When a dog gives its life for its master, is it showing human behaviour? If a dangerous shark tries to feed a photographer, is it being motherly?
Would you say animals feel emotions like we do? Representation pic
My mother must have had something of St Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals. She loved animals, and more importantly, they loved her. Some were strays she had rescued but others just wandered into our home and stayed forever, like it was some sort of YMCA for animals.
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One of these was Cany, abbreviated from Canis major, found by mother abandoned as a puppy. Dappled black and white, he looked somewhat like a husky. The family loved Cany and he returned the love abundantly with what felt to us like stable, steady affection, loyalty and a wolf-like protectiveness.
We saw that in action one evening. My mother was walking Cany in Mumbai’s crowded Lokhandwala Complex when a motorcycle thief snatched the gold chain around her neck and rode away. With a growl, Cany broke loose and took off after the speeding motorcycle.
At the end of the lane, the motorcycle turned left onto Lokhandwala’s ring road, and so did Cany. Let us recall here that dogs that chase after moving vehicles usually stop once the vehicle recedes. Cany was not about to stop; he was hunting, like a wolf, one bad guy on a motorcycle.
With twilight falling rapidly, we went looking for our beloved dog but he was nowhere to be seen. We eventually found him, mangled, bleeding and unconscious but alive in the mangrove swamp behind the colony. He had outrun the motorcycle and brought the rider down but been brutally stabbed several times. The thief had made away with the necklace but in Cany’s mouth was a shred of his blue jeans.
So, would you say Cany felt human-like emotions towards my mother like love, devotion and loyalty? Would you say animals feel emotions like we do? I’ve seen dogs looking guilty after doing something naughty and cats behaving clingy and cuddly when their owners return from office. My German Shepherd dog certainly acted jealous if my children played with other dogs.
The movie Hachi was based on the real-life story of Hachiko, a Japanese Akita dog, who went to the railway station for nine years every evening to await the return of his master, Hidesaburo Ueno, who had died of a cerebral hemorrhage while teaching. A statue of Hachi now adorns the town square.
Whether animals feel like us or not seems to boil down to an odd banana-shaped neuron called the spindle cell, discovered in 1929 by an Austrian psychologist called Constantin von Economo. You can find yours behind your forehead, roughly between and a little below the eyes in an area called the cingulate cortex that governs our emotional responses. Spindle cells seem to bridge the thinking and feeling parts of our brain, firing upwards at the rational, logical neo-cortex and downwards at the intuitive, feeling, so-called limbic brain.
Spindle cells are at work when you detect sadness in someone’s eyes and a moment later feel a similar sadness wash over you and hug that person. It seems spindle cells are what makes us social, empathetic and so very—well, human.
For years, scientists assumed that spindle cells were unique to humans and made us uniquely emotional and sentient.
And then some scientists found exactly these same banana neurons in the brain of another highly social animal, the whale. Today’s list of animals with spindle cells also includes dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and elephants—all animals whose behaviour reminds us of ourselves.
Dolphins have been known to save humans floundering at sea. Elephants come together to ‘grieve’ when one of their tribe dies. Touching movies have been made showing relationships between individual humans and these animals.
There is still some cloudiness about what the presence of spindle cells in a creature’s brain indicates for animal-human interactions and empathy. But they could help explain the utterly extraordinary experience of Paul Nicklen, National Geographic photographer.
Nicklen spent four days in the icy waters of the Antarctic shooting one of the ocean’s deadliest predators, the leopard shark, weighing over 450 kg and spanning close to 2.5 m. However, instead of making a quick lunch out of Nicklen, the shark seemed to be wanting to feed him nutritious penguins. It would bring him live penguins and release them, waiting for him to eat them.
When he didn’t, it brought him tired penguins, and then dead penguins, and finally dropped them on his head, cut wide open. Once it played with him by taking his entire head and camera into its mouth—but without hurting him.
The only time Nicklen recalls feeling a similar emotion was as a child with his mother. “Someone taking care of you, and feeling safe and nurtured, and protected, but I’ve never had that in, in my life as an adult.”
Inspired by the Radiolab podcast, Animal Minds.
Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper
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