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- Denis Giles
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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi
Mimicry, by changing form, shape and colour on the spot, is unique to animals. Imagine if you went into a Chinese, or African, neighbourhood and had to defend yourself by looking Chinese or African. Or if you had to change your colour to black or white or polka dotted? Or become shorter, fatter, change the shape of your nose, increase the number of arms. We can’t do a single thing at will even if our lives depend on it.
But animals and insects do it easily. They change their forms to look like species that predators avoid. They smell differently, they change their shapes and colours to blend in with the background, or with their prey, or look like blobs of inanimate matter. They have learnt to eat without being eaten.
The mock viper (P. pulverulentus) of Asia is a mild harmless snake. It looks like a viper with a triangular head, but the viper is a dangerous snake. The only difference is that the mock viper has round pupils. True vipers’ pupils are vertical slits. The Mock Viper knows it is harmless but is so clever that, when threatened, it squeezes the shape of its pupils to look like the slits of a true pit viper and then, in the panic this causes, it flees.
Appearing dangerous is the first defence. Another snake in this region, the Malayan bridle snake, mimics a venomous snake, called the Malayan krait, not just in its coloration, but by hiding its head under its coils when threatened.
The Milk snake (L. triangulum) is harmless but changes itself gradually to develop bands like the venomous Coral snake. Is this mimicry or a coincidence? Definitely deliberate mimicry, because it happens only in those regions where the milk snake and coral snake are found together. In other regions, the milk snake doesn’t look anything like the coral snake. Likewise, the harmless Scarlet King Snake is born with white bands. But young snakes start developing the colouring of the coral snakes with the yellow, apricot, or tangerine coloured banding.
The hognosed snake pretends to be dead and gives off a rotting smell. But before that it mimics a rattlesnake, raising its head as if about to strike and making a rattling sound.
It’s not just defence, animals that hunt need to be clever too. Either they adopt amazing disguises or they fool their prey into believing they are harmless while they get close to them.
The Green Lacewing larva feeds on woolly alder aphids who are protected by ants. So it plucks the white waxy wool from an aphid’s back, attaches it to its own and fools the ants into believing it is part of their flock. Once inside the circle, it eats the aphids.
The Zone tailed Hawk feeds on live animals, but it mimics the flight of a vulture who is a carrion eater. Small animals are deceived by the gliding flight, and vulture like outline, and are then snatched up.
The Cleaner Wrasse fish is harmless and its function is to eat the parasites on larger fish. They stand in line to be attended to. The Sabre Tooth Blennnyhas black and blue markings like the Cleaner and loiters at cleaning stations, imitating the Wrasse’s swimming pattern. It comes close to large fish and bites a chunk out of them before darting away.
The Dusky Dottyback is a small 3 inch harmless looking fish which lives in our Indo pacific coral reefs. It ranges in colour from pink to grey,but can change into any colour – green, yellow brown - to match its prey. It tricks baby fish of larger species into thinking it is one of them. Then it eats them. Its favourite prey are baby damselfish. This unique talent allows the dottyback to easily approach juvenile damselfish without detection and, by the time one group has alerted itself, it moves to new groups of fish and new colours.
The Cheilinus wrasse is a carnivorous fish of the coral reef. It changes its colour to mimic harmless plant eating fish, like goatfish or parrotfish, and swims in their schools until it gets close to its prey. But different wrasses use the power of mimicry to do different things. The Potters wrasse mimics the Potters Angel — a larger, more spiny, harder to catch fish.
The slender Trumpet fish swims vertically in the soft coral branches and changes its colour to match its background. It is almost invisible to the small animals that it hunts.
The Marine flatworm increases its size to look like a sea slug, which is avoided by aquatic predators because it emits a poisonous and malodorous substance.
The Bushveld Lizard (E. lugubris) in Southern Africa mimics notorious and noxious ‘oogpister’ beetles when young. While the adults blend with the red-tan colours of the Kalahari semi-desert, the lizard juveniles are jet-black and white and move with stiff, jerky movements and arched backs. Predators avoid the threat of the pungent, acidic fluid sprayed by these beetles when threatened.
Metalmark moths (Brenthia) are hunted by jumping spiders. So they make themselves look like the spiders that hunt them. How does a moth with wings mimic an arachnid with eight legs? When a metalmark is confronted by the spider, it arranges its wings to mimic the spider's pose, looking like a bigger, meaner, spider.
Capturing other insects becomes easier for ant-mimicking spiders who align six of their legs to look like ant legs and the extra pair to look like the antennae of a six-legged insect. Passing for a non-threatening ant allows them to get within easy striking distance of their prey.
Before butterflies rise to dazzle the world with their beauty they have to spend days as defenceless caterpillars waiting to be eaten. Many masquerade as something that's actually dangerous. Some, when faced with a predator, retract their heads backward into themselves, causing a bulge that looks like the head of a snake. The snake "eyes" are just spots on the caterpillar's sides. Some even extend appendages from the top of their head to mimic a forked snake tongue.
The Oscar goes to the king of all mimics: the mimic Octopus, Thaumoctopus mimicus, an eight tentacled creature that can look like anything it wants to: a seasnake, a foul tasting flatfish, a shrimp, a seahorse, stingray, anemone, starfish, lionfish, crab. Inhabiting the coast of Indonesia, this creature is so good at not being an octopus that it eluded human discovery until 1998. In any other civilization it would be preserved as a being of magic. In this world it is killed in the millions and eaten.
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- Denis Giles
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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi
Last week I received a frantic email from a teacher in Puducherry. The school principal had decided to remove all the beehives on the trees and cut down all the lower branches so that they would not get any more. The real culprits were two children who had thrown stones at the beehive and had been bitten. I spoke to the principal and explained that she should give a lecture to the school on the importance of beehives and ask children to stay away from them.
There are so few bees left in India that we are on the brink of a major pollination crisis. Our lives, as we know them, are about to change – and yet the most important beings on the planet, bees, are not protected by law. Bees pollinate one sixth of the flowering plants all over the world, which feed insects and birds, and 400 different kinds of fruit/ food plants. Basically, one third of everything you eat. All of which will become extinct within five years if the bees disappear. And don’t let’s have any smart answers about “people can eat meat”, because the animals grown for meat also eat only plants so you will not have meat either.
There are 25,000 different species of bees in just 9 families, of which the Apidae family, with the honeybee, the bumble bee and the carpenter bee, is the most common. All bees have stiff hair and pockets on their legs, allowing them to collect more pollen and be more efficient transporters of it between plants.
What is pollination? It is the transfer of pollen from the male part of the flower, the anther, to the stigma, which is the female part of the flower. When this happens, a plant’s seed, nut, or fruit is formed.
Bees focus their energies on one species of plant at a time. By visiting the same flowers of a particular species in one outing, much higher quality pollination occurs – rather than spreading many different pollens to different plants, all plants of one species get an even distribution of vital pollen from others of its same species.
The bees are disappearing for one major reason: the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. I have repeatedly asked the government to ban these, but they refuse because they need these terrible pesticides for the GM Cotton crops which Monsanto forced on India by promising that these cotton crops would not need any pesticides at all. This turned out to be a lie – in fact, GM cotton needs many more vicious pesticides which are now killing off pollinators and people.
The other reason is people getting rid of beehives, and trees being cut. This is where you need to step in.
Honeybees live in groups and they work extremely hard to make their hive. The hive contains a queen bee who produces all the baby bees, thousands of workers who get all the pollen that makes the honey that feeds the babies.
For the most part bees are totally harmless. If you ignore them they will ignore you, as they are far too busy with their own lives. After all, making one spoonful of honey
requires thousands of round trips. If you have a hive in your vicinity you should be happy, because it means that everything around will get greener and there will be far more things to eat. Just letting the hive be means that you are doing your bit for nature. In fact, if you have a hive in the vicinity, try and plant flowers or flowering trees so that they get more to eat.
But if you throw stones at them, or shake the tree for no reason, then the bees get very agitated and may attack. They do this in desperation and fear to defend their babies and home. They may sting a group of people. But remember, the bee stinging is an act of suicide because the stinger is part of her abdomen and when she stings the stinger breaks away and she dies. So you have to do a provocation to get them to bite.
If you absolutely have to remove the hive – which means destroying all the pollination of every flowering plant around 10 kilometres – then don’t burn it or smoke it, because thousands of larvae and the queen bee are destroyed. It will take several years for the workers to find a queen and to regroup – if they live. Don’t spray it with a soap and water mixture. People spray all the plant around with vinegar so that the bees die while collecting pollen, but this is a totally rabid and anti- environmental thing to do as you lose all the plants, and these may not even be the ones the bees are feeding from. Do not use insecticides.
The best way would be to encourage them to shift. This may take months, but at least you will not be murdering important beings – far more important than even you.
You should make every effort to relocate honey bees instead of exterminating them.
Here are some suggestions. Try them all.
a) Hang some mothballs inside of an old nylon or thin sock close to the bee nest.
b) Bees will often relocate to be closer to their food source and are attracted to strong, sweet smells. Cut soft, ripe pears or mangoes into chunks and place them into an open sandwich bag. Place this 15-20 feet away from the hive. After a few days, move the bait a few feet further away from the hive. Continue this process until the bees stop visiting the original location and have set up a new hive closer to the bag.
c) While bees are attracted to sweet smells, they are equally repulsed by pungent smells. One of the simplest methods to repel bees is to liberally sprinkle garlic powder in places where the bees congregate. They will start avoiding the area and slowly relocate.
d) Citronella candles will not harm bees and they will avoid any areas containing the smell. This helps protect some areas if you have a hive in your yard, and may prove partially effective in forcing a colony to relocate if the candles are being burned close to the hive.
e) Scatter a handful of cucumber peels as another natural form of repellent. The peels give off a scent that bees, and many other insects, find repulsive.
If you have access to, and are expert in, beekeeping and beekeeping equipment, take the big hive clump into a cardboard box (queen included) and then transfer the bees into a hive super-box with some frames. This can be put a distance away in a wooded area and slowly the bees will start to relocate themselves.
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- Denis Giles
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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi
The White Revolution was launched in 1970, with a view to making India milk sufficient. It made India into the world's largest milk producer, surpassing the USA in 1998, with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–11. In 30 years the official story is that milk production has again doubled. But this cannot be true because all the cattle going for illegal slaughter now are milking cows and this figure runs into lakhs. Also the government’s own FSSAI reports are that as much as 80% of milk on the market is fake. From time to time a survey of the number of cattle is done. This is mainly concocted by bureaucrats sitting at a ministry desk and it is done so that more money can be brought into this sector. Vets on the ground in the districts are never involved in any headcount and there is no methodology till today by which a headcount can be done. It is like the tiger count during the eighties, a mathematical exercise done by doubling numbers and then multiplying them again. When a methodology was worked out, and a proper survey was done, the numbers were not 25,000, as the government claimed, but only 1,400. The same thing will prove true of cattle. After all, we are the largest exporters of beef in the world — you cannot have milk and meat from the same animal. If there was enough milk why is half of India drinking reconstituted dried milk, falsely labelled fresh?
India has 37 pure cattle breeds. Five of these — Sahiwal (at 2000-4000 kg/lactation on average), Gir (2000-6000 kg/lactation on average), Red Sindhi (2000-4000 kg/lactation on average), and Tharparkar and Rathi (1800-3500 kg/lactation on average each), — are known for their milking prowess. These breeds are now on the verge of extinction, thanks to the White Revolution.
Merely helping small farmers increase their cows’ food and water intake, and living conditions, could have had miraculous results. (Indian cows, for instance, are doing really well in Brazil. In 2011, a pure Gir named Quimbanda Cal broke its own 2010 record of delivering 10,230 kilolitres of milk a year, with a daily yield of 56.17 kilolitres). But instead of focusing on — and improving — the reasons why the yield of these cows was low in India, the government in the 1960s started crossbreeding Indian cows with imported bulls and semen. One of the main reasons for India’s presently looming milk crisis — and the disappearance of India’s desi cows — is a faulty premise in official thinking about exotic crossbreeds, which no government has tried to revise. Add to this, a deliberate misrepresentation of the viability of desi cows ( so that we can keep importing cows, and officials can keep going abroad to look at them) and it is entirely believable that India will become a milk importing nation. In the next 10 years, the projected demand for milk in India will touch 180 million tonnes (as I said before, most demand is now being met with fake milk). The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) warns that if India cannot keep pace, it will have to start importing milk, leading to much higher consumer prices.
Cattle improvement was linked to the sole methodology of bringing in alien breeds of Jersey and Holstein-Friesen and using them in a nation-wide cross-breeding program to improve the domestic milk production capacity. The imported Jersey purebreds, on an average, produce 3,000 to 5,000 litres in a lactation year. But the resulting Jersey crossbreeds, that were born, do not yield more than 2,500 to 3,000 litres. Imagine if the country had, instead, gone in for developing the yielding of its own indigenous breeds, India’s milk production would have surpassed all global records.
Indiscriminate crossbreeding of Indian cattle with foreign breeds, under the Intensive Cattle Breeding Programme (ICDP), has already put more than 80 per cent of Indian cattle in the nondescript category. But, official data continues to be fudged: when official data records the average yield of indigenous cows as 2.2 kg daily, it clubs non-dairy draught breeds together with the five top milch breeds. This deliberately undermines the performance of India’s best milch cows — such as Girs and Rathis — to establish the supremacy of exotic cattle.
Meanwhile Indian cattle breeds are doing exceptionally well abroad, in the US, Australia and Brazil.
We are losing out not just on milk output but the quality of milk. It is now a known fact that there are two kinds of milk: A 1 and A 2. A 2 milk is from indigenous breeds, and scientific evidence shows Indian (zebu) cattle give A 2 milk. European varieties of cattle, like Holstein, give A 1 milk, and evidence has started piling up linking A1 protein (present in allEuropean breed milk) with high risks of type-1 diabetes, coronary heart disease, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, arteriosclerosis, sudden infant death syndrome, autism and schizophrenia.
Since we have almost wiped out all our own cattle, what should be done with the half breeds? They cannot work in the fields, nor are they strong enough to be draught animals. In any case, the demand for draught animals has dropped, as mechanization increases. So, farmers don’t keep males any more. Half breeds are not kept for breeding. In any case, the government has put so much emphasis on artificial insemination that one bull can inseminate thousands of cows.
So, it is the male calves that fill most of the trucks going illegally for slaughter. India’s anti-slaughter laws do nothing to prevent cows and bulls, and male calves, from being sent to legal and illegal slaughterhouses, where they are killed for beef, veal and leather.
India retains its top spot as the world’s largest exporter of beef, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and has extended its lead over the next highest exporter, Brazil. According to the data, India exported 2.4 million tonnes of beef and veal in 2015, compared to 2 million tonnes by Brazil and 1.5 million by Australia. India itself accounts for 23.5 per cent of global beef exports. This is up from a 20.8 per cent share from 2014. This is the recorded amount.
Unofficially it is almost double. It is estimated that almost two million cows are smuggled, across a 2,400-mile poorly-patrolled border, from India into Bangladesh every year. Inside India's borders, people dodge the law by smuggling cows to states (Kerala, West Bengal, Arunachal, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim) where there are little or no penalties for cow slaughter. India reportedly has about 3,600 legal slaughterhouses and 50,000 illegal ones, many of which slaughter cows. Much of Indian beef finds its way to the Middle East and Europe from Kerala and Bangladesh. The trade is unbelievably barbaric and much of the money earned is by criminal gangs. According to U.P. police officers, much of the revenue goes into guns.
So how can we stop the males from being killed. May I suggest that we not produce them at all. That the animal husbandry department put its resources into sex selection.
Already in the West, a lot of dairies now use gender selected semen when breeding their cows. Sexed semen is semen in which the fractions of X-bearing (female) and Y-bearing (male) sperm have been modified from the natural mix, through sorting and selection. The method works by staining sperm with a DNA-binding fluorescent dye. The bovine Y-chromosome bearing sperm contain 3.8% less DNA than the X-chromosome bearing sperm. Because of the dye, the male and female sperm can be electrically charged differently and separated by a fluorescence-activated cell sorter. The method is fairly accurate, with 90% of the sperm containing the desired sex. Using this technology, farmers can breed only female calves.
There is an American company that sells sexed semen to India. I took up this matter with the ministry and was told that the American firm was extremely expensive. But why is no Indian firm working on this?
I would suggest that the government do two things: use its resources on sex selection in cattle, so that males are not born and killed with so much cruelty, and preserve indigenous cow breeds, rather than continuing to fixate on unsuitable exotic breeds.
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- Denis Giles
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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi
A human eats, defecates, reproduces, dies. And in between tries to give meaning to his life by being as destructive as he can of everything around him.
An animal also eats, defecates, reproduces and dies and leaves the planet intact.
Whom would God choose, I wonder, to enter his heaven?
Human beings have no respect for their own defecation, nor does it really matter where they go: in communal bathrooms, in individual ones or in the open. They eat and drink so badly that their faeces stinks and spreads disease. Even the poo of a little baby is full of harmful bacteria.
But animals, especially wild ones, are particular. Many species choose communal latrine areas to defecate and urinate. Raccoons, badgers, hyenas, elephants, antelopes, deer, lizards and horses. In fact a 240 million year old defecation site of the Dinodontosaurus, found in 2013 in Talampaya National Park, Argentina, has been called the world’s oldest public toilet. Hyraxes and moles, who live underground, come above ground to defecate on sites that become dunghills. These sites also become territorial markers for the group to warn off other groups from the area. These toilets are at strategic locations, away from where the animals feed and sleep.
Are humans the only ones who build bathrooms? Social insects, like the Black Garden Ant, use specialized toilet area in their own nests – just like us. Jerdon’s Jumping Ants build refuse chambers in their nests, well below their living areas. Faeces and waste, such as uneaten food, is dumped there. Leaf cutter ants deposit their faeces in a pile outside their nests and have a special group of ants whose only job is to deal with the waste.Spidermites weave nests, and all the nest members defecate only at one site inside the nest.
Each living being (apart from humans who defecate in the same fields they grow crops in and next to the water pumps they drink from) believes in sanitation. Horses and other grazing animals use dedicated latrine areas so that grazing areas are kept pollution and parasite free.
Going one step further, antelopes deliberately defecate on exposed sites which are nutrient deficient, like sandy soil or rocky areas. Their faeces enriches the soil and deposits undigested plant seeds.
What are the elimination habits of some species?
When it becomes very hot, vultures defecate on their own legs. The principle is the same as sweat— as the liquid evaporates it cools their skins.
Caterpillars shoot their granola flake size faeces (insect faeces is called frass) out of their rear ends with such force that it lands 40 times their length, away. This rocket disposal avoids attracting carnivorous ants.
White footed Lemurs, who live in Madagascar, stay in loose knit families. They move around independently at night and live on separate trees. But to stay in touch, and communicate information, the entire family defecates at the same clump of trees which is in the centre of their territory. The lemur clings to the tree trunk, lift its tail up and drops the faeces to the ground. By sniffing these trees, family members exchange information. The males also leave scents from their scent glands which warn off other non- family lemurs. Dwarf lemurs smear their faeces on branches of trees, creating a thick build-up. Bamboo lemurs, create communal toilets around the trees where they sleep or eat. By doing this, the animals focus on defending important resources, instead of the entire territory.
Northern Collared Lemmings have faeces that glows ultraviolet, which birds of prey can see, so they build underground toilets in order to avoid predators.
Meerkats, underground squirrel like creatures who live in families of hundreds, have communal latrines in the core of their territories which they use daily. But they also ring their territories with latrines, which are used sparingly but mark their areas. This prevents any face to face confrontations between families.
Some solitary carnivores also use communal toilets. The fiercely solitary ocelot, or dwarf leopard of South America, defecates in communal latrines which act as information centres. Female ocelots can convey if they are ready to mate, and male ocelots advertise their presence to others in the area. Two completely separate, solitary, carnivore species share latrines, like the Pampas Cats and the fox-like Culpeos, who use the same rocky caves of the Andes.
Rhinos often tread through their dunghills, sniffing the dung at the piles to decode messages left in them by other rhinos. In a study published in January 2015, researchers found that rhinos spent no time in sniffing dung from group members, but took a long time over the dung of strangers.
Birds don’t defecate in their nests. They even take the poo done by their babies and carry it out of the nest to drop it somewhere else
Rabbits and capybaras produce two kinds of poop: hard, dry pellets and soft ones. The soft ones are eaten again so that no minerals go waste.
Hawaii’s beautiful white-sand beaches are simply the faeces of parrotfish. Nearly every grain of sand is a bit of coral that travels throughits body and ends up as sand. Each fish contributes about 400 kilograms a year.
The Australian wombat, a relative of the Koala, is unique in the animal kingdom in that it produces cube shaped poo– around 80 to 100 cubes per night. It lives in underground burrows during the day, but comes out at night to forage on vegetation. Wombats deposit faeces on the tops of rocks and logs, where they can be easily found by other wombats. The flat sides of the cubes ensure they do not roll off their locations.
Small cats whether domestic or wild, like servals, bury their faeces. Dominant wild cats, like lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars, that compete for territory, leave it in the open to signal that they have claimed the area as their own.
Peregrine Falcons defecate before take-off to lighten their load when flying.
Dogs don't bury their faeces. They perform a ritual designed to advertise their presence. Dogs have scent glands between their toes. They use their back feet to vigorously scratch the ground around their droppings as a visual marker.
Blind naked mole rats also have bathrooms in their nests. Nest mates regularly visit this area and rub their bodies with the waste to coat themselves with pheromones that identify them as members of the group.
Honey bees go on “defecation flights” to deposit their faeces far from the hive. During the cold days of winter, they don’t leave their nests, but when it becomes warmer they leave the hive en masse for one large group poop. Stingless bees have specialized members of the hive dedicated to waste removal.
Chinchillas defecate in latrines. They mix their faeces with plant materials and then urinate on them, which form crystals that seal the latrine.
Newly born termites cannot digest wood, so they first feed on faeces from adults, often right from their anuses. They ingest bacteria which then allow them to eat wood. The termitesCoptotermes formosanu use faecesto build their nests. This helps them fend off diseases, because beneficial bacteria feed on termite waste. It's like building a home out of antibiotics.
Three-lined potato beetles use their own faeces as a defence against predators. They feed on poisonous plants and pile their own excreta onto their backs as a chemical shield.
Badgers live in family groups of six individuals in underground homes with many rooms, entrances and tunnels. They keep their living quarters clean and will and drag old hay, grass, bracken and plastic bags outside to prevent fleas and lice. Badgers will not bring food into their homes, and defecate in distant shallow pits.
Elephant faeces is so informative that one piece of dung will tell you the age of the animal (the greater the diameter, the older the elephant), the size, the gender, diet, when the elephant was there and its health condition
People who live in areas with poor sanitation often suffer from water-borne diseases, when excrement gets into their drinking water. All our sewers flow into the rivers that give us drinking water. But the adage that you shouldn't "poop where you eat" doesn't seem to apply to humans. Even cockroaches collect faeces and dump it outside their nests. So who is cleaner?
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- Denis Giles
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By Maneka Sanjay Gandhi
Not so long ago, the 16th century philosopher, Rene Descartes described animals as red-blooded machines without thoughts or wishes. We have come a long way since then. Step by step scientists have discovered intelligence, self-will, ego and emotions in all animals, even insects. At every point these discoveries have been challenged, again and again, and when the doubters finally cave in, in the face of overwhelming evidence, they leave a ‘But’ at the end. Something that animals do not have.
One of the biggest ‘buts’ was Complex Emotions: kindness, pity, surprise, empathy, cowardice, courage, amusement, pride, depression, anticipation, shame, modesty, caution, patience, anger, composure, stress, envy, jealousy, goodwill, disgust, regret. The ability to tell lies.
One by one experiments have shown that animals possess all these complex emotions. In the book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, for example, primate expert Frans de Waal proves that non-human animals can be inherently good, caring, and even, in our definition, moral.
In a famous 1958 experiment, hungry rats that were only fed if they pulled a lever to shock their littermates, refused to do so, showing that the rodents have a sense of empathy and compassion for their fellows.
Scientists at the University of Chicago enclosed some rats in small, confining enclosures—like transparent coffins. The tiny prisons could only be opened from outside. The scientists discovered that free rats would go out of their way to release their trapped comrades.
The rats even did this when tempted by chocolate chips—a favourite food of both rats and human beings. The free rats would resist these treats until after they released the trapped rats. Then both would share the reward. So, rats turn out to be nicer than most humans – certainly nicer than the ones who experiment ceaselessly on them.
In a study by Steiner and Redish in 2015, rats showed that they could feel regret when not choosing a better available option. Both, their behaviour and their brain patterns, changed exactly the same way that humans change. Regret is the introspective recognition that a previously chosen action led to a less desirable outcome than an alternative action would have. Humans with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex of the brain do not express regret – and nor do rats.
Jealousy describes the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety that occur when an interloper threatens an important relationship. Jealousy requires the cognitive ability to determine self-esteem and weigh the rival’s threats.
In a study by Harris et al, scientists adapted a paradigm, from human infant studies, to examine jealousy in companion dogs. They had people lavish attention on objects, one of which was a realistic-looking stuffed dog that barked and whined, in front of their companion dogs. The interactions, and the dog responses, were recorded and analysed. Nearly all of the dogs pushed at either the stuffed dog or the owner and almost a third attempted to get between the object and their owner.
Significantly, they did not exhibit these behaviours to the same degree when the object of affection was not dog-like!
Empathy is the capacity to recognise and react to emotions that are being experienced by another. Reimert et al in Physiology and Behaviour, 2013, correlated a number of behaviours in pigs with positive (feeding and group housing) and negative (social isolation) events. They demonstrated that when one pig was happy with his surroundings, it had the effect of lightening the mood of other pigs. But when one pig was kept badly, and it reacted negatively to its surroundings, all the pigs reacted in the same way. The effects were not just limited to visible behaviour. Even cortisol levels in the pigs’ saliva confirmed their emotional state. The pigs were thus clearly demonstrating empathy.
Crayfish, that had been exposed to shock giving electric field in a dark maze, showed huge signs of anxiety when placed there again even after the electric field has been removed. . The stressed animals had increased levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. The animals calmed down when they were injected with an anxiety removing drug chlordiazepoxide and they entered the dark as normal.Anxiety is believed to occur in all vertebrates. Now we know it extends to invertebrate species as well.In this study, published in Science magazine, crayfish feel just as much anxiety as us.
Have you heard of the expression ‘rolling your eyes.’ It is something that humans do (I do it often) to express annoyance combined with frustration at a situation.
In a study by Sandem and Braastad, commercial dairy cows were food-deprived, and then either allowed access to food, or kept in a frustrating position where they could smell and see food, but not gain access to it. Behaviours thought to be associated with a negative emotional state and the cow’s percentage of visible eye white were recorded during the study. All food-deprived cows showed at least one of these behaviours: aggressiveness , vocalisation, and head shaking. None of the fed cows had this. But even more interesting: the percentage of white of the total visible eye area was larger than normal in the food-deprived cows, gradually increasing until 4 minutes after test starts, while it was lower than normal in the cows that were fed.
It is incredible to me there is still a debate over whether animal emotions are different from humans. If you watch mammals, or even birds, you will see how they respond to the world. They play. They are frightened when there’s danger. They relax when things are good. It seems illogical for us to think that animals might not be having a conscious mental experience of play, sleep, fear or love, or any of the emotions in between. Animals have very similar survival circuitry: for example, the brain regions that tell an animal to run away from a threat are the same, even if that animal runs on two legs, four legs or takes flight. Whenever we eat or abuse an animal in any way, remember, it is just us in another form.
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