When an elephant gets emotional

A new book challenges the view that animals have no feelings, says Hugh Aldersley Williams

For the American writer Henry David Thoreau,the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. If so, what sort of lives do animals lead? Dr Jeffrey Masson believes animals have the capacity to be just as miserable - or happy. In a recent book, When Elephants Weep: the Emotional Lives of Animals, Dr Masson asserts that animals have a capacity not only to feel physical pain but also to fear and even to hope, love and grieve. In short, that they are sufficiently self-aware to experience emotions.

Dr Masson came to his subject from human psychoanalysis. "Surprisingly, there is almost no investigation of the emotional lives of animals in modern scientific literature," he writes, although noting that Darwin conjectured freely on the matter. "Not only are the emotions of animals not a respectable field of study, the words of emotion are not to be applied to them."

Dr Masson breaks this taboo, recounting tales of animal rescues, favours, longings, friendships and enmities. A description of elephants' preoccupation with the bones of dead elephants is reminiscent of Hamlet's brooding over Yorick's skull. But he does himself no favours with his own emotive language, which will alienate many scientists. Animals are referred to throughout by the pronoun "who" rather than "which", for example.

There are good reasons why scientists have been wary of the idea of emotions. Some feelings, such as fear and lust, may have a chemical base in their respective hormones. In the case of others, it may be that only language can beget emotion. Love, for example, is seen by some anthropologists and literary critics as a figment of the 19th-century romantic imagination. If we are able to articulate feelings of love only thanks to language, then this emotion would seem to be precluded in animals. Emotions such as joy and grief, gratitude and generosity are still more troublesome.

The hardline view is that animals do not have the consciousness or self- awareness required for emotional feeling. This is a convenient assumption for a society that keeps animals in homes, zoos, farms and laboratories and slaughters them for food, experimentation and entertainment. Small wonder that we prefer animals to behave as automata rather than as feeling, suffering creatures too much like ourselves.

Scientists want to know why as well as how animals experience emotion. It is easy to argue that emotions such as fear, love and even some interspecies friendship might confer an evolutionary advantage. It is harder to make the case for hope, which demands the ability to conceptualise, or for feelings of altruism, gratitude or grief, which further no immediate purpose of the animal experiencing the emotion and perhaps even endanger it. Dr Masson describes an occasion when a male peregrine falcon was seen to grieve over its mate, which had been shot dead. "There is no survival value in moping, not eating and grieving," he concedes. Yet it was observed.

A paper published last month in the science journal Nature adds grist to Dr Masson's mill, though this can scarcely have been its authors' intention. Professors Howard Eichenbaum and Michael Bunsey of the State University of New York published results that establish the similarity in rats and humans of the part of the brain called the hippocampus.

The hippocampus allows humans to recall associations, something that is typically tested by measuring ability to remember random pairs of words. This facility is known as declarative memory. Parallel experiments with groups of rats with intact and damaged hippocampi involved associating pairs of odours.

All rats learnt the associations, but only those with intact hippocampi were able to use this learning to select a further odour and earn a food reward. The result indicates the significance of the hippocampus for rats' ability to draw inferences rather than simply to record sensory data. "The present findings provide an extension to animals of classic views on human memory," say the authors.

The hippocampus functions in part as a recorder of long-term memory. Other scientists have argued that long-term memory is important to self- awareness. As Roger Penrose wrote in his 1989 bestseller, The Emperor's Mind: "A case can be made that the laying down of permanent memories is associated with consciousness, and if this is right, the hippocampus would indeed play a central role in the phenomenon of conscious awareness."

The discovery that rats' hippocampi work like ours increases the likelihood that animals have consciousness like ours. "In humans, the ability consciously to recollect is what defines declarative memory," says Professor Eichenbaum. "We may have tapped the same phenomenon in similar form in animals."

The result should please Dr Masson but will not surprise him. As he writes: "Unfortunately for those who hold that emotions are exclusively human products of our unparalleled mental powers, the physical pathways of human emotion are among the most primitive. From a purely physical standpoint, it would be a biological miracle if humans were the only animals to have feelings."

'When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals' (Vintage, pounds 6.99).