George Page - Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence

Our pets acquire their emotional problems without our intentional help. In the laboratory, cruel experimenters can easily induce all manner of psychiatric disorders in their animals. Intending to test memory, a researcher at UCLA trained a group of rats in a traditional maze, then spiked the food so that the rats got sick, not immediately, but hours later. After this much time had elapsed, would the rats put together cause and effect and avoid that food in the future? Yes, they would. Furthermore, they acquired a phobia regarding that entire section of the maze, which they wouldnt go near. As Michael Gazzaniga notes in his entertaining book Mind Matters, humans have exactly the same response to a restaurant that has caused us food poisoning. We never return to that place.

Other experiments, some of them cruel, demonstrate that animals can easily be driven into a highly stressed-out state by the random infliction of pain, especially pain about which they can do nothing. In tests with two sets of rats exposed to random shocks, the subjects who could stop the shock by turning a wheel were better off and developed fewer stomach ulcers than the ones who received the identical shock of the same duration but couldnt do anything about it. The shock was the same in each case, but the feeling of being able to do something about it made a big difference in the mental health of the two groups.

Gazzaniga reports studies of large organizations confirming that the same principle holds for people: Upper-level management, with more power to control events, feel less stressed out than middle managers. Of course, the upper-levels also make more money, which might be a factor in their well-being. When a fish is snared on the hook, its body is flooded with endorphins, the same natural painkillers that flood my own body when I experience pain. Does the fish feel pain? Alas, the inference from biochemistry suggests that the answer may be yes, even though anglers (including myself, most definitely) have always hoped and perhaps believed that this is not the case.

In the wild, certain animals are excellent at inducing stress in each other, with no help from humans at all. Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University has done extensive research with the baboons of East Africa, who have too much spare time on their handsat least in the case of the alpha male, who successfully makes life miserable for almost everyone else in his troop. He may attack physically or he may silently harass any other potential couple by simply being nearby at all times. His dominating presence alone is usually enough to make the other male slink off and leave the female alone. The other animals in the group end up with excess amounts of the gluco-corticoid hormonesjust as humans do who are suffering from too much stress.

Encountered one-on-one, sheep are not sheep as we know them by reputation. To know a sheep is to know an animal with quite complex behavior and good memory, according to Keith Kendrick, a neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge. He knows that a sheep can remember more than fifty members of its flock, that a ewe who has selected a favored male experiences a surge of dopamine in her brain when shown a picture of that male, and that looking at a picture of a preferred kind of food triggers brain activity in a sheep analogous to the activity in my brain when I look at a picture of cherry-vanilla ice cream. The seat of that activity in both cases is the hypothalamus, the area of the brain most activated by pleasurable self-stimulation. Do we have any good reason, or any reason at all, for presuming that the sheep looking at the picture of choice grass does not feel something like the sense of pleasant anticipation that I do while contemplating the ice cream?

Likewise, grooming among primates and some other animals floods their systems with dopamine. Smiling in humansand perhaps in other animals as well, if we could read the expressions correctlyis grooming at a distance, in effect. And Dr. George Losey of the University of Hawaii has discovered that the little wrasses that clean tiny organisms and other parasites off other fish are allowed to do so only because the action tickles the larger fish. With good tickling, the fish will stay parked for hours, but given bad stimulation they will bite the offending cleaner fish (or the offending fake fish, if were talking about one of Loseys experiments). One fish practically lifted itself out of the water in an effort to rub against a piece of wire just above the surface. As far as Losey is concerned, The sea is not full of cold fish at all. Theyre out there having a darned good time. They get tickled during the day, they get sex in the afternoon... they have a lot of pleasure.

No one can say that emotions are chemical states and nothing but these states in the brain, yet theres no doubt that they are mediated by the chemical states in some way. Lab rats can be seduced into pressing a lever just about endlessly if the action results in either the direct injection of endorphins, such as dopamine, in the brain or the electrical stimulation of the hypothalamus, which then releases the dopamine. Dodman believes that this is strong evidence that emotions in animals are essentially the same as the emotions we feel. Or we could put it this way: Wherever its found in the animal kingdom, dopamine is dopamine.

And oxytocin is oxytocin, as we learn from Dr. C. Sue Carter at the University of Maryland, who conducted an ingenious study of the prairie vole. Oxytocin is the hormone that seems to play a key role in the experience of pleasure we feel during sexual activity. It is released in the brain of all mammals at these pleasurable junctures. It also plays a key role in mother-infant bonding, indicated by its presence at elevated levels at the time of birth and when nursing. Oxytocin is a relaxing, antistress hormone and, apparently, much more. Thinking about these matters, Carter hypothesized that the hormone might also be instrumental earlier in the behavioral cycle that eventually leads to sexual activity and childbearing. The term emotional glue sometimes used in reference to human couples doesnt mean much to biologists, as Carter points out. She wanted to investigate the biochemical underpinnings of this glue. Specifically, she wanted to find out whether the same biochemical glue that underpins sex and maternal bonding in people and volesoxytocinalso underpins pair bonding.

The prairie vole is a good subject for studying this hypothesis because it happens to be a socially monogamous species. Such behavior is quite rare among the rodents, as we might not be surprised to learn. I should also point out that social monogamy is not the same thing as sexual monogamy. Marriage among humans is an institution of social monogamy, but it does not guarantee sexual monogamy. Adultery happens. The same holds for these voles, but promiscuity doesnt matter to Carter, who is interested in the initial and permanent pair-bonding behavior.

At her laboratory in Maryland, Carter introduced a young, unpaired female vole to a male and allowed her to spend one hour with him. Under normal circumstances in the wild, this one hour is not enough time for the female to make up her mind about this potential lifetime mate. In the wild, shell go back and forth between candidates, vacillating, undecided, for about twenty-four hours. Her decision is indicated when she begins spending almost all her time with one of the males, and she may even become aggressive with the loser. In effect, female prairie voles go through puberty in a twenty-four-hour period. Prior to meeting their first strange male, their reproductive hormones are suppressed.