Dogs, emotions with a nose

Opinion

January 8, 2013

Dogs, emotions with a nose

By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Tue Jan 08, 2013, 08:00 AM CST

PICAYUNE — To anybody who spends a lot of time with animals, the march of science sometimes seems to lag common sense. Some years ago, I read an article in the New York Times about behavioral psychologists — university researchers with PhDs — who announced that after long study and many experiments, they’d concluded that dogs have emotions recognizably like our own.

I phoned my friend Randy, a veterinarian. Did this finding strike him as newsworthy? It did not.

“A (bleeping) dog,” he said “is emotions with a nose.”

Indeed, most dog lovers would say that dogs are rather more emotional than humans, mainly because the only feeling they sometimes hide is fear. Want to see joyous excitement? Pick up your dog’s leash and walk to the door. Dejection? Put it down and exit without him.

Whenever he’s left “alone” with the other twenty-odd animals on our place, Jesse the Great Pyrenees acts as stricken, as if he fears we’re never coming back. As for empathy, he’s often better at reading my wife’s moods than I am. Mine too. Any time I’m angry or frustrated about something, I’m getting a big white nose in my hand. Otherwise, he’s as stubborn and independent-minded as most of his livestock-guarding breed.

Fearless too. Best not to mess with a calf on Jesse’s watch. I once saw him throw a coyote about three feet, and then pick up and carry my neighbor’s baby goat back to its mama. Between him and his consort Maggie, we feel awfully safe around here. Although accepting of strangers, I believe they’d defend us with everything that’s in them.

The altruism of dogs, however, is something we’ve bred into them over thousands of years. Among the oldest products of human genetic engineering, dogs are pretty much what we’ve made them. Observing breeds of dog (not to mention pigeons) was one of the things that started Darwin thinking.

Other domestic animals exhibit cross-species empathy too. When I first learned to ride, my quarter horse Rusty got frightened by something and bolted. I lost a stirrup and decided to do an emergency dismount before I got thrown.

I was lying on my face in a winter wheat field making sure I could still wiggle my toes when I felt a tickling sensation on the back of my neck — Rusty’s whiskers. Instead of galloping back to the barn without me, he’d come back to make sure I was OK.

No philanthropist, on other occasions Rusty had untied himself and trotted home without me. The difference seemed to be his concern for my well-being.

For that matter, nobody can observe a herd of cows form a protective phalanx around a newborn calf without understanding that the animals’ feelings for each other are deeply embedded in their DNA.

But rats? An animal that’s been synonymous with cunning and treachery pretty much since the Black Death of the fourteenth century? After all, to “rat somebody out” is to betray them in order to gain an advantage for oneself.

Anyway, that’s the latest revelation from Science Magazine, also reported in the Washington Post. As a means of testing the “biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior,” researchers at the University of Chicago devised an elegant experiment to determine if the rodents gave the proverbial rat’s a__ about each other.

After housing lab rats in pairs for a couple of weeks, they imprisoned one animal in an unpleasantly restrictive cage capable of being opened from the outside. Then they turned its roommate into the enclosure to see what would happen and videotaped the proceedings.

Visibly agitated by their friend’s plight, and made fearful by its distress calls — “emotional contagion,” scientists call it — “[f]ree rats circled the restrainer, digging at it and biting it, and contacted the trapped rat through holes in the restrainer.”

When by chance their actions made the cage pop open, the rescuers first froze in fear. Then the pair began sniffing, grooming each other and exploring the larger enclosure together like old friends. Over roughly a week, all of the female and most male rats learned to open the cage by deliberate action. They did so even after the experiment was altered to cause the imprisoned animal to exit into a second enclosure — i.e. strictly to relieve their companion’s stress.

Even more remarkably, the animal’s altruism survived the addition of tasty chocolate chips into the experiment. Most often, “free rats” not only liberated their pals, but usually saved a treat or two for their buddy in the slammer.

Neurobiologist Peggy Mason told the Post that surprised her: “To actually share food — this is a big deal to a rat ... I didn’t think they would do that.”

True to her discipline, Mason thinks that the experiment tends to show that the origins of even the most seemingly “selfless” actions lie deeply embedded in the biology of all social animals.

(Columnist Gene Lyons canbe reached by email at Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com)

Text Only

Opinion

Hood’s ‘open carry’ ruling strikes important balances
Attorney General Jim Hood’s office issued an opinion this week that went a long way toward establishing some order and applying some common sense to what has become a contentious and confusing debate both for proponents and opponents of free exercise of the Second Amendment.
House Bill 2, which becomes law July 1, was authored and led to passage by state Rep. Andy Gipson, R-Braxton. Gipson has told the press that he believed the legislation was necessary to clearly define what a concealed weapon is under the law and to distinguish between “concealed carry” and “open carry” rights. But many law enforcement officers charged with enforcing the state’s “concealed carry” law and other contradictory statutes, the bill created some confusion and Hood’s AG opinion brought some clarity to the ongoing debate.

June 19, 2013
Analysis: Miss. supes discussing county budgets
Mississippi supervisors gather on the Gulf Coast this week to talk about roads and bridges, economic development, water resources and other issues.

June 19, 2013
The Loss of Trust
Amid all the heated cross-currents of debate about the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance program, there is a growing distrust of the Obama administration that makes weighing the costs and benefits of the NSA program itself hard to assess. The belated recognition of this administration’s contempt for the truth, for the American people and for the Constitution of the United States, has been long overdue.

June 19, 2013
Mary Dorsa Guttry
Mass of Christian Burial for Mary Dorsa Guttry, 90, of Carriere, Miss., who passed away Friday, June 14, 2013, will be held Wednesday, June 19, 2013, at 2 p.m. at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church.
Visitation will be Wednesday, June 19, 2013 from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. at McDonald Funeral Home.
Burial will be in New Palestine Cemetery under the direction of McDonald Funeral Home.

June 18, 2013 1 Photo
We all need to be prepared for disasters
When my father was alive, he left New Orleans only two times in his life. The first was to serve his country in Korea. The second was when the federal government evacuated him to San Antonio in 2005.

June 15, 2013
How much spying needed for security?
Ever since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have vacillated between their desire for safety and their desire for privacy.
The federal government, whose spying on its own citizens has been further exposed this past week, says Americans can’t have it both ways.

June 15, 2013
State lags in early child ed
The bad news is that Mississippi remains the only state in the South without a state-funded early children education program. Only eight states nationwide do not invest in some form of early childhood education and only 11 states don’t have a state-funded pre-kindergarten program.

June 15, 2013
A hard rain is gonna fall...
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist

After disappearing during his term in office and bringing scandal to his family and state, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is going to Washington, having won election to Congress. And that’s far from the worst story reflecting the current character of our nation.

May 25, 2013
Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
More Opinion Headlines

Opinion

Search Results

Dogs, emotions with a nose

Site Map

Contact Us