From Shelley on Tazi List comes this fascinating Time article on play and fairness in dogs and other social animals. “…Thanks to Bekoff and other researchers, ethologists are also starting to accept the once radical idea that some animals–primarily the social ones such as dogs, chimps, hyenas, monkeys, dolphins, birds and even rats–possess not just raw emotions but also subtler and more sophisticated mental states, including envy, empathy, altruism and a sense of fairness. “They have the ingredients we use for morality,” says Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to the monkeys and chimps he studies”.
“Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity…”
(Which is also one of the very few late Ezra Pound lines worth quoting).
The people I want to be around were born knowing all this. Perhaps others will be convinced or at least opened by more scientific observations.
I am grateful they recognized ‘even’ rats. Though mine (pet, show rats) were so different from wild or urban rat societies (as domestic dogs are to wolves), their individual unique personalities, behaviors and relationships always fascinated me. I could identify with them while still honoring their alienness to me.
Are we finally moving toward forgiving the ‘evil’ of anthropomorphism by realizing it is truly and merely empathy with other species?
(ps Why do I sound so stuffy when I’m expressing something important to me?)