The Emotional Lives of Animals

"Partly because it’s very accessible, but partly because Bekoff is good at highlighting aspects of emotions that we often miss. For instance, he begins his book by talking about the fact that we tend to think of emotions as things that happen inside us, you know, maybe in the head, maybe in the heart, maybe in the gut, depending on where you localise them. But he says that this is exactly the wrong way to think about emotions. Emotions are not private, internal affairs; if anything, they are painfully public events. When I experience an emotion, I cannot but smile, I cannot but frown, I cannot but cringe. I become red with anger. Or I look like I have just seen a ghost. This public-ness suggests that emotions are not are not just for us, although they might be about us. They are ways of communicating. They’re fundamentally social. He also explains that many emotions are complex. Psychologists often differentiate between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ emotions. Primary emotions are innate and hardwired—maybe like the flight or fight response. But there are other emotions that cannot be the product of hardwiring. These are the secondary emotions. They’re learned, they’re flexible, they’re psychological. The animal reflects on what to do based on the emotion. In this book, Bekoff focuses on these secondary emotions. He talks a lot about the positive ones: laughter, joy, the love bond between animals. He also discusses play, which takes a central role in his analysis. But he goes into less positive as well. For example, do animals seek revenge? Well, there are cases of rivalries between bird siblings where the animals become vengeful towards one another in competing for the attention of a parent. Similarly, when hyenas become outcasts in their own community, they try to get revenge on those who threw them out of the cackle. Yes, perhaps! And one of the emotions on display in The Lion King is grief. Simba grieves the death of his father, Mufasa. And then the pack grieves the disappearance of Simba, who in turn also grieves the loss of his homeland when he has to leave in secret. Bekoff doesn’t talk about the movie, of course, but he does think that animals grieve the loss of their loved ones. This is a difficult topic because grief arguably requires a concept of death. Do animals have this? The tide, I believe, is moving toward an affirmative answer. Not all animals, but definitely some. Non-human primates suffer terribly in the wake of the death of a family member. They become bereaved. Foxes and elephant perform what we might as well call ‘burials’—where the animals approach the dead body of a conspecific, especially a friend or family member, and treat it in bizarre ways. They cover it with objects and protect it from others. This contradicts a longstanding theory in anthropology that holds that animals would have evolved a natural aversion to dead bodies for evolutionary reasons—because they are carriers of disease—and that only humans break this pattern through our cultural traditions around death. But one of the conclusions Bekoff wants us to get to in this book is that animal behaviour is not only about survival. It is also about connecting, bonding, and socialising. There have been many cases recorded by lay people—and also scientists—of animals helping an injured conspecific, which from a survival perspective is not easy to understand. These are also discussions of other social behaviours that you can only make sense of in light of secondary emotions—like friendship or collective celebrations. So the book foregrounds the emotional lives of animals, which are public and complex. Definitely. Anthropomorphism is a bad word in the sciences. There is nothing that is more likely to put someone out of joint with the scientific community than an accusation of anthropomorphism, which is the projection of human powers or capacities onto nonhuman animals. I see two problems with our excessive fear of anthropomorphism. Firstly, those who panic about anthropomorphism often begin from an impoverished understanding of other animals and an inflated sense of the position humans occupy in the order of nature. If you begin from the belief that only humans have a sense of past and present, that only humans have complex emotions, that only humans can think of what others desire, then even the slightest suggestion that cuts against the grain of this belief will strike you as outrageously anthropomorphic. But where is the outrageousness, in the new suggestion or in the original belief? Secondly, fears of anthropomorphism—which can sometimes be a real danger, I don’t deny that—can hinder scientific research by preventing scientists from seeing parallels that are there. That’s something we have known for a long time: in the animal sciences, whenever there are new developments or new theories that push a boundary, the first instinct is to dismiss those developments and theories as anthropomorphic. But often there’s a shift and the supposedly ridiculous proposition gets incorporated into the body of science. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For example, what happened when Jane Goodall proposed that chimpanzees have personalities? She was persona non grata in anthropology . Now she is one of the most respected scientists in the world. The same thing happened to Jaak Panksepp, who discovered rat laughter. He was blacklisted from scientific circles. People said he had lost his way as a scientist. Now, he is remembered as a pioneer of affective animal neuroscience. And these are only two examples. There are many others. So there are conceptual and practical problems with this cultural panic about anthropomorphism. But none of this is to deny that we need to be careful. It is simply to say that new ideas cannot be turned away simply because we want to believe that we possess some special quality that will be devalued if extended to other living beings."