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As I've pointed out in many other essays, our relationships with other animals are confused, challenging, frustrating, and range all over the place. This is so for numerous species including the many different animals who experience rich and deep emotional lives (see also) including domestic dogs. We know that dogs and humans share a long common history and have evolved a unique relationship when compared with the social bonds we develop with non-domesticated animals (see also). Dogs do things that even hand-reared wolves can't do (hand-reared wolves who form close relationships with humans are socialized, not domesticated) and dogs who have had little contact with humans behave like socialized dogs. Recent, Dr. Karine Silva of the University of Porto in Portugal notes that dogs "possess certain human-like social skills that chimpanzees, our closet relatives, do not." Dogs were found to display "sympathetic concern" that goes beyond simple mimicking, a reaction called "emotional contagion." The researchers discovered that "Dogs, behave as 'upset' as children when exposed to familiar people faking distress." They provide three reasons for empathic concern:
"Modern pets originated from wolves which are highly social animals that engage in co-operative activities and have developed empathy towards other animal species.
Furthermore, biological chances as dogs were domesticated mean their empathy towards man has been fine-tuned over generations.
And breed diversification and selection for increasingly difficult working tasks, such as herding animals or hunting, have led to more complex understanding of human emotional communication."
While more research is needed there's no doubt that we have a special close and enduring relationship with our best friends and when we harm them we're double-crossing them because they have expectations about how we should treat them.
Other recent research involves the use of monkeys to study human obesity and diabetes. Monkeys are forced to overeat and then are used to test drugs that are used to treat obesity and diabetes. You can decide for yourself on the ethics of this sort of research - should we induce obesity or, as we do in other projects, subject animals to diseases from which they don't normally suffer - but at least one researcher does not favor it. Barbara Hansen of the University of South Florida "prefers animals that become naturally obese with age, just as many humans do. Fat Albert, one of her monkeys who she said was at one time the world’s heaviest rhesus, at 70 pounds, ate 'nothing but an American Heart Association-recommended diet'." A good deal of obesity can be easily avoided so in many ways these monkeys are being used to study a condition that we should avoid in the first place.
Rats also are finding themselves in a regrettable laboratory situation. In order to learn more about the boundary of life and death, a team of Dutch researchers embedded electrodes in the brains of healthy rats and then decapitated them. The results of this horrific study showed that after decapitation the activity of the brain immediately started dropping and that it took 4 seconds for it to drop to one-half the pre-decapitation level. The conclusion: "The study is good evidence that decapitating rats is humane, even when they're awake." Once again, you can decide on the ethics of this research, the results of which are reported in the February 12, 2011 issue of New Scientist (for which a subscription is needed but a short review can be read here).
Let's end on a happier note. February 19 was the 20th anniversary of Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots program. Details about this wonderful program can be found at the homepage for Roots & Shoots and here. I've been involved with Roots & Shoots for many years and recently an online book was published (downloadable here) that highlights the wonderful and inspirational relationship that kids have with animals, people, and their shared environments based on the principles of Roots & Shoots. Kids are the ambassadors for making our planet a more peaceful, empathic, and compassionate place for all beings. Let's teach them well.
