Animals showing "human" emotions and behavior on Youtube. Will it change our view of them?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Most people, after having observed a beloved pet for a long time, are not so sure anymore that animals’s emotions and intelligence are fundamentally different, or less from our human ones.

Traditionally, it has been very hard for naturalists to catch relaxed animals on film. Most clips show animals stressed out in a experimental situation, filmed by strange people. Or in life or death situations.

But Youtube (and better naturalists’ camera’s) has changed that.

Now that everybody has a camera, we can witness animal behavior that untill now, only individual pet-owners knew.

I wonder if such video clips will eventually change the public’s view of animals. After all, such clips are emotionally powerful, more so then any number of animal-activists slogans. I even find it telling that with many such clips, the comments of people will try to argue quite passionately, that the emotions by the animal aren’t “real” but just a learned response, a trick, or otherwise invalid. As if they feel challenged. No-one responds that way to any treatise on animal rights.

A few examples, some well known, some less known:

Elephants painting;

Elephants mourning

A lion recognizing it’s owners after a year

A friendship between a cat and a chicken

A parrot using a tool

A parrot solving a puzzle

Crows using tools
So, I’d like to discuss not if these video’s show animal intelligence and emotions, as that is a whole other debate, But if others agree with me that such clips are more likely to convince people then before.

2

I read a book by Carl Sagan. It may have been Billions And Billions, or it may have been another one. At the time, he thought he stood a good chance of being cured of the cancer that eventually killed him. He wrote of visiting one of the gorillas that knew sign language, noting how ‘human’ it acted. He questioned where to draw the line when it comes to ‘intelligence’. Is a dog ‘intelligent’ or ‘sentient’? What about a rat? Or a mouse? It put him into an ethical dilemma. He was receiving treatment that would not have been possible without animal experiments; yet how moral is it to perform these experiments upon creatures that have (in their own way, based on their evolution) feelings and emotions? It’s been a while since I read the book, but I think that he was grateful for the countless animals that gave their lives for his treatment.

I’ve remembered that part of the book (more or less anyway, as you can tell). Seeing videos of animals doing human-like things reminds me of it.

3

Some more clips:

Wild crows making use of urban traffic to crack nuts

Chihuahua masturbating

Cat dreaming

Shoplifting seagull

Octopus solving puzzles.

4

It might make some people empathise with animals a bit more, but I doubt it is going to mean much to anyone who, in this age of pets and media attention, has failed to grasp the concept of animals having personalities. People already know and are generally good to animals if they don’t taste good or prove handy for testing max-strength LemSip.

The kind of people who commit extreme animal cruelty usually have a few missing wires anyway.

Having said that, the Youtube video might change people’s perceptions of Chihuahuas from cute little dogs to dirty little buggers. :slight_smile:

5

Which is, actually, more accurate. :slight_smile:

6

Good point. And speaking of accurate, I’m slightly concerned that an octopus appears to be better at opening jars than my girlfriend.

7

There is a wonderful Discovery Channel documentary on animal emotions, “Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry”. It seems to be hard to find, but it is very much worth the effort.

8

Why would an octopus want to open your girlfriend?

9

That video of the painting elephant is amazing to say the least!

Opened my eyes up.

10

Yeah I am really curious if the Elephant understands the idea of representation, or if she is just following training.

Either way it amuses me that even an elephant starts by drawing the trunk :wink:

11

Japanese Scientists have devoted hundreds of hours to solving that exact question, most of their research is available in Anime form.

12

Indeed. Just look at them. If octopuses don’t come directly from some evil people-opening dimension, then I don’t know what does.

Except Rosie O’Donnell, obviously.

13

It’s following training. I went to the website to see how expensive those paintings are (answer: very expensive) and there are a few standard pictures they draw. Aside from a few variations, they’re the same strokes and so on. Like they have that picture of an elephant, one of a flower, another elephant picture, and so on. They also have “abstract” ones which I guess are probably just the elephants doing their own thing, but the representative ones are trained.

I read a book about chimpanzee intelligence (The Mind of an Ape by Ann and David Premack) where they concluded that one of the big things chimpanzees couldn’t do was to make representations of themselves. Like if you gave them a picture of a chimpanzee face in pieces, they had trouble putting it together properly and they couldn’t do anything with clay. They did find that after some training* and letting the chimp look in the mirror with a hat on, she put the face parts in the right places (lots of them upside down though) and then turned some extra pieces over and put them on top of the picture’s head like a hat. But they really didn’t show much ability to do things like draw or sculpt or in any way create representations of things.

*my memory on this part is a little muddled- I don’t remember how they got from “she can’t do the puzzle” to “she did the puzzle and added a hat on her own, but apes still can’t do puzzles like this”

Anyway, based on that (and with the understanding that animal intelligence doesn’t exactly work like this all the time) I would expect that elephants are also not able to create representations of themselves (especially stylized ones with flowers and such) just out of their own imaginations. It’s still seriously amazing (I don’t think I could draw an elephant that nice…) though.

14

Scotty Mo’s post illustrates exacty what I meant. No matter how much we read or hear about “animal intelligence”, it doesn’t have the impact of actually seeing it (on film) with our own eyes. That is how our own animal side is wired, I guess.

And Youtube is perfect for showing such short clips. Modern camera’s are perfect for recording such clips of animals in normal, relaxed circumstances. Together, they might start to make a difference in how we perceive animals.

Racer1, my personal gripe is with how we treat animals is in the category of “animals that taste nice”. So, pigs, chickens and cows. My own country, the Netherlands, I’m sad to say, is number one in industrial farming. Chickens and pigs are kept in gruesome circumstances, with high -tech farming making a maximum profit at the expense of the anima’s wellbeing.

15

Thanks! Youtube had it, thankfully.

16

I don’t know if I agree with this statement. Footage of animals in their natural setting unaware that they are being filmed has been around for decades. National Geographic and shows like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom have been around forever, showing animals relaxed in non-experimental situations.

YouTube hasn’t changed anything besides getting to see people’s home videos of their pets.

17

Of course it’s wrong to think of emotions as “human”. It’s hard for us to imagine how a dog experiences the world, but you can be sure it is filled with emotion, maybe even to a greater degree than a human because there’s less thinking and more feeling. In a book I am reading, the author talks briefly about the chemistry of love and the effects it has on the brain. I found it hilarious that when a male prairie vole is injected with vasopressin, it will immediately go and cuddle with a nearby female. Emotions are amazing when you think of how they are “merely” the effects of some chemical seeping through your brain, which is in turn just a huge bundle of very simple biological on/off bits.

18

How people can say that dogs have no emotions is beyond me. It seems that the do little other than emote pretty much all the time.

What surprised me is finding out that dogs laugh. So do rats. I suspect that cats do too, but it’s a superior, laughing-on-the-inside kind of laugh.

19

Sure, and it is better awareness of how the juicy animals (I’m evil, I know) are kept and treated that could lead to a change in popular opinion and force a difference. We all know it deep down, but it is easy to not think about where our meat is coming from when we’re not actually seeing the conditions all the time. In the current economic climate, I doubt there will be much support for change as it would lead to an increase in the cost of meat, but maybe when the economy recovers.

In short, seeing videos of animals in the slaughter house and transported in terrible conditions is what could make a difference. It won’t stop people eating meat, but it might improve their treatment.

Not sure it will do much for Chihuahuas though.

20

I agree that elephants are very intelligent but Elephant painting an elephant has been thoroughly debunked. Obviously an elephant can hold a paintbrush and stick it to a canvas, but the trainers are holding the elephants tusk and and guiding it into a shape. They profit handsomely from dumb tourists who think its a window into the elephants’ mind.

But I am surprised that dolphins haven’t been mentioned yet. The more I watch them , the more I get the feeling that they observe us just as much as we observe them. They seem to be “aware”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWauuX_1KH8 BBC documentary on dolphin intelligence