen in other animals. These birds can learn to pull a string to retrieve a short stick, use the stick to pull out a longer one, then use the long stick to draw out a piece of meat. One crow, named Sam, spent less than two minutes inspecting the task and solved it without error.

Caledonian crows live in small family groups and youngsters learn to fashion and use tools by watching adults. Researchers from the University of Auckland discovered that parents actually take their young to specific sites called "tool schools" where they can practice these skills.

Love dogs

As we all know, dogs are "man's best friend." They can also be best friends to one another. Tika and her longtime mate, Kobuk, had raised eight litters of puppies together and were enjoying their retirement years in the home of my friend, Anne. Even as longtime mates, Kobuk often bossed Tika around, taking her favorite sleeping spot or toy.

Late in life, Tika developed a malignant tumor and had to have her leg amputated. She had trouble getting around and, as she was recovering from the surgery, Kobuk wouldn't leave Tika's side. Kobuk stopped shoving her aside or minding if she was allowed to get on the bed without him. About two weeks after Tika's surgery, Kobuk woke Anne in the middle of the night. He ran over to Tika. Anne got Tika up and took both dogs outside, but they just lay down on the grass. Tika was whining softly, and Anne saw that Tika's belly was badly swollen. Anne rushed her to the emergency animal clinic in Boulder, where she had life-saving surgery.

If Kobuk hadn't fetched Anne, Tika almost certainly would have died. Tika recovered, and as her health improved after the amputation and operation, Kobuk became the bossy dog he'd always been, even as Tika walked around on three legs. But Anne had witnessed their true relationship. Kobuk and Tika, like a true old married couple, would always be there for each other, even if their personalities would never change.

Jethro and the bunny

After I picked Jethro from the Boulder Humane Society and brought him to my mountain home, I knew he was a very special dog. He never chased the rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, or deer who regularly visited. He often tried to approach them as if they were friends.

One day Jethro came to my front door, stared into my eyes, belched, and dropped a small, furry, saliva-covered ball out of his mouth. I wondered what in the world he'd brought back and discovered the wet ball of fur was a very young bunny.

Jethro continued to make direct eye contact with me as if he were saying, "Do something." I picked up the bunny, placed her in a box, gave her water and celery, and figured she wouldn't survive the night, despite our efforts to keep her alive.

I was wrong. Jethro remained by her side and refused walks and meals until I pulled him away so he could heed nature's call. When I eventually released the bunny, Jethro followed her trail and continued to do so for months.

Over the years Jethro approached rabbits as if they should be his friends, but they usually fled. He also rescued birds who flew into our windows and, on one occasion, a bird who'd been caught and dropped in front of my office by a local red fox.

Dog and fish: improbable friends

Fish are often difficult to identify with or feel for. They don't have expressive faces and don't seem to tell us much behaviorally. Nonetheless, Chino, a golden retriever who lived with Mary and Dan Heath in Medford, Oregon, and Falstaff, a 15-inch koi, had regular meetings for six years at the edge of the pond where Falstaff lived. Each day when Chino arrived, Falstaff swam to the surface, greeted him, and nibbled on Chino's paws. Falstaff did this repeatedly as Chino stared down with a curious and puzzled look on her face. Their close friendship was extraordinary and charming. When the Heaths moved, they went as far as to build a new fishpond so that Falstaff could join them.

An embarrassed chimpanzee: I didn't do that!

Embarrassment is difficult to observe. By definition, it's a feeling that one tries to hide. But world famous primatologist Jane Goodall believes she has observed what could be called embarrassment in chimpanzees.

Fifi was a female chimpanzee whom Jane knew for more than 40 years. When Fifi's oldest child, Freud, was 5 1/2 years old, his uncle, Fifi's brother Figan, was the alpha male of their chimpanzee community. Freud always followed Figan as if he worshiped the big male.

Once, as Fifi groomed Figan, Freud climbed up the thin stem of a wild plantain. When he reached the leafy crown, he began swaying wildly back and forth. Had he been a human child, we would have said he was showing off. Suddenly the stem broke and Freud tumbled into the long grass. He was not hurt. He landed close to Jane, and as his head emerged from the grass she saw him look over at Figan. Had he noticed? If he had, he paid no attention but went on being groomed. Freud very quietly climbed another tree and began to feed.

Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser observed what could be called embarrassment in a male rhesus monkey. After mating with a female, the male strutted away and accidentally fell into a ditch. He stood up and quickly looked around. After sensing that no other monkeys saw him tumble, he marched off, back high, head and tail up, as if nothing had happened.

Animal rescues: feeling compassion for those in need

Stories about animals rescuing members of their own and other species, including humans, abound. They show how individuals of different species display compassion and empathy for those in need.

In Torquay, Australia, after a mother kangaroo was struck by a car, a dog discovered a baby joey in her pouch and took it to his owner who cared for the youngster. The 10-year-old dog and 4-month-old joey eventually became best friends.

On a beach in New Zealand, a dolphin came to the rescue of two pygmy sperm whales stranded behind a sand bar. After people tried in vain to get the whales into deeper water, the dolphin appeared and the two whales followed it back into the ocean.

Dogs are also known for helping those in need. A lost pit bull mutt broke up an attempted mugging of a woman leaving a playground with her son in Port Charlotte, Florida. An animal control officer said it was clear the dog was trying to defend the woman, whom he didn't know. And outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a dog rescued an abandoned baby by placing him safely among her own newborn puppies. Amazingly, the dog carried the baby about 150 feet to where her puppies lay after discovering the baby covered by a rag in a field.

Raven justice?

In his book Mind of the Raven, biologist and raven expert Bernd Heinrich observed that ravens remember an individual who consistently raids their caches if they catch them in the act. Sometimes a raven will join in an attack on an intruder even if he didn't see the cache being raided.

Is this moral? Heinrich seems to think it is. He says of this behavior, "It was a moral raven seeking the human equivalent of justice, because it defended the group's interest at a potential cost to itself."

In subsequent experiments, Heinrich confirmed that group interests could drive what an individual raven decides to do. Ravens and many other animals live by social norms that favor fairness and justice.

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The Emotional Lives of Animals - Yes! Magazine

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Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles.

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Chapter One
The Case for Animal Emotions and Why They Matter

Many animals display their feelings openly, publicly, for anyone to see. And when we pay attention, what we see outside tells us lots about what's happening inside an individual's head and heart. As we'll find, careful scientific research is validating what we intuitively understand: that animals feel, and their emotions areas important to them as ours are to us.

A few years ago my friend Rod and I were riding our bicycles around Boulder, Colorado, when we witnessed a very interesting encounter among five magpies. Magpies are corvids, a very intelligent family of birds. One magpie had obviously been hit by a car and was lying dead on the side of the road. The four other magpies were standing around him. One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it - just as an elephant noses the carcass of another elephant - and stepped back. Another magpie did the same thing. Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass, and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then, all four magpies stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off.

Were these birds thinking about what they were doing? Were they showing magpie respect for their friend? Of were they merely acting as if they cared? Were they just animal automatons? I feel comfortable answering these questions, in order: yes, yes, no, no. Rod was astounded by how deliberate the birds were. He asked me if this was normal magpie behavior, and I told him that I'd never seen anything like this before and hadn't read any accounts of grieving magpies. We can't know what they were actually thinking of feeling, but reading their actions there's no reason not to believe these birds were saying a magpie farewell to their friend.

Despite the more than three decades I've spent studying animal species, I never cease learning from the individuals I encounter. Red foxes live near my mountain home outside of Boulder, Colorado. As I stare into the eyes of a red fox sitting by my study and watching me type, or as I observe red fox pups playing with one another or a female red fox burying her mate, I can't help but reflect deeply on what it's like to be these individuals sharing my hillside. Many animals live on the surrounding land - coyotes, mountain lions, porcupines, raccoons, black bears, a wide variety of birds, and lizards, along with many dogs and cats. Through the years, they've been my friends and teachers.

In my musings about animal emotions I also can't help wondering, What about the insects? Do even mosquitoes have emotional lives? Of course, mosquitoes have tiny brains and lack the neural apparatus necessary for the evolution of emotions, so it's doubtful they do. But in truth, we just don't know. One day, perhaps we'll figure out a way to determine this. More important, however, would it make a difference to us if they did? It should, just as it should make a difference to us that other animals have emotions. Knowing that animals feel - and being able to understand them when they express joy, grief, jealousy, and anger - allows us to connect with them and also to consider their points of view when we interact with them. Knowledge about animal passions should make a difference in how we view, represent, and treat our fellow beings.

THICK SKIN AND TENDER HEARTS:

Babyl the Elephant and Her Unconditional Friends

A recent trip to Kenya and Tanzania opened my eyes to the world of elephants, who are some of the most amazing beings I've ever seen. Observing large groups of wild elephants close up I could feel their majestic presence, awareness, and emotions. These firsthand experiences were wholly different than seeing captive elephants, who often live alone, in the confines and unnatural settings of a zoo, and my visit was deeply spiritual, inspirational, and transformative.

While we were watching a group of wild elephants living in the Samburu Reserve in Northern Kenya, we noted that one of them, Babyl, walked very slowly. We learned that she was crippled and that she couldn't travel as fast as the rest of the herd. However, we saw that the elephants in Babyl's group didn't leave her behind; they waited for her. When I asked our guide, the elephant expert Iain Douglas-Hamilton, about this, he said that these elephants always waited for Babyl, and they'd been doing so for years. They would walk for a while, then stop and look around to see where Babyl was. Depending on how she was doing, they'd either wait or proceed. Iain said the matriarch even red her on occasion.

Why did the other elephants in the herd act this way? Babyl could do little for them, so there seemed no reason for or practical gain in helping her. The only obvious conclusion we could draw was that the other elephants cared for Babyl, and so they adjusted their behavior to allow her to remain with the group.

Friendship and empathy go a long way. And Babyl's friends aren't an isolated example. In October 2006 in a small village in eastern India, a group of fourteen elephants crashed through a village looking for a group member who had fallen into a ditch and drowned. Residents had already buried the seventeen-year-old female elephant, but still, thousands of people were forced to flee their homes as the other elephants searched and rampaged for more than three days.

THE HEART IS THE MATTER

In September 2006 there was a meeting about animal welfare called "The Heart of the Matter." It's nice to see scientists finally using the word heart, for the heart is the matter.

I study animal emotions and I love what I do. Over the course of my career, I've studied a wide variety of animals - coyotes, wolves, dogs, Adélie penguins, archer fish, western evening grosbeaks, and Steller's jays - and I've tackled a wide range of questions, dealing with everything from social behavior, social organization, and social development to communication, play, antipredatory behavior, aggression, parental behavior, and morality. To me, the evidence for animal emotions is impossible to deny, and it is widely supported by our current knowledge in animal behavior, neurobiology, and evolutionary biology.

In fact, the study of animal emotions is a dynamic and rapidly developing field of science, and there's no shortage of interest in animal emotions among scientists and average folks alike. In March 2005 about six hundred people from more than fifty nations gathered in London at a landmark meeting sponsored by the Compassion in World Farming Trust to learn more about animal sentience, animal consciousness, and the emotional lives of animals. In October 2006 the World Society for the Protection of Animals organized a conference in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how to improve animal welfare on farms and in research labs. Organizers expected about two hundred people, but twice that many attended, coming predominantly from Brazil and surrounding countries. The favorable response to the meetings in London and Rio is indicative that the time really has arrived for us to come to terms with the emotional lives of animals.

Stories about animal emotions and our complicated interrelationships with animals appear with increasing frequency in the press, from prestigious scientific journals like Science, Nature, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to the New York Times, Psychology Today, Scientific American, Time, The Economist, and even Reader's Digest. The emotional lives of animals was even the subject of a surprise hit movie, The March of the Penguins. Released in summer 2005, the documentary poignantly depicts penguin feelings and demonstrates how they experience suffering but also how they endure the most extreme challenges as they care for their eggs and their young.

Nevertheless, despite mounting scientific evidence and widespread popular belief, a decreasing few within the scientific community remain skeptical. Some still doubt that animal emotions even exist, and many who believe they do exist tend to think animal emotions must be lesser than human ones. This seems to me an outdated and even irresponsible point of view, and my main goal in this chapter - and indeed throughout the book - is to show that animal emotions exist, that they are important to humans, and that this knowledge should influence how we treat our fellow animals.

In discussing animal emotions, I focus mainly on behavioral data and anecdotal stories, weaving in recent discoveries in social neuroscience to show how a combination of common sense and scientific data - what I call "science sense" - makes a strong case for the existence of beastly passions. While stories drive much of my discussion, I bring in scientific studies as necessary for support.

However, once we agree that animal emotions exist and that they matter - which is what a great many people already believe - then what? Then we must consider ethics. We must look to our actions and see if they are consistent with our knowledge and beliefs. I feel strongly that ethics should always inform science. We should always strive to merge knowledge, action, and compassion. Indeed, that is always the heart of the matter.

WHAT ARE EMOTIONS?

It is very difficult to answer the question, "What are emotions?" Most of us know emotions when we see them but find it difficult to define them. Are they physical, mental, or both? As a scientist, I feel safe saying that emotions are psychological phenomena that help in behavioral management and control; they are phenomena that emote us, that make us move. A distinction is often made between "emotional responses" to physical reactions and "feelings" that arise from thoughts. Emotional responses show that the body is responding to certain external stimuli. For example, we see an oncoming car about to hit us and we feel fear - increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature. But actually, the fear isn't felt until the brain responds to the physiological changes that were a reaction to seeing the oncoming car.

Feelings, on the other hand, are psychological phenomena, events that happen solely in an individual's brain. An external event may trigger one emotion, such as anger or grief, but upon reflection we may decide we feel differently. We may interpret our emotions. Feelings express themselves as different moods. Feelings help us and influence how we interact with others in a wide variety of different social situations.

Charles Darwin, the first scientist to study animal emotions systematically, recognized six universal emotions: anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise. He maintained these core emotions help us deal rapidly with a wide variety of circumstances and help us to get along in a complex social world. Others have since added to his list. Stuart Walton, in his book A Natural History of Human Emotions, adds jealousy, contempt, shame, and embarrassment to Darwin's core group, while the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (in Descartes' Error) says that social emotions also include sympathy, guilt, pride, envy, admiration, and indignation. It's interesting that none of these researchers mention love.

Which, if any, of these emotions do animals experience? And do animals experience any emotions that humans do not? This is a very interesting question. Ethologist Joyce poole, who has studied elephants for many years, states: "While I feel confident that elephants feel some emotions that we do not, and vice versa, I also believe that we experience many emotions in common."

If Poole is right, then there may be some emotions that animals experience that humans will never understand, but there are many that we do. Aren't animals, human and nonhuman alike, happy when playing of when reuniting with a loved one? Don't animals become sad after losing a close friend? When wolves reunite, wagging their tails loosely to and fro in a circle, whining and jumping about, are they not displaying happiness? What about elephants who reunite in a greeting celebration, flapping their ears and spinning about and emitting a vocalization known as a "greeting rumble" - is this not happiness? Likewise, what name but grief can we give to the emotion that animals display when they remove themselves from their social group, sulk after the death of a friend, stop eating, and even die? Surely, despite differences, all species must share a similar core of emotions.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EMOTIONS

Researchers usually recognize two different types of emotions, primary and secondary emotions. Primary emotions are considered to be basic inborn emotions. These include generalized rapid, reflex-like ("automatic," or hardwired) fear and fight-or-flight responses to stimuli that represent danger. They require no conscious thought and include Darwin's six universal emotions: fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness, and happiness. Animals can perform a primary fear response, such as avoiding an object, almost unconsciously, before they have even recognized the object generating the reaction. Loud raucous sounds, certain odors, objects flying overhead: these and other such stimuli ate often inborn signals for "danger" that cause an automatic avoidance reaction. There's little or no room for error when confronted with a dangerous stimulus, so natural selection has resulted in innate reactions that are crucial to individual survival.

Primary emotions are wired into the brain's evolutionarily old limbic system (especially the amygdala); this is the "emotional" part of the brain (so named by Paul MacLean in 1952). The physical structures in the limbic system and similar emotional circuits are shared among many different species and provide a neural substrate for primary emotions. In his three-brains-in-one (or triune brain) theory, MacLean identifies the reptilian, or primitive, brain (possessed by fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals); the limbic, or paleomammalian, brain (possessed by all mammals); and the neocortical, or "rational" neomammalian, brain (possessed by a few mammals, such as primates and humans) - all packaged into the cranium. Each is connected to the other two, but each also has its own capacities. While the limbic system seems to be the main area of the brain in which many emotions reside, current research now indicates that not all emotions are necessarily packaged into a single system, and there may be more than one emotional system in the brain.

Secondary emotions are more complex emotions, and they involve higher brain centers in the cerebral cortex. They could involve core emotions of fear and anger, or they could be more nuanced, involving such things as regret, longing, or jealousy. Secondary emotions are not automatic: they are processed in the brain, and the individual thinks about them and considers what to do about them - what action is the best one to perform in a certain situation. Conscious thought and secondary emotions can influence how we respond to situations that bring forth primary emotions: We may duck as an unseen object flies overhead, but as we recognize that it's only a shadow, we will refrain from running and instead, feeling a twinge of embarrassment, quickly straighten up and pretend nothing is wrong.

Thinking about the emotion allows for flexibility of response in changing situations after evaluating which of a variety of actions would be the most appropriate to perform in the specific situation. Sometimes, if someone is bothering you, it might be appropriate to get away from them, and sometimes this might create an even worse social situation - depending on who the person is and what kind of consequences you fear. Although most emotional responses are unconsciously generated - they occur without thinking - we learn to try to think before acting. Thinking allows us to make connections between feelings and actions, and this allows for variability and flexibility in our behavior so that, depending on the social situation, we always do the right thing. In this way, evidence of emotions in any creature is also an important step in determining sentience and self-awareness.
From The Emotional Lives of Animals:A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy - and Why They Matter by Marc Bekoff. Excerpted by permission of Marc Bekoff.

Marc Bekoff, Ph.D., is a former Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and co-founder with Jane Goodall of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He has won many awards for his scientific research including the Exemplar Award from the Animal Behavior Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Marc has written more than 200 articles, numerous books, and has edited three encyclopedias. His books include the Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, The Ten Trusts (with Jane Goodall), the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, the Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships, Minding Animals, Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Reflections on Redecorating Nature, The Emotional Lives of Animals, Animals Matter, Animals at Play: Rules of the Game (a children's book), Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (with Jessica Pierce), The Animal Manifesto: Six Reasons For Increasing Our Compassion Footprint, Ignoring Nature No More: The Case For Compassionate Conservation, and Jasper's Story: Saving Moon Bears (with Jill Robinson). In 2005 Marc was presented with The Bank One Faculty Community Service Award for the work he has done with children, senior citizens, and prisoners. In 2009 he was presented with the St. Francis of Assisi Award by the New Zealand SPCA.

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Animal Odd Couples | Excerpt: The Emotional Lives of Animals | Nature | PBS

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Many animals display their feelings openly, publicly, for anyone to see. And when we pay attention, what we see outside tells us lots about what's happening inside an individual's head and heart. As we'll find, careful scientific research is validating what we intuitively understand: that animals feel, and their emotions areas important to them as ours are to us.

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Dogs Can’t Help Falling in Love (Published 2019)

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One researcher argues that a dog’s ability to bond has more to do with forming emotional attachments than being smart about what humans want.

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Opinion

Credit... Jane Evelyn Atwood/Contact Press Images

FOR the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in an M.R.I. scanner - completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs' brains work and, even more important, what they think of us humans.

Now, after training and scanning a dozen dogs, my one inescapable conclusion is this: dogs are people, too.

Because dogs can't speak, scientists have relied on behavioral observations to infer what dogs are thinking. It is a tricky business. You can't ask a dog why he does something. And you certainly can't ask him how he feels. The prospect of ferreting out animal emotions scares many scientists. After all, animal research is big business. It has been easy to sidestep the difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions because they have been unanswerable.

Until now.

By looking directly at their brains and bypassing the constraints of behaviorism, M.R.I.'s can tell us about dogs' internal states. M.R.I.'s are conducted in loud, confined spaces. People don't like them, and you have to hold absolutely still during the procedure. Conventional veterinary practice says you have to anesthetize animals so they don't move during a scan. But you can't study brain function in an anesthetized animal. At least not anything interesting like perception or emotion.

From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons. We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer.

My dog Callie was the first. Rescued from a shelter, Callie was a skinny black terrier mix, what is called a feist in the southern Appalachians, from where she came. True to her roots, she preferred hunting squirrels and rabbits in the backyard to curling up in my lap. She had a natural inquisitiveness, which probably landed her in the shelter in the first place, but also made training a breeze.

With the help of my friend Mark Spivak, a dog trainer, we started teaching Callie to go into an M.R.I. simulator that I built in my living room. She learned to walk up steps into a tube, place her head in a custom-fitted chin rest, and hold rock-still for periods of up to 30 seconds. Oh, and she had to learn to wear earmuffs to protect her sensitive hearing from the 95 decibels of noise the scanner makes.

After months of training and some trial-and-error at the real M.R.I. scanner, we were rewarded with the first maps of brain activity. For our first tests, we measured Callie's brain response to two hand signals in the scanner. In later experiments, not yet published, we determined which parts of her brain distinguished the scents of familiar and unfamiliar dogs and humans.

Soon, the local dog community learned of our quest to determine what dogs are thinking. Within a year, we had assembled a team of a dozen dogs who were all "M.R.I.-certified."

Although we are just beginning to answer basic questions about the canine brain, we cannot ignore the striking similarity between dogs and humans in both the structure and function of a key brain region: the caudate nucleus.

Rich in dopamine receptors, the caudate sits between the brainstem and the cortex. In humans, the caudate plays a key role in the anticipation of things we enjoy, like food, love and money. But can we flip this association around and infer what a person is thinking just by measuring caudate activity? Because of the overwhelming complexity of how different parts of the brain are connected to one another, it is not usually possible to pin a single cognitive function or emotion to a single brain region.

But the caudate may be an exception. Specific parts of the caudate stand out for their consistent activation to many things that humans enjoy. Caudate activation is so consistent that under the right circumstances, it can predict our preferences for food, music and even beauty.

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

The ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child. And this ability suggests a rethinking of how we treat dogs.

DOGS have long been considered property. Though the Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and state laws raised the bar for the treatment of animals, they solidified the view that animals are things - objects that can be disposed of as long as reasonable care is taken to minimize their suffering.

But now, by using the M.R.I. to push away the limitations of behaviorism, we can no longer hide from the evidence. Dogs, and probably many other animals (especially our closest primate relatives), seem to have emotions just like us. And this means we must reconsider their treatment as property.

One alternative is a sort of limited personhood for animals that show neurobiological evidence of positive emotions. Many rescue groups already use the label of "guardian" to describe human caregivers, binding the human to his ward with an implicit responsibility to care for her. Failure to act as a good guardian runs the risk of having the dog placed elsewhere. But there are no laws that cover animals as wards, so the patchwork of rescue groups that operate under a guardianship model have little legal foundation to protect the animals' interest.

If we went a step further and granted dogs rights of personhood, they would be afforded additional protection against exploitation. Puppy mills, laboratory dogs and dog racing would be banned for violating the basic right of self-determination of a person.

I suspect that society is many years away from considering dogs as persons. However, recent rulings by the Supreme Court have included neuroscientific findings that open the door to such a possibility. In two cases, the court ruled that juvenile offenders could not be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. As part of the rulings, the court cited brain-imaging evidence that the human brain was not mature in adolescence. Although this case has nothing to do with dog sentience, the justices opened the door for neuroscience in the courtroom.

Perhaps someday we may see a case arguing for a dog's rights based on brain-imaging findings.

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Opinion FOR the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in an M.R.I. scanner - completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs' brains work and, even more important, what they think of us humans.

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Scientific Studies Reveal Surprising States

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Scientific Studies Reveal Surprising States

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Dingo researcher Bradley Smith on expedition in the Great Sandy Desert.

It cemented a life long pursuit investigating the smarts of fish and Brown's findings would probably surprise many.

"There's virtually nothing a fish can't do," Brown, an associate professor at Macquarie University's biology department says. "They recognise individuals, they preferentially associate with them, they deliberately manipulate individuals, they can cooperate, they show processes of reconciliation and all sorts of things, so basically everything you might find in primates you'll find in fish."

The questions of animal intelligence and related theories on sentience or consciousness have been probed and prodded by scientists and philosophers for centuries, with each new generation of minds seemingly devising alternative theories.

When looking at intelligence researchers examine how animals use cognitive abilities such as thinking, acquiring knowledge, sensory perception, memory, individual recognition and language, while sentience, or consciousness, deals more with how animals perceive what is around them and what they feel or think.

Research into these topics has gone through many stages, both humane and brutally inhumane. Rene Descartes's 17th-century teachings influenced Western beliefs for generations. The French philosopher and vivisectionist decried animals as lesser beings, or automatons, that lacked minds and souls and were not capable of reasoning. Which might explain his predilection for dissecting live animals. But Charles Darwin, whose anecdotal approach is regarded as the beginning of contemporary studies, argued that the mental powers of animals and humans differed only in "degree, not in kind" and attributed emotions to many species.

Australian philosopher Peter Singer's landmark 1975 book Animal Liberation really helped bring such concepts into the public consciousness and formed the foundations of the animal rights movement.

Kanzi is a chimpanzee that can reportedly communicate using symbols.

For much of the 20th century researchers explored the possible intelligence in primates, as the species most closely related to humans. A number of high-profile and controversial studies took place where researchers tried to prove intelligence by attempting to communicate with primates kept at research facilities. These included Kanzi, a bonobo​ that can reportedly communicate by using lexigrams​ (symbols representing words); Koko, a gorilla which uses sign language, and Ayumu, a chimpanzeethat exhibits an amazing memory (it is shown the numbers one to nine on the computer screen, and given just a fraction of a second to remember their random location. The chimpanzee can tap the numbers in the correct order).

But Brown says how closely an animal is related to humans is not "in in any way a valid measure of intelligence".

I think most biologists will assume that when we talk about vertebrates, they have the ability to express emotions.
Professor Paul Hemsworth.

"You shouldn't even have an expectation that because things are closely related to humans that they're going to be more intelligent than others," Brown says.

"Our emphasis has now shifted to understanding what are the environments or contexts that may lead to the rise of cognition more generally, so things like active foraging ​, [where] you go out and actually look for food, if foods are only found in particular locations at particular times and you have to solve particular problems in order to access it then those things are likely to increase intelligence generally."

Bradley Smith, a leading researcher in the behaviour of dingoes based at Central Queensland University agrees.

"They have feelings, they have families, they're just trying to go about their lives," he says.

However, as research has delved deeper into exploring what animals were capable of, some have warned about the influence of anthropomorphism - that is, reading human traits in animals' behaviours.

In 2014, Copenhagen Zoo was the centre of a fierce backlash when it killed an 18-month-old giraffe Marius with a bolt gun and then dissected the body in public and fed it to lions.

The zoo argued that it had to prevent the animal becoming an adult because of rules discouraging the inbreeding between giraffes. It was supported by Peter Sandoee, a professor of bioethics at the University of Copenhagen, who criticised the reaction, which included death threats to zoo employees, for being the "Disneyfication​" of animals.

"You take this very romantic image of animals as people with fur or feathers," Sandoee told the media. "Animals are viewed as a type of citizen, with the implication that they should be treated on par with fellow human beings."

The Gorilla Foundation in the United States also opened themselves to ridicule when they released a statement last year that Koko, after being told of the death of Robin Williams, who she had spent an afternoon with a decade earlier, became "quiet and looked very thoughtful" and "at the end of the day ... became very sombre, with her head bowed and her lip quivering".

Tiffani Howell, who has a PHD in psychology from Monash University, says "it's really hard to measure things like awareness".

However, Brown claims that the continuing debate about whether fish are intelligent and feel pain has led to animal welfare concerns ending "at the water line".

"You want to minimise stress and pain and discomfort to the animals [but] that kind of thing does not exist in fisheries and there's absolutely no scientific reason for that to be the case," Brown says.

"People don't expect fish to respond to pain. They don't really care about welfare issues because they have this lower expectation of fish intelligence but everything that we've done with fishes so far and even sharks suggests that there's really very little difference amongst vertebrates generally and if you're going to treat one vertebrate one way then you really ought to treat them all the same way."

Another characteristic often associated with intelligence in higher order animals such as elephants, dolphins and primates is the recognition of death. Rob Appleby, from Griffith University's Environmental Futures Research Institute, was on one of his regular expeditions on Fraser Island to observe the local dingoes and their often misinterpreted and maligned behaviour when he came across a mother dingo and her pups, one of which was in a great deal of distress and was convulsing.

He suspected that it may have been bitten by a snake, but it was the reaction of the pup's family members during the following days that really intrigued him. It took up to 30 minutes for the pup to die, during which time, the mother dingo and every sibling interacted with it, from pawing and sniffing and whimpering.

Later the mother dingo seemingly protected the body of the pup by picking it up in its mouth and repeatedly moving it to keep it close to the family.

"This is the first time that's its ever been observed in a canid [a family of animals that include wolves, jackals, foxes and domestic dogs] that we're aware of and it's certainly at least seemed to match some of the descriptions of the transport of deceased animals by species that we do ordinarily equate as being very intelligent," says Appleby, who does not know what eventually happened to the body despite a thorough search of the area.

"We tried to think of everything we could think of that was an explanation. The most logical competing hypothesis is that it was a source of food and she was simply moving it around to protect it, but my experience with dingoes on the island is that they don't tend to cache food all that often. They will do it but usually caching involves some sort of burial ... and my experience is that in that circumstance it probably would have occurred reasonably rapidly."

Rob Appleby taking video of dingoes on Fraser Island.

"In our view, it is this incapability to bear any legal responsibilities and societal duties that renders it inappropriate to confer upon chimpanzees the legal rights - such as the fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus - that have been afforded to human beings."

There is also the case of Sandra, an orangutan kept in a Buenos Aires' zoo, that is making slow progress through the Argentinian courts with her lawyers arguing that she should be moved to a sanctuary.

Appleby says the uproar over perceived wrongs directed at animals such as whaling, annual mass killings of dolphins in Japan and increasing awareness about species being pushed to extinction, show that people's perceptions were changing as research finds traits that were once thought to only be human.

"It's that recognition of sentience, that recognition of emotion and intelligence that I think is having people start to question how we treat them and wanting to treat them better," Appleby says.

Stathi Paxinos covers rugby league, rugby union, boxing, swimming and Australian Rules football for The Age. He has covered numerous major sporting events including the Sydney Olympic Games (boxing), the 2003 Rugby World Cup, state of origin contests and NRL finals, world title fights and national swimming championships. Stathi also covered boxing and aquatics at the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

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Scientific studies of animal intelligence and emotion reveal surprising traits

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It cemented a life long pursuit investigating the smarts of fish and Brown's findings would probably surprise many. "There's virtually nothing a fish can't do," Brown, an associate professor at Macquarie University's biology department says.

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At first it seemed like the usual, deviously clever attack. Several killer whales were trying to catch a Weddell seal that had taken refuge atop a drifting patch of Antarctic ice. The orcas swam alongside each other, creating a wave that knocked the hapless pinniped into the water. Death seemed certain.

Then something amazing happened: A pair of humpback whales turned up. As the panicked seal swam toward them, a lucky wave tossed it onto the chest of the closer, upturned whale. The whale arched its chest out of the water, which kept the seal away from the charging killer whales. And when the seal started to fall off, the whale carefully pushed it back onto its chest with a flipper. Soon after that, the seal scrambled to safety on another ice floe.

"I was shocked," recalls marine ecologist Robert Pitman, who witnessed the episode in 2009 and described it and another example in Natural History magazine that year. "It looked like they were trying to protect the seal."

Humpback whales will vigorously defend their own calves when attacked by killer whales, of course. But after analyzing other encounters between the two species, Pitman and his colleagues conclude that humpback whales will also launch preemptive attacks on their predators. Sometimes the intent seemed to be protecting another whale's calf. But more often, like with the Weddell seal, the humpbacks for some reason helped a different species.

When prey gang up and harass a predator, it's known as mobbing. A flock of crows, for example, can drive away a hawk by repeatedly dive-bombing. The behavior is also known among fishes, insects, and terrestrial mammals, but it hadn't been studied in marine mammals. Because of their large size, humpback whales don't have to worry about many predators. Killer whales are the only species known to attack, and they target small calves. The mothers will try to scare them off with thunderous bellows. If that fails, they defend their young by smacking their massive tails or swinging their 5-meter-long, barnacle-encrusted fins.

To find out whether the seal rescue in Antarctica was unusual behavior for humpbacks, Pitman, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, California, posted a request for information on a marine mammal listserv. He received 115 descriptions of encounters, many from commercial whale-watching trips, which sometimes included photos and videos. In 31 cases of mobbing, humpbacks approached killer whales that were already engaged in a fight. They would chase the killer whales, often bellow, and slap their fins and tails. "The humpbacks were definitely on the offense," Pitman says. He and colleagues published their findings online this week in Marine Mammal Science.

The conclusions have convinced Phillip Clapham, a NOAA marine biologist in Seattle, Washington, who was not involved in the research. "They make a very good case that it's a proactive response to killer whales," he says. "I think they're absolutely right."

It's not hard to imagine why humpbacks would rush to the rescue when another humpback whale is under attack. Because they migrate to and from the same breeding grounds where they were born, humpbacks are likely to encounter relatives. So a threatened calf might share some genes with a rescuer, making the apparently altruistic act of saving it somewhat self-interested.

But what about protecting other species? This happened in nearly 90% of attacks where the killer whales' prey could be identified. "It's pretty mysterious," says Trevor Branch, a fisheries scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who has studied populations of large whales. "We tend to think of altruism as being reciprocal, but there's no way these other species would come back and help the humpback whales."

Pitman suspects that it is inadvertent altruism. The humpbacks might simply rush to the scene of a fight whenever they hear killer whales fighting. "I think they just have a simple rule," Pitman says. "When you hear a killer whale attack, go break it up." Clapham adds that the confrontations may teach the killer whales a lesson, making them think twice about messing with humpbacks.

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Why did a humpback whale just save this seal's life?

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At first it seemed like the usual, deviously clever attack. Several killer whales were trying to catch a Weddell seal that had taken refuge atop a drifting patch of Antarctic ice. The orcas swam alongside each other, creating a wave that knocked the hapless pinniped into the water. Death seemed certain.

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Whales Mourn Loved Ones, Just Like You and Me

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Whales Mourn Loved Ones, Just Like You and Me

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Young gorillas and adult females gather around mother and dead offspring in an act of apparent sympathy or possibly even ceremony in April. (Photo Credit: Virunga National Park)

Mourning the loss of a loved one was initially thought to be just a human characteristic. However, over the years, experts have observed similar behavior in terrestrial social animals like gorillas and elephants. In one case, a herd of wild elephants spent hours trying to lift the body of their dead matriarch. After accepting her death, the elephants covered the body with leaves and tree branches and kept vigil for two days before finally dispersing. Now, scientists have discovered that even whales undergo tremendous sorrow when they lose an offspring or companion.

For their research, the team, led by Melissa Reggente, a biologist from the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy, parsed through data from 14 observations of unusual whale conduct. Seven of those incidents appeared to display mourning or grieving behavior. The results of the study, published in the Journal of Mammology in July, indicate that whether it is the massive sperm whale, the killer (orca) whale, or the relatively tiny spinner dolphin, the grieving patterns are similar.

A mother orca carries her dead newborn (Photo Credit: Robin W. Baird, Cascadia Research

In one case, researchers on a boat in the Red Sea saw an Indo-pacific bottlenose dolphin push the badly decayed corpse of a smaller dolphin through the water. When they lassoed the carcass and began towing it towards land to bury it, the adult dolphin swam alongside, until the water became too shallow. Even then, it continued to watch long after the body had been removed from the water. Reggente speculates that the adult dolphin was probably grieving the untimely death of its calf.

In a separate, but equally heart-wrenching incident observed near the San Juan Islands in Washington, a female killer whale was seen balancing her dead newborn on top of her head to keep it from sinking. In the North Atlantic Ocean, a pod of short-finned pilot whales created a circle around a grieving mother and her dead calf, protecting the two from predators looking to feed on the corpse.

The scientists say that this behavior is extremely "costly' for animals because it takes time away from normal activities like foraging for food, mating, and socializing with other members of the species. It, therefore, makes no evolutionary sense, thus leading the team to conclude that the whales were grieving for their loved ones.

Female killer whale pushing her dead calf (Photo Credit: Orca Research)

Barbara King, emeritus professor of anthropology at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, concurs with this theory. The author of the book How Animals Grieve says that some of the unusual behavior may be driven by curiosity or exploration. However, when mammals expend energy with actions like clinging on to their loved one's bodies or repeatedly touching the carcass with their fins, they are mourning their loss.

Given that whales are intelligent social animals, the findings do not come as a big surprise to most experts. The mammals do, after all, form strong friendships and even lifelong bonds with companions, just like humans. However, now that there is substantial evidence of the grief they undergo, people will perhaps be more cautious in their treatment of these magnificent marine animals.

Resources: nationalgeographic.com,natureworldnews.com, sciencealert.com

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Whales Mourn Their Loved Ones, Just Like You And Me

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Mourning the loss of a loved one was initially thought to be just a human characteristic. However, over the years, experts have observed similar behavior in terrestrial social animals like gorillas and elephants. In one case, a herd of wild elephants spent hours trying to lift the body of their dead matriarch.

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Everything Worth Knowing About Animal Intelligence

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Everything Worth Knowing About Animal Intelligence

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The Germanic god Odin tended a smorgasbord of divine duties - healing, death, poetry and knowledge among them - but he might have been a somewhat less powerful one-eyed immortal without his animal helpers. According to Norse texts, ravens named Thought and Mind sat on the god's shoulders, departing every morning to spy on humans for him.

The old myths about clever animals may have been closer to the truth than science has been for much of its history. Until fairly recently, animals were considered to be unthinking machines and humans the only truly intelligent species. But aided by new tests that allow animals to show their smarts unhobbled by human preconception, scientists have discovered that there may be more similarities between human and animal intelligence than differences. To paraphrase an old hymn: All creatures great and small, we appear to have a cognitive kinship with them all.

Brainy Bees

Humans admire bee efficiency, but generally assume they are just tiny, well-programmed robots. Researchers are now uncovering a range of brainy skills previously thought to be exclusive to larger animals. In the Bee Sensory and Behavioural Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London, Lars Chittka and his colleagues found that bees count in simple ways and recognize faces. More recently, the Chittka lab has found that bees can be trained, using drops of sucrose as a reward or drops of quinine as a deterrent, to distinguish between two different colors more accurately and more quickly. The lab is also studying how bees copy each other. Chittka is testing this social learning in the lab by observing how inexperienced bees learn the quickest routes to flower patches by mimicking seasoned foragers.

Dolphin-speak

Those lucky enough to have seen a pair of dolphins bounding across the water know how playful they can be.

Hunter College comparative psychologist Diana Reiss, who has studied dolphin behavior since the 1980s, discovered that they're also able to communicate in surprisingly sophisticated ways. In one experiment, she installed an underwater keyboard that functioned as a vending machine. Each key had a different symbol, emitted a specific whistle when pushed, and delivered a treat - balls, hoops or rubs.

The dolphins quickly learned the associations, but what really intrigued Reiss was how they imitated the keys' whistles and even combined the whistles as they invented new games involving both hoops and balls. The study offered the first glimpse of the process of vocal learning in dolphins.

Now, Reiss wants to get a better understanding of how individual dolphins embed newly acquired whistles in their interactions. "We're separated by 95 million years of evolution, and we haven't made much progress understanding their communication," says Reiss.

Crafty Corvids

Ravens, it seems, never forget a beaked face. In the wild, the birds live in groups until they select mates, then each pair diverges into a solitary, conjugal life.

In the lab, researchers mimic these social arrangements and keep pairs in separate aviaries. But the ravens remember their old comrades from group life and recognize their recorded calls, reacting one way to birds that were their friends and another to ones that were not.

Jorg Massen and his colleagues at the University of Vienna conducted a study that looked at the birds' understanding of third-party relations. They wanted to know whether ravens have a mental representation of the way others should act. It appears they do.

Working with one group of birds, Massen's team played recorded calls of other ravens the birds had observed but hadn't interacted with. They chose calls that would deliberately upset the hierarchy - for instance, playing the submissive call of a No. 2 bird after a dominance call from No. 3. They found that the birds had little patience for rebelliousness, even in groups other than their own. "It represents a turnover in rank, and they react strongly to it," Massen explains. "If this were The Sopranos, it would be as if one of the underbosses were shouting at Tony."

Don't Underestimate Reptiles

Animals like chimps and dolphins are famed for their intelligence. But new evidence reveals cleverness in creatures considered primevally dumb: reptiles.

"If we're going to understand the evolution of the brain and of intelligence, we have to look across the gamut of species," says Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln in the U.K. When trained to hit a blue dot on a touch screen with their beaks, her red-footed tortoises used what they learned in a real-world situation. Placed in an arena, they headed straight for a blue bowl that resembled the dot on the screen.

Wilkinson says the tortoises performed the touch-screen task better than dogs, perhaps because they must fend for themselves as soon as they're hatched. Her work with tortoises and lizards challenges the idea that social interactions, rather than the physical environment, select for intelligence. "You do see impressive cognition among animals with complex group living, but there hasn't been much exploration of cognition in less social animals," Wilkinson says. "I think the cognitive abilities of reptiles will receive a lot more attention in the future."

Clever Chimps

Scientists have known since the early 20th century that chimps are capable strategists - they'll stack boxes to reach a dangling bunch of bananas, for instance.

In 2015, Harvard researchers Alexandra Rosati and Felix Warneken decided to see whether the primates were able to handle something assumed to be exclusively human: cooking. We cook so routinely that it may seem like a no-brainer, but it requires a number of cognitive abilities, including self-control, causal reasoning and planning. At the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in the Republic of the Congo, Rosati and Warneken offered chimpanzees a choice: They could place raw slices of food in a device that would return it to them uncooked, or in another that would deliver cooked slices.

The team didn't give the chimps the chance to do real cooking out of concern that they might mimic humans they'd witnessed cooking, or that they'd burn themselves. The chimps, which favored the cooked food and even moved raw slices from the other device over to the "oven," showed they had some of the basic cognitive skills for cooking, but Rosati says it's unlikely that they'll start gathering for potlucks. "You need to be able to sit around and share for a human-like cooking system to emerge, and chimps have a difficult time with that."

If Animals Are Smart, Where Does That Leave Us?

Hearing about the cleverness of animals makes some people a little uncomfortable.

"People want to be special," says Jennifer Vonk, a comparative psychologist at Oakland University in Michigan who studies bears, cats and other animals. "Every time a researcher finds that tool use or theory of mind or language-like communication is not unique to humans, somebody comes up with new categories that raise the bar." But primatologist Frans de Waal, a leader in the animal cognition field, suggests it's time we wipe our minds of the Aristotelian notion of the scala naturae, which placed animals in a hierarchical ranking of complexity with humans at the top.

"Animal cognition is more like a bush," de Waal says. "The corvids [crows and ravens] branch in one direction, the dolphins in another, the primates, including us, in another. You can't put them on a simple scale, because all animals are very smart in what they need to do to survive."
[This article originally appeared in print as "Animal Intelligence."]

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Everything Worth Knowing About ... Animal Intelligence

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The Germanic god Odin tended a smorgasbord of divine duties - healing, death, poetry and knowledge among them - but he might have been a somewhat less powerful one-eyed immortal without his animal helpers. According to Norse texts, ravens named Thought and Mind sat on the god's shoulders, departing every morning to spy on humans for him.

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How dogs love us | Dr. Gregory Berns | TEDxAtlanta

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How Stuff Works- Do Animals Have Emotions?

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How Stuff Works- Do Animals Have Emotions?

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Arriving home to be greeted by a yipping dog bouncing off the walls and a purring cat cuddled up in bed can bring a strong sense that you're the star of the show and your pets are decidedly happy to see you. But are they really expressing happiness? And is that a freshly chewed-up shoe in the corner? What's up with that? A case of canine criticism?

Animal emotion is a complicated arena, but it seems the scales are slowly tipping toward the opinion that animals do have emotions, although some skeptics remain. The debate surrounding the scope of emotions animals possess derives from two main complications: the potential for anthropomorphism (humans projecting their own traits onto animals) and the inherent difficulties of studying emotions in nonhuman species.

Believers, however, typically opine that animals are capable of a range of emotions, such as happiness, sadness, empathy, grief, curiosity, anger, anxiety and fear. So a naughty dog that goes on the carpet and gnaws up everything is probably not actively trying to punish its absent person for being gone so long. But it might be feeling lonely and anxious, and not know how to behave when left on its own for so much time.

Emotions might have evolved out of social necessity, helping animals adapt to different situations. Animals raised by themselves don't learn all the social niceties involved in getting along with others. They'll often interact poorly when forced to socialize later in life.

Plus, many proponents for animal emotions say that if you compare the portions of the brain that get fired up when people experience emotions to those nestled in creature craniums, you get some corresponding hotspots. The amygdala is one such example, and it's pretty ancient evolutionarily speaking. So since our brains are hardwired the same way as an animal's, the theory is that it makes intuitive sense for similar stuff to be going on up there [sources: Bekoff, Tangley].

But if animals do, in fact, feel emotions, to what extent do they experience them, and is there a sliding scale in terms of which animals undergo which emotions? If even tiny insects like mosquitoes were able to grieve, your next camping trip could turn into a serious guilt trip. Elephants, on the other hand, along with sea lions, geese, bears, monkeys and moose all appear to be hit hard by the death of a loved one. On a more cheerful note, dolphins, chimpanzees, elk and rats are among the multitude of mammals and smattering of birds that engage in play, appearing blissfully happy when they do.

On the next page, satisfy your curiosity on topics ranging from human vs. animal smarts, or whether your nutty pets are actually helping to keep you a happy camper.

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Your kitten's strange faces and chirps might seem perfectly intelligible, but how much meaning can you really read into them? Can animals display happiness, sadness, empathy or fear?

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The reason humans are considered to be at the top of the food chain is to do with intelligence, which is measured by their ability to build and use complex tools to solve day-to-day issues. However, recent research has revealed that a number of animals also display similarly intelligent behavior.

The fact that the chimpanzee tops the list should come as no big surprise - after all, they do share 99% of our DNA - But the New Caledonian Crow? Found only in the remote South Pacific Island of New Caledonia, the bird resembles other crows in every way, except for its sophisticated tool use, which beats not only most birds, but also, most primates, including monkeys.

Researchers at Oxford University and the University of Auckland, have been following the New Caledonian Crow for many years now, and what they have discovered so far, is quite fascinating.

The fact that the crows use many kinds of tools, which they craft from trees and shrubs is not that surprising- many animals and even insects are able to do that. What is surprising, is that they can select the right tools or use them in combination to get a task done - A sign that clearly reflects the intelligence of the species.

To test this, University of Auckland researcher Alex Taylor and his team, showed seven crows a piece of meat inside a tree hollow and then placed near them a stick that was too short to get to the food. Right next to it, they also placed two cages, one with a useless stone, the other, with a stick that was long enough to pull the meat.

They then watched in awe as each one of the birds figured out how to get to the meat - by first using the small stick as a tool to pull out the longer one, and then utilize the latter, to get to the food.

Alex and his team then reversed the sticks placing the long one near the birds and the short one in the cage. While their first reaction was to perform the previous routine, the birds quickly realized they didn't really need to and went on to pick the meat, using just the long stick. Though this kind of logical reasoning is common in humans, it has so far been observed only in chimpanzees and orangutans in the animal world - And, it gets better.

The latest study of these super-intelligent crows shows that they are now utilizing their tool-use aptitude to grab themselves the most nutritious foods - beetle larvae. Researchers have always wondered why the crows spend so much time trying to dislodge the larvae from tree trucks with twigs - A task that requires a lot of skill and patience.

Now, they have the answer - Apparently, these tiny grubs are so nutritious that eating just a few is enough to provide the crows with their day's nutritional needs - A fact they have obviously figured out a long time ago.

Also, these are not the only species of crows that are smart - Tel Aviv's hooded crow has figured out how to catch fish, by first scattering bits of bread into a pond and then snagging the unsuspecting fish as they surfaced to eat the crumbs.

And if that's not impressive enough, there is the Japanese crow who extracts nutmeats from their hard shells by simply dropping them on the road so that the cars can crush them. What's even better is that in order to avoid getting hit by the vehicles, they wait until the traffic light turns red, scooping the nuts only after the cars grind to a halt! Simply amazing!

Resources: advocacy.britannica.com,sciencemag.com,scienceblogs, com

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The reason humans are considered to be at the top of the food chain is to do with inteligence, which is measured by their ability to build and use complex tools to solve day-to-day issues. However, recent research has revealed that a number of animals also display similarly intelligent behavior.

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Do animals feel empathy? Does an elephant have consciousness? Can a dog plan ahead? These are some of the questions that award-winning environmental writer Carl Safina teases out in his new book, Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel.

Ranging far and wide across the world, from the Ambroseli National Park in Kenya to the Pacific Northwest, he shows us why it is important to acknowledge consciousness in animals and how exciting new discoveries about the brain are breaking down barriers between us and other non-human animals.

Speaking from Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York, where he is a visiting professor in the school of journalism, he explains how elephants routinely display empathy; why U.S. Navy underwater tests in the Pacific Northwest should be stopped; and how his own pet dogs prove his theories.

Your book suggests that animals have thought processes, emotions, and social connections that are as important to them as they are to us. Why is it important to know this?

It's important to know who we are here on Earth with. We talk about conservation of animals by numbers, but those are just numbers. Watching animals my whole life I've always been struck by how similar to us they are. I've always been touched by their bonds and been impressed-occasionally frightened-by their emotions.

Life is very vivid to animals. In many cases they know who they are. They know who their friends are and who their rivals are. They have ambitions for higher status. They compete. Their lives follow the arc of a career, like ours do. We both try to stay alive, get food and shelter, and raise some young for the next generation. Animals are no different from us in that regard and I think that their presence here on Earth is tremendously enriching.

You state that consciousness is not merely a human experience and cite the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness drafted in 2012. Tell us about this new interpretation and how it relates to our fellow creatures.

The issue over consciousness, like many aspects of animal behavior, is confused by a lack of definitions people agree on. We tend to use the word consciousness to mean a variety of different things. Some people say if you can plan years ahead it shows consciousness, but that just shows planning.

If you're having a mental experience, you are conscious. The question really is, do other species have mental experiences or do they sense things without having any sensation of what they are experiencing? Like a motion sensor senses motion but it probably doesn't experience that it senses motion. Animals do-they react to movement: fight or flight or curiosity.

It is incredible to me there is still a debate over whether animals are conscious and even a debate over whether human beings can know animals are conscious. If you watch mammals or even birds, you will see how they respond to the world. They play. They act frightened when there's danger. They relax when things are good. It seems illogical for us to think that animals might not be having a conscious mental experience of play, sleep, fear or love.

So why are many scientists adverse to the idea that animals have consciousness?

In the beginning there was almost no neurology, nothing was known of how mental processes worked. Animal behavior was based on fables, like foxes are clever, tortoises are persistent. So scientists said, "All we can know about animals is based on what they do. We can only describe what they do. We can't know anything about their minds." Unfortunately, that hardened into a straightjacket assumption that if we can't know anything about their minds, we can't confirm consciousness.

Meanwhile, people have spent decades watching wild animals. People who watch wild animals don't question whether they're conscious or not because we see incredible intricacies of behavior and vast ranges of personalities. I'm talking about vertebrates: mammals like elephants and cats, but also birds.

It's very obvious that animals are conscious to those who observe them. They have to be in order to do the things they do and make the choices that they do, and use the judgments that they use. However, in laboratories the dogma persists: don't assume that animals think and have emotions-and many scientists insist that they do not.

With the public, I think it's quite different. Many people simply assume that animals act consciously and base their belief on their own domestic animals or pets. Other people do not want animals to be conscious because it makes it easier for us to do things to animals that would be hard to do if we knew they were unhappy and suffering.

I love how you reveal the important aspects of play in the animal world and the relationship between adults and children, so similar to our own.

When the public sees wild animals they feel lucky to see elephants, or they might go to Yellowstone and see wild wolves. Researchers spend decades watching these creatures and see individuals. Many researchers have names for the animals and recognize the different personalities. Some are bold; some are shy. Some are more aggressive; some are mellower; some babies are much more assertive.

They see that first time mothers aren't as sure about what to do, and experienced mothers are more relaxed and confident. They see that some wolves are very assertive and aggressive and other wolves forbear. If there is a fight, some wolves will kill other wolves, but other wolves won't, even when they beat them in a fight.

What you see when you actually get to know wild animals is very different from a casual sighting. If you saw human beings doing nothing but drinking water or running around a field, would you think that is all there is to human beings? If you know the people drinking the water or running around, you have a different experience watching them.

Empathy is another characteristic that animals and human beings share. Can you tell us more about how empathy is expressed by animals in extraordinary circumstances-both with humans and other animals?

Many people think that empathy is a special emotion only humans show. But many animals express empathy for each other. There are documented stories of elephants finding people who were lost. In one case, an old woman who couldn't see well, got lost and was found the next day with elephants guarding her. They had encased her in sort of a cage of branches to protect her from hyenas. That's seems extraordinary to us but it comes naturally to elephants.

People have also seen humpback whales help seals being hunted by killer whales. There is a documented account of a humpback sweeping a seal on its back out of the water, away from the killer whales. These things seem extraordinary and new to us because we have only recently documented these incidents. But they have probably been doing these kinds of things for millions of years.

Both elephants and killer whales are suffering dramatic losses in their population. Connect these two creatures for us and what challenges they face in the modern world?

I tried to take a break from writing about conservation to write about what animals do in their natural lives. I focused on three of the most protected populations of animals in the world-elephants in national parks in Kenya, wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and killer whales in the Pacific Northwest; in all three cases I found that these protected animals are still being killed by people.

Elephants have been undergoing a tremendous slaughter since 2009, when the powers that be decided China could import ivory from dead elephants. As a result, elephant populations are being devastated by poachers throughout Africa and Asia.

In the case of the wolves in Yellowstone National Park, the U.S. removed endangered species status from wolves outside the parks. So, when wolves from the parks stray outside, they're often shot and it is usually the alpha pack leaders who are killed. When wolf packs lose their alpha male or female, they often break up. The younger wolves don't have the knowledge to survive that adults have.

Killer whales have very poor reproduction because the salmon stock they depend on is so depleted that they don't get enough food and are not in good enough condition to bear young. The young don't survive well, either. Killer whales are full of toxic chemicals that they get from their food and the polluted waters where they swim around Washington State and West Coast of the United States. Even though they're endangered and they're supposed to be afforded the strictest protections, the Navy also continues to test live bombs in areas where these whales swim.

One pod that desperately needed a young, healthy female had their only young female killed by massive hemorrhaging in her ear canals. A Navy bomb explosion was recorded on the listening devices of the whale researchers the day she died. It's very distressing that even when we are supposedly protecting these animals they're not being protected by our own government.

Do you have animals in your everyday life? If so, tell us how they confirm or disprove your theories.

I was never much of a dog person because I was interested in free-living, wild animals, but I have two dogs now and I cannot believe how much I love these dogs and how much they are part of our family.

They know exactly who we are. They know who strangers are. They are often very, very happy. Occasionally they get frightened by things that are strange or they aren't sure what's going on.

The only thing they cannot do is speak to us in full sentences, but they communicate all the time. They know what they would like to do and they can plan a little bit. They may not plan what they're gonna do next week, but they know when they want to go out or when they want to get us to take them out for a run.

When we take them to a certain beach, they know exactly what the routine there is, even if we haven't been to that beach in months. When we take them over to my mother's, they remember that the shed in her backyard has cottontail rabbits under it and they always run straight to the shed to investigate.

You use the term "vivid" to describe the lives of animals. Explain.

I've studied wild animals a lot and I'm always struck by how extremely alert they are and how well they sense what's going on around them. They're much more aware, compared to humans. Modern day humans go outside and don't see, hear or sense very well. Our senses have dulled over thousands of years of civilization and settled living. I think that an animal's experience of life is much sharper and clearer. That's why I use the term "vivid".

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Yes, Animals Think And Feel. Here's How We Know

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The author of a new book also says that animals can feel empathy, like the humpback whale that rescued a seal.

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Throughout her career as a neurobiologist, Peggy Mason has been told over and over that the rats she experiment s on a r e not capable of empathy. Only humans and other primates can understand the emotions of another . Most other animals can't. And certainly not beady-eyed rats.

But what she was witnessing in the lab was telling her something very different. In experiments, Mason and her colleagues at the University of Chicago were finding that when one rat was placed near another jailed rat, the free rat would open the hatch for a rescue - something it wouldn't do for a toy rat. What's more, when given the choice between saving a fellow rat and some delicious chocolate, the free rat would open both cells and then share.

The study, published in Science in 2011, was a breakthrough . If rats were capable of basic form s of empathy, then perhaps empathy was common - or even universal - among mammals. Studying animal empathy could give us insight into how human empathy evolved. ("I consider myself just a fancy rat," Mason told me.)

But almost immediately, Mason's results met intense skepticism.

Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist, argued that Mason w as simply p r ojecting humanlike feelings and emotions onto these rat "rescues" - a tendency known as anthropomorphism .

"We don't have evidence that there is an internal first-person experience that leads the animal to do it," Kacelnik tells me on a Skype call from his office in Oxford. "Do they experience any emotion when helping a partner? It may as well be, but we don't know."

In a response to Mason's study, Kacelnik and his colleagues wrote that tiny ants can also appear as if they are "rescu ing " other ants in some situations . But ants are nearly brainless, and few consider them capable of empathy.

Alan Silberberg, a psychologist at American University, also wondered if Mason was inferring too much from the data. In his view, the free rat opened the cage for selfish reasons: It liked playing with the other rat. He as published a paper replicating Mason's design, but with a twist. He showed when the rats couldn't play with each other after the trap opened, the free rat wasn't interested in conducting the jailbreak .

These criticism s d on't mean Mason's findings a r e incorrect . But they do illustrate a core difficulty in study ing animal empathy: While it's easy to observe animal behavior, it's near impossible to confirm the motivations behind that behavior.

The quest to understand animal empathy has been long and fraught, but it isn't trivial. If animals can indeed feel emotions like our own, the revelation may one day lead to treatments for conditions where social bonding is difficult - like in autism - or is nonexistent, like in sociopathy.

We should care whether animals have empathy. It would mean animal brains are not that different from our own.

For decades, scientists trying to study animal empathy have run into a simple fundamental problem. "There are so many possible interpretations of [empathetic] behavior that all need to be eliminated if you're going to say they're responding because of the emotions of another animal," James Burkett, a neuroscience researcher at Emory, explains. After all, psychologists can't put a rat on a couch and ask it about its feelings.

Early experiments to prove that animals have empathy were all confounded by this limitation. In 1959, Russell Church, who still conducts neuroscience research at Brown, showed that rats conditioned to press a lever for food will stop when another rat is shocked in an adjacent cage. He argued this was a sign of anxiety, and a possible sign of empathy.

Then in 1962, George Rice and Priscilla Gainer at Agnes Scott College went a step further, arguing that rats would try to save other rats in trouble. In their experiment, rats were placed in two adjoining see-through cells. One of the rats was put into a harness and hoisted above ground - an unpleasant experience that caused wailing. The free rat in the other cell could then push a lever to lower the harness. Rats would push the lever to "free" their fellow rats, but wouldn't push the lever if a block of Styrofoam were being hoisted.

Rice and Gainer concluded that "this behavior might be homologous to altruism."
"It is hard to imagine that empathy - a characteristic so basic to the human species - came into existence only when our lineage split off from that of the apes."
A rebuttal article in Science argued that Rice and Gainer's rats were s imply responding to the loud noise of the other rat's screams. These critics showed that rats would use the lever to free anything making a loud noise - not just their fellow rats. This wasn't empathy, their argument went; this was wanting their fellow rats to shut up.

Undaunted, other scientists kept searching for animal empathy. A few years later, in 1964, " rhesus monkeys will consistently suffer hunger rather than secure food at the expense of electroshock to a [another] . " Jules Masserman, who once served as a president of the American Psychiatric Association, also noted that rhesus monkeys were more likely to go h ungry for those they were familiar with.

Most psychologists, however, refused to believe that animal empathy was possible. The field was dominated by behaviorism - which held that animals don't have observable mental states, just actions. Behavior could be understood in terms of rewards, punishment, competition, and consequences - but not emotion. Whenever animals displayed behavior that looked like empathy, behavioralists could easily attribute it to stimuli response.

And for a long time, the skeptics prevailed. Scientists simply didn't have the tools to demonstrate that animal empathy was real. That is, until Jeffrey Mogil, a geneticist at McGill University, noticed his mice behaving oddly in the early 2000s.

Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his own empathy. His research is about understanding why two people may experience pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil tells me.

For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain tolerance.

In one experiment, the researchers would take a mouse from a cage, restrain it, and then dip its tail in a hot 120°F bath . They wanted to see h ow long i t would take for the mouse to yank its tail out - a measure of how well the animal withstood pain.

In the early 2000s, Mogil and his team began analyzing data from thousands of tail-dip trials. And they happened upon a bizarre pattern. The order in which the mice were tested in each trial seemed to matter a lot for pain tolerance. That is, on average, the first mouse taken from a communal cage and dipped in hot water experienced the least amount of discomfort. The second one felt a little more. And so on.

That "was really, really surprising to us," Mogil tells me. It was as if the first mouse had somehow told its cage mates, "That really hurt." And upon hearing that, the other mice winced.

Mogil's was the first evidence that animals other than primates could experience "emotion contagion." This is considered by many to be the most basic form of empathy. W hen I see a broken arm, I wince. When one mouse is in pain, others feel it.

Mogil staged several follow-up experiments to solidify his hunch. First he repeated the tail-in-water test, but instead of putting the mice back into the same cage, he put them into a different one. When that happened, he says, " this effect goes away completely ." Another test showed that mice feel greater pain when they are around other mice in pain. This is especially true if the mice know one another (i.e., they were cage mates beforehand).

That was just the beginning. Mogil l ater showed that mice were capable of c onsolation - another sign of empathy. In one experiment, researchers "jailed" certain mice and injected them with vinegar , a painful experience . Other mice were then placed in the "jail block" and were free to visit the imprisoned mice or ignore them completely. When the mice were familiar with one another, the free mouse would visit with the caged ones.

"If you think about that for a second, that's crazy," Mogil says. It doesn't make any sense for one mouse to approach another that is in pain - after all, that pained mouse could be dangerous. "The only reason you would do it is if you were trying to help."

That said, there do seem to be limits to animal empathy. The highest level of empathy is called cognitive empathy. T his is the ability to think through feelings and weigh options: "Emily seems upset right now, does she want me to ask what's wrong?" No researcher I spoke with for this article would go so far as to argue that animals have cognitive empathy. That's distinctly human.

But scientists have made extensive progress studying the lower, gut-level forms of empathy, in order to understand how this capacity might have evolved in animals. That, in turn, might shed some insight into how the more advanced forms of empathy seen in primates and then humans developed.

"We should think of ourselves as a part of a continuum," says Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University. "These animals have some basic fundamental underlying neural mechanism that cause them to engage in a behavior similar to what we do."

Young and his colleagues recently published a paper in Science that took an important next step toward proving t hat the small acts of empathy d isplayed by rodents are, in fact, like our own.

The study in question involved prairie voles, one of the few species of mammals that mate for life. Young found that prairie vole companions will look out for one another much like human spouses do. When one vole is scared, its counterpart will come over to comfort it by licking . They won't do this for strangers. T he vole mates are also emotionally in sync: Their stress hormones will rise and fall with one another when one is shocked and the other is not. (Experiments have shown that this behavior seems to be inborn, not conditioned.)

M ore importantly, Young and his team discovered that these bonds are facilitated by oxytocin, a neurochemical found in all mammals that is believed to help facilitate social interactions between humans.

"Oxytocin is what makes the brain pay attention to the social cues of the partner," Young explains. In humans, variations on the gene for oxytocin have been shown to predict social problems in childhood and relationship stability later in life. Studies have shown that nasal injections of oxytocin may help autistic people - who often have trouble interacting with others - maintain eye contact.

When Young blocked the oxytocin receptors of prairie voles, they stopped caring for one another.

"We share the neurocircuitry of this with animals," Young says about his results. "We can come to the conclusion that what we have is not necessarily so unique."

Frans de Waal is one of the world's leading primate behavior researchers. Since the 1970s, he's made thousands of observations of primate communities. He's shown that many primates will console one another after fights. He's seen them hug and kiss. In 2010, he co-authored a Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper in the compiling data from more than 3,000 observations of chimpanzee fights. The paper found that chimps will commonly console the losers of fights - a behavior especially pronounced among chimps with kinship bonds.

If human and animal empathy are the same, it means lessons learned from the brains of animals can be applied to heal our own.

Young is hopeful his continued work on prairie voles will yield animal models for psychiatric drugs. With a good animal model he could, in theory, test whether a drug would make the prairie voles more or less likely to comfort one another. He could test to see if there are certain genes responsible for empathetic behavior, and target those for intervention.

"We know that there are many psychiatric disorders where the ability to empathize is deficient," Burkett says, "but we have no treatment for those deficiencies."

Perhaps the fluffy, heartsick prairie vole can open that door.

We still don't know how many animals can actually empathize. But t he mounting studies suggest there's a fundamental baseline, at least among mammals. "When we're talking about the ability to sense the emotion of others, and to respond to them in some way, that's probably very widespread," Burkett says.

The capacities may vary depending on how animal societies are structured . Chimps and primates are thought to have the most humanlike emotional capacities. Dogs have evolved to live in packs and are attuned to our emotional needs. Cats, evolved to be solitary hunters, care much less.

But what difference does it make if chimps know why they're helping out a friend? Isn't it enough that they engage in the behavior, just like we do?

"Let's say you are living in a house with children, and you are crying, and your children approach you and touch you," de Waal says. "You're not, at that moment, thinking, 'Are they now altruistic or selfish when they do this?' That would be a silly distinction. Because your children are responding to your emotions."

That's all that really matters.

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Yes, even rats have feelings. Here's how we know.

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Throughout her career as a neurobiologist, Peggy Mason has been told over and over that the rats she experiment s on a r e not capable of empathy. Only humans and other primates can understand the emotions of another . Most other animals can't. And certainly not beady-eyed rats.

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Carl Safina- Ted Talk, What Animals are Thinking and Feeling

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Carl Safina- Ted Talk, What Animals are Thinking and Feeling

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What animals are thinking and feeling, and why it should matter | Carl Safina | TEDxMidAtlantic