Animals and Emotions

Animals seem to be all over the news this week, and I am not talking the Chameleon and his two running mates. I wonder what animal you would put for each of the main leaders. Gordy the Gorilla? Rather unfair perhaps. Clegg is rather giraffe-like perhaps. I’ll have to think about that.

There was a strange but interesting article in the Guardian this week about whether our nearest relations in the animal kingdom were capable of having certain emotions. Of course, the article went on to mention three things, some of which were not emotions. They were probably feelings but that distinction is for another time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/grieving-chimps-need-more-research

Apparently these chimps have been all over the newspapers this week and the footage been one of the top hits on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL86Ap9zSmM

It showed a troop of chimpanzees looking over and caring for one of their own who was dying. The video provides images of two females sitting next to the dying chimp, stroking her and covering her with straw. Later a larger male comes into the enclosure and makes what scientists have interpreted as a crude attempt to resuscitate the dead female. According to the news clip, the animals who had watched this death were completely subdued and appeared to be grieving for weeks after. The entire troop seemed to be affected by the witnessing of this death.
The notion is that this proves that chimpanzees are far more like us than we imagined and that animals are capable of “human emotions”.

One scientist, Stuart Semple, suggested that this might be a classic case of anthropomorphism, whereby we place human actions, thoughts and emotions on animals that are possibly not capable of such things. We interpret their actions according to the way we would behave or feel. However, Semple went on to say that animals may very well be capable of emotions such as sadness and feelings of grief and it is not a question of whether this issue exists but how we establish precisely what this means; for the animals and indeed for humans and their actions.

Another scientist, Professor Marian Dawkins, suggested that in the absence of confirmed knowledge we should take the stance of assuming that animals do have emotions and treat them accordingly without going to the other extreme of treating them as humans and the high level expectation that goes with that.

Of course, animal rights activists would take this information to further their cause in protecting animals from the sort of abuse that scientific researchers place upon them, but that, once more, is a discussion for another time.

As for us humans treating animals as humans, well, anyone who has owned a dog has been guilty of that to some degree. “He’s a dog!” is a frequent cry that people in my family have when it is suggested that the poor little might should come and say “hello” to us (on the telephone!).

However, I am intrigued by emotions and whether we as humans have a monopoly on being the only species capable of such high level working.
As a teenager, our family had the most stupid, arrogant and stroppy dog that was ever placed on this earth. She adored each and every one of us but detested anyone else who came into the house. New friends had to go through her acceptance regime that usually took about twenty minutes on the first visit and then a further four or five visits before she finally accepted that this was a human being to be trusted.
I can distinctly remember one day when I was devastated about something, I returned home demonstrating a certain amount of anguish. Obviously it wasn’t a life-shattering issue because I cannot remember exactly what I was so upset about. On seeing me arrive and march upstairs, throwing myself into bed, the dear dog followed, clambered up into the bed and nestled her head up against mine. Normally, if invited onto the bed, she would selfishly burrow all the way down and place herself at your feet. Not this time. She knew I needed some contact and she lay with me, unobtrusively.

How did she know I needed that? How come she responded against her instinctual behaviour? I hadn’t been over demonstrative about my grief. At the point of being greeted by the dog, I was not crying but she knew there was something that was wrong, and she acted accordingly.

This week, I was talking to a friend who said that his dog was exactly the same. She responded to his anger by cowering, which is probably an instinctive thing to do as he hurtled things across the room but he also said that his dog seemed to know exactly what was needed when he was at his lowest. She knew not to bounce around in expectation of attention. Time and time again she demonstrates a sort of intuition, if that is not too strong an anthropomorphist statement.

Do dogs feel grief? Do they understand death?
It is said that a dog is eternally grateful to see their owner on their return because every time they are out of sight for a prolonged period they assume that the owner has died. Once more, this statement suggests that we are placing human thoughts on our animals but this shouldn’t be dismissed altogether.

Two instances spring to mind.
I was asked by my parents, in conjunction with my brother, to dog sit whilst they took their first transatlantic holiday. Easy, we thought. She may have been a stroppy so and so but she loved us as much as she loved her masters. Only that wasn’t the case. It is an apocryphal story that has been heard all too frequently but the dog stopped eating. This was unheard of. As well as been the stroppiest dog on earth, she was also the greediest. Her natural instinct to gobble finally returned three days later just when we were on the verge of taking her to the vet.
The same hound was incandescent with anguish when my grandfather died. For at least two weeks after his death, she hurried into his house and searched the entire place for him. Devastated that she could not find him, she curled herself up under the kitchen table and resolutely stayed there until we left. It was pitiful to watch and furthered our own grief.

I’m not suggesting that this is absolute evidence that animals have feelings but it certainly suggests that it is feasible. What it does not do, however, is suggest that animals have the core set of emotions that we have. They demonstrate a response to what we might seem to be an emotion but that is quite different to having the emotion itself. They demonstrate feelings and perhaps a certain level of empathy. Whether that empathy is an intuitive thing or something that is an instinctual response is something that probably needs some study.

The chimpanzees were in the news because of their response to death.
The day after I had read this article, I listened to the radio and on “The Reunion” there was a group of people who had been part of the Dunblane massacre in 1996.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc

I listened to a short amount of this programme on my way to work and finished listening to it this morning.
As I arrived at work yesterday, I listened to the teacher who was the first person to be shot by Thomas Hamilton, the former scout leader who carried out this atrocity.

It was a normal spring day. Excited five and six year olds were gathered in the school hall waiting for their lesson. Anyone who has worked in a school will know this scene all too well. Getting young children ready for PE is not something that they put on the teacher training course. It can be a source of great antagonism and frustration as well as source of merriment and hysteria.
The wonderful thing about children that is often fatally lost in adults is the joy of the simplest of things. They get changed for PE on a weekly basis yet still get excited about this very simple and straight forward act.
I could envisage these children jumping around and collecting together to protect themselves from the cold as they awaited instruction from their teacher to find a space to do their warm up activities.

Only they never got the chance. This man charged through the glass doors and opened fire; first on the teachers and then one by one he shot the children, killing sixteen of them, physically injuring many more, emotionally injuring an entire community, murdering hope.

I switched off the car engine and started to get out of the car, only I couldn’t. The macabre in me wanted to listen to this poor woman explaining what happened. The thought of those children falling down one by one was horrifying enough but the statement that really wrenched at my heart was when she said, “At first, the children just thought it was some sort of game”.

The fun and enjoyment of their weekly PE lesson always excited them, even if it was the same mundane lesson. Just doing something different, away from the classroom was enough to set them into excited anticipation. When Hamilton came in, they thought that he had been invited in to get them moving around, and they responded. On his first shot, they ran giggling. On the second and third, they continued to dash around until finally a collective horror enveloped them. Huddling together, they watched as first their teachers and then their friends were massacred.

It defies comprehension. Maybe it exacerbates comprehension for those who have been in charge of such lessons in such places. I know that yesterday whilst I was listening, I had a freshness of grief, remembering that day fourteen years ago.

Sophie Jane Lockwood North was one of the young victims. Her father was on the radio yesterday. On hearing what had happened, he came to the school and waited for an eternity to see whether his child was one of the victims. Two hours passed before he was told the devastating news. Two hours.
How did he survive those two hours? How has he survived the ensuing years?
His wife had died from cancer two years before Sophie. How much can one person cope with grief?

We all have to confront death eventually. It’s not a pleasant thought. It is an integral fear for many. Faiths across the world prepare human beings for this without ever getting to the crux of the issue that life ceases to exist. Hope in afterlife is there as an appeasement, a placation of the instinctive fear of dying.

My own baptism of death occurred when I was seven. The telephone went and I answered it. My cousin always joked and asked how I was but she just asked for my mum immediately. My mother took the cradle and listened and then, unusually, she cried.
My dear uncle had died and I can remember crying and asking that one word, “why?”

Like others, since then I have lost grandparents, friends, relatives, my father, and it never really gets any easier though bizarrely, I fear death less as I get older, which always seems rather odd to me considering the proximity to the inevitable is greater. It ought to be the other way around.

I also fear death less because I have actually witnessed two people leaving life. That, in a very odd way, actually helps.
My grandmother was ready to die. She lay in the hospital bed and gradually stopped breathing. It was simple, calm, undemonstrative and peaceful. We all sat there together looking at this woman who had given us life and watched her go.
By the time my Dad drew his final breath, it was almost a relief. The weeks before had been the most difficult of our lives. Once more, we collected around his bed. We said nothing; just waited until he was ready. The silence was just there. It doesn’t and didn’t need description. He breathed and we waited for an extraordinary amount of time, thinking it was his last only to hear another one after that, waiting once more for minutes for another quiet breath to pass. And so on and so on until there was the collective understanding that he had gone.

As humans, and according to the research by scientists as animals, we all deal with death in different ways. We all grieve in different ways despite their being a progressional diktat of how we are expected to behave.
We all have to experience death and in many ways we hope to. If you don’t have to deal with bereavement, it probably means that you die young, and despite Daltry’s and Townshend’s protestations to the contrary most people don’t really want to die before they get old.

But my incidents of death are fairly commonplace. The deaths are part of life. Although I have had instances of some horrific deaths, including a murder, which I never thought I would experience, the deaths I have had to deal with have been the sort of deaths that most of us will have to experience.

Death is life changing. My 34 year old friend who died had a significant impact on the friends who were with him and near him as he prematurely left us. The murder of my 22 year old child who I had nurtured and loved as a boy when I was a young teacher left me emotionally scarred. It was as near a trauma as I had experienced at that time, and I still feel that grief whenever I contemplate what happened to him.
The death of my father changed my life. Completely.
But however dreadful that loss was and continues to be, it wasn’t accompanied by the trauma of something like Dunblane or Columbine, Hillsborough or Hungerford. How do people cope with that? How do people live day in day out with the loss of a child? I don’t know and I don’t want to know. The fear of that sort of death is a constant.

With death having a certain prominence in life, therefore, why do we hide away from it? Why do we shield our children when we know that at some point they are going to have to confront this? Why, when we can see and experience evidence of animals feeling some sort of grief do we not accept that this is something that we can possibly learn from? Why do we shy away from the acceptance of the vital and significant emotions that we all have to contend with and embrace?

When I read the article about the chimpanzees, I was interested because I am intrigued as to how our emotions work. I am intrigued as to whether we are the only species capable of expressing ourselves emotionally, which we are apparently not. Knowing that animals have the capacity to feel is significant but in some ways it is more interesting that we are prepared to study animal behaviour without fully realising the potential of our own emotional being. Furthermore, we are prepared to ignore the information and understanding that we already have about emotions and feelings, and brush it aside as either insignificant or something that we cannot deal with.
Certainly with children, our ability to research, discuss, think about emotions is not quantifiable and is therefore deemed to be less significant than other aspects of learning. And yet, as is the case with death and bereavement, we are all going to have to cope with this at some point in our lives.

If teaching is about preparing our young people for the future, then surely we should have emotional learning at the forefront of their learning? However difficult it may be, we have to talk to children about the feelings associated with grief and loss and bereavement and separation. These are feelings that our children experience without any hope of being able to express their concerns. These are feelings that our children may not have experienced but are frightened to ask about because they have intuited that it is a taboo subject.
It isn’t that they can’t deal with the issue of death; it is that we as adults cannot cope with it. Is that really fair on our children?

If anything should be learned from the chimpanzees this week, it is that there is a possibility that their reaction to the impending death was an instinctual behaviour and that this in turn resorts to a natural grieving process. We look on in some sort of admiration at this behaviour and then do not enable or assimilate to a similar instinctual and emotive response in humans.

Death and grief is difficult but it will never get any easier if we ignore this essential part of our life and think carefully about how we deal with a range of emotions and how this is merely one aspect of our all round intelligent approach to life.