by Matthew Cobb
This great video from San Diego Zoo. The calf is called Adhama, and she was 5 months old when this was posted at the end of June. She seems to be having fun. Or is she just learning how to swim? This comes back once again to the big epistemological question we’ve debated here many times: how could we know what an animal is feeling?
h/t: My ex-student Karlina Ozolina
Too cute! Hippos are such awkward-looking creatures. Much more graceful in water!
This is only my opinion, of course, but I would apply the “if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck” hypothesis. Especially considering that they are mammals and are extremely closely related to us.
I may, however, be entirely wrong.
The only way I can see this could be testable would be to somehow measure individual neuron activity in the animal and in a human being while being put in the same situation.
I am not entirely sure how easy that would be though, and even then, there would be arguments from meta-physicists claiming there is something immeasurable going on here and there is some unwritten rule that says we can never know!
Cuter still is their wolf spider & hundreds of spiderlings!
I’m going to assume that animals experience much the same emotions that I do for the reasons the “pro” camp brought up last time. However, one must remember that it’s just an assumption.
Anyway, very cute hippo.
Sorry, don’t know the source of this but when I ran across it several years back it made a ton of sense.
Mammals sprang from similar evolutionary sources. There is little we find in humans that doesn’t exist in other mammals. Why would we think that emotions are somehow unique to us? That’s not to say that the objective experience of my dogs when they’re happy is the same as mine, but damn it, they grin and laugh just like me.
Many animals learn adult behaviour by enacting them gently with their siblings, it makes sense to me that there must be some kind of reward involved – and that is pretty much the definition of “play” is it not?
I wonder if our new ability to digitally record history will eventually allow the human race to observe evolution in action in a way that is acceptable to theists. Although I expect they’ll have “reinterpreted” their scriptures long before the crunch point 🙂
Can one be sure that a kitten that looks like it is frollicking is actually frollicking?
Is a smiling human being actually feeling like smiling, or is s/he just a good actor because the situation is such that The Boss (or peers or family) expects him/her to smile, and s/he does so just to keep them off his/her back?
It appears to be a happy dance, but the dark truth is that the baby hippo is performing an interpretive dance expressing its seething hatred for penguins.
I have snakes, a Burmese python and red tailed boas, that when introduced to a large water container (bathtub sized) for the first time did much the same thing. They would roll and turn seemingly deliberately in what looked like play. However after a few days they stopped and I haven’t observed the behavior since. My conclusion is that they were learning to move in a novel environment.
I think you could call what the baby hippo is doing play if juveniles or adults who are familiar with the water continue to engage in this sort of behavior. Otherwise this is no different than human babies “dancing” while learning to walk. We project on the infant that is still building muscle strength and coordination the intention to move or behave in a certain way.
No, boredom with the game does NOT mean it isn’t play. People do this all the time. It’s part of the play mechanism, we get an emotional reward during play as our neural circuits learn the new process, then we move on.
Very few activities actually provide long term interest for humans (and relatively few humans become that attached to the activity in question)
“…how could we know what an animal is feeling?”
What about the evolutionary continuity between humans and other animals – is that not an evolutionary argument in favor of our empathy with other animals having some real foundation?
I’m still somewhat dumbfounded that there’s any kind of a debate.
I think we can all agree that pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, and other “primitive” feelings are essentially the same across at least all the vertebrates. We can agree on that, no?
And there’s rarely any difficulty in discerning when an animal is experiencing those states. The pain of an animal caught in a claw trap, the panic of a cornered animal, the pleasure of one that’s just eaten a good meal and had a roll in the hay — anybody can spot those, because each comes with legions of behavioral cues that’re consistent across species.
Why then this mysterious magical invisible line between those easily-identifiable feelings with vital survival properties and other important ones that we also consistently and universally identify?
I honestly can’t think of a single reason other than holdovers from religious doctrines of privileged creation and ensoulment. Humans are special, next to the gods, and it’s from the gods that we get all these prized properties. The non-human animals are just dumb beasts — mechanical automatons, really — put here by the gods for us to eat and otherwise use as we see fit.
Cheers,
b&
Would you argue that the experience of locomotion (for instance) is the same across all vertebrates, or even all tetrapods? Snakes and whales, cats and penguins all have essentially the same experience? What about vision? Do frogs and eagles, bats and flounders have essentially the same sensory experiences?
If you’re willing to grant significant variation in these kinds of experience, on what basis then do you rule out the possibility of similar adaptive variation in emotional experience? Why should (say) a chip’s feeling of parental love bear any resemblance to how a tortoise feels about the clutch of eggs it leaves behind on the beach? Emotions aren’t immune to natural selection, and common descent alone isn’t sufficient to guarantee emotional similarity.
How could we know what you are feeling, when you are swimming? Well, we can listen to what you might say. But is what you say an accurate description of what you are feeling, or is it what the culture expects you to say?
We sometimes ask questions for which there could not be answers. So are those real questions, or are we just creating a mystery where there is nothing mysterious?
Indeed and how can I relate your description of your feelings to my own feelings. Does ‘happy’ mean the same to you as it does to me?
Mike.
http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-like-to-be-bat.html
Really? No “Dance of the Hours”?
Here you go…
(Start Time didn’t stick with link. Oh well… Hippo dance starts at 3:24)
LOL. If you start the Fantasia video at 3:24 as you suggest, then press play on the hippo video with no sound, it works surprisingly well. 😀
How could I know what you’re feeling? Read some Ryle, or some Dennett. We have two options: either make the assumption, and it’s quite a big one, that the other being is feeling the same way you would in that situation, or define feelings in terms of dispositions towards certain actions.
You can’t know what another organism is feeling. You can only assume it based on prior experience.
I think the modern science bias *against* animals as intelligent or emotional beings is a holdover of *religious* memes that have no basis in reason or evidence. Humans are “created in god’s image” and “have souls”, but animals “do not have souls” and “man has dominion over beast & birds & fish” (they are resources to be exploited by man — or at best resources to be managed responsibly by man).
The idea of humans as “special” and “superior” was so appealing that remained entrenched in the minds of otherwise rational and objective biologists and zoologists. It had (still has?) such a hold that when researchers claimed to see evidence of emotion or intelligence in animal behavior, they were the ones accused of irrational bias.
It seems like here in past decade or so, this is finally changing.
There’s still a big gap though between saying on the one hand that animals have emotions and on the other hand that they have emotions just like ours and that our intuitions about the nature of their emotions are therefore accurate. The former position is (or should be) uncontroversial; but the latter (in my opinion) warrants considerable skepticism.
Yes, but I think that to say the baby hippo is “having fun” is vague enough to be almost certainly correct.
And while we should expect both quantitative and qualitative differences in the emotional and cognitive processes in animals, it would be quite surprising if the differences were any more drastic than the more readily observed anatomical differences. All vertebrates have roughly the same body plan, same organs in the same places, and so forth. So while we should expect cognitive differences we should be quite surprised if those differences were not relative to an underlying cognitive framework that is common to all mammals including humans, and a more basic framework common to all vertebrates, and so forth.
The basic vertebrate body plan is flexible enough to produce appendages as diverse as a bird’s wing, a horse’s hoof, and a human hand. I’d expect similar homologies — and similar diversity — from vertebrate emotions. So for instance it may turn out that the drive that impels salmon upstream to spawn shares deep evolutionary roots with the human urge to pair off and fall in love. But recognizing that homology gives us no real insight into what “love” feels like to a fish; in fact it would most likely be a serious error to use the word “love” in that context.
Similarly, hippo play may resemble human play and share evolutionary roots with it. But it does not automatically follow that we therefore know what “fun” feels like to a hippo. The most we can reasonably say is that the hippo seems to be having fun, while recognizing that such statements tell us more about our own perceptions than about the hippo’s actual experience.
In the UK BBC1 has a hippo ident –
http://youtu.be/WvO_GnytTg0
Have you seen the Dog Whisperer? He knows what those dogs are thinking and he knows what they are feeling. How can I be (reasonably) certain? Because he has a consistent theory of the dog’s mind which reliably produces testable predictions, and those predictions prove to be accurate. It explains things and produces results, just like any decent scientific theory. His theory of dog-mind is also consistent with what one would expect from biological and evolutionary reasoning: roughly similar to human thinking since we are both social mammals, but with some key differences.