Emotions

By William Rossiter, CSI President

A symposium at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, recently discussed emotion in non-human animals. Much of the evidence is anecdotal, based on personal experiences, and popularized in magazine articles and TV documentaries. It is hard to squeeze into standard scientific protocols, but the evidence is blatant that playing dolphins, ceremonial orcas, giggling gorillas, high-fiving chimpanzees, dreaming dogs, and grieving elephants are telling us truthfully that non-humans experience emotions. However, it's one thing for experts to bring experiences to a public forum, and quite another to present data at a professional conference, where empirical demands and arrogant whispers threaten those who bring emotions to a peer-reviewed format.

Most humans today, if they give it any thought, would deny that non-human animals experience emotions. Perhaps part of a basic need, this self-deceitful construct that "we" are better than "them", convinces us that we belong to the "best" group. This helps "us" to exploit "them", whoever "they" are, without remorse or responsibility. Cetology still resents some cognitive work, even culling young scientists who decide to study certain cognitive subjects. Why? Perhaps because much of cetology still demands some exploitation of cetaceans, and the more respect you have for them the less easy it is to use them. There is also a righteous rejection of anthropomorphizing non-human animals. This clumsy word, the modern scarlet letter "A", means to describe non-humans in terms culturally reserved for humans. This is a flaw of language and of culture, not of reality. It "helps" us to reinforce differences, using different vocabularies to describe similar things in humans and non-humans. Take autopsy and necropsy as an example. How many examples can you think of? Under deceitful constraints the accelerating reality and awareness of non-human attributes is left with no descriptive words, except in human terms. To use anthropomorphic terms, even in desperation and with clear need, is to be denied entry as "real" science, even if undeniably real. But science garnishes reality with special words, so why can't some words be found that describe the reality of non-human emotion?

To rebut the stolid, archaic hierarchy, CSI heartily recommends The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions, edited by Dr. Marc Bekoff, Discovery Books. This book, with contributions by many familiar cetacean advocates, will give any open mind pause and pleasure.

Another deceitful construct is the belief that reality is what we perceive; that the human range of sensory perception can tell us all we need to know about the real world. Science has blown this away, demonstrating for example, spacial awareness from echolocation, air vibrations, polarized light, star movements, fluid dynamics and magnetic vectors. All are beyond us, and we might still deny them but that other creatures survive by them. Yet still we resist, believing that our perceptions and technology will give us all we need to know. The danger here, in part, is that some of our limited perspective is time-based; we cannot seem to see what we are doing to the world in time to allow our grandchildren a chance.