Animal Minds (Animals)

by dhw, Sunday, June 05, 2011, 15:51 (4706 days ago) @ dhw

An article in today's Sunday Times summarizes a 35-year observational study that tracked the behaviour of about 2500 African elephants. It describes the range of their emotions, their ability to use tools, and their empathy for one another. They have been seen removing branches and pulling out tranquillizer darts from another's body, wedging a weakened elephant to stop her from falling, rescuing calves, grieving, and also communicating through body language ... entwining trunks, jostling each other, playing games. There are often lengthy discussions before they settle on a route, and they co-operate on different tasks. -Professor Fritz Vollrath from Oxford cautions against reading human motives and emotions into elephant behaviour: "This is a really exciting area in which we know very little. From these observations, it seems elephants have evolved comparable coping strategies to your own. [...] The question is, 'Are they really identical to us?' I agree that elephants behave as if they have compassion or empathy, but do they have it like ours? We must be aware that behaviour we might interpret as showing humanlike emotions might have arisen for completely different reasons."-I'd rather trust those who have studied the subject for 35 years than someone who confesses that he (whom he calls "we") knows very little about it. Of course most people are unlikely to say elephants are "identical" to us, and I doubt if humans will ever be able to get right inside the elephant mind, so the professor's scepticism is nice and safe. But the tacit assumption that human emotions are somehow different from animal emotions, even if the behaviour, reactions and consequences are the same, seems to me to smack of the age-old belief that humans are "special". Why are some people so reluctant to accept that if we are all descended from common ancestors, we might also have many features in common, including the positive ones we would like to claim as our exclusive property.