Can animals fall in love? It is a question that sounds faintly ridiculous but, strange as it sounds, it is one that scientists are starting to take seriously. In the past few decades, a flood of discoveries has forced us to blur the boundary that exists between man and beast.
A century ago, we thought animals were essentially dumb and acted purely on instinct They had no language, could not make tools, and sex was purely for reproduction. We now know that many species can have sophisticated social lives, express emotions such as fear, hatred and even jealousy, and that many may have linguistic abilities.
It seems there is a new discovery every month elevating a particular species onto a new intellectual and emotional plane. It was revealed couple of years ago that sheep, whose very name was a byword for stupidity, could recognise human faces and form strong attachments to their keepers.
And it was revealed recently that elephants can recognise themselves in the mirror. Thought by scientists to be the ultimate test of ‘sentience’, the mirror test has been passed by most apes, the dolphin and, some claim, the pigeon.
Now a team of scientists have found that somewhale species have structures in their brains which indicate that they may be able to fall in love.
Patrick Hof and Van Der Gucht of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have found specialised neurons, called spindle cells, in the brains of humpback, fin, killer and sperm whales.
Spindle cells, found in the brain, were thought to be the preserve of humans and the other great apes — the chimps, the bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans. They were touted as the brain cells that set ‘higher’ primates apart from all other animals - specialised cells that are linked to emotion, speech, social skills empathy and ‘gut’ intuition.
“Whales communicate through huge song repertoires, recognise their own songs and make up new ones. They also form coalitions to plan hunting strategies, and have evolved social networks similar to those of apes and humans,” Dr Hof told New Scientist magazine.
In fact, whales were found to have three times as many of these cells, proportionately, as humans.
It’s quite a big step from finding a certain cell in a whale’s brain and deciding that the animal is capable of emotions. But there is evidence that the inner life of whales and dolphins are far more colourful and vivid than we thought.
People have always known dolphins are bright.Tales go back to antiquity of the mammals helping shipwrecked sailors, guiding drowning men back to land and so on. But just how intelligent they are has been a matter of fierce debate.
And while Dolphins have passed the ‘mirror test’, it’s only the difficulties faced by scientists wishing to study the behaviour a 60-foot-long behemoth in the labthat have prevented us from learning more about the workings of whales’ brains.
While chimpanzees can be easily studied both in the wild and in the lab, whales pose huge problems for animal researchers. Nevertheless, what we do know suggests that these animals may have an ‘inner life’ perhaps as complex as ours.
in 1990, a pair of male killer whales were found retracing the last movements of their dead mother, swinming hundreds of miles together for days.
Does this mean that whales grieve? That a species other than our own can show love to one another? We must always be on our guard when attributing human emotions and sentiments to animals. For we humans have a terrible habit of confusing sentimentalism with scientific fact.
In the film March Of The Penguins, not only were young audiences invited to boo and hiss the seal when it made a meal of the mummy penguin (what was the seal supposed to do, order pizza?), but we were invited to believe the pair bonding seen in adult emperor penguins was due to ‘love’.
Trouble is, it turns out penguins aren’t quite so ‘in love’ as the film would have had us believe. Far from being monogamous, emperor penguins have sex with up to 20 partners in a lifetime. Same-sex couplings have been observed in captivity too!
Emperor penguins are certainly impressive animals, and their determination and resourcefulness to breed in such an extreme environment is awe inspiring and worthy of admiration. But are they capable of love? Probably not.
Similarly, we imagine that the lifetime pair- bonds of species like the albatross are somehow evidence of romance, when it’s far more likely the rarity of these animals and difficulty of finding mates make monogamy an evolutionary advantage.
The truth is that we cannot know what it is like to be one of these animals and, sadly, they cannot tell us. But there is no doubt that the more we learn about animal behaviour — and about the structure of their brains — the more we are forced to conclude that the things we have in common, certainly with the more intelligent mammals, are greater than our differences.
Among our closest relatives, behaviour once thought to be the preserve of humans is now known to be commonplace. The bonobo engages in recreational sex, including lesbian coupling that is absolutely nothing to do with reproduction.
This means that we may have to think again how we treat these animals. If whales. for one, have language, form strong emotional attachments and are completely conscious of the1r own existence, this makes the case for hunting them for food completely untenable.
The Romans considered the elephant to be the noblest of beasts, suffused with honour , intelligence and capable of true love-both for its fellows and its human masters. For centuries scientists have dismissed such notions about animal as childish and ill-informed sentiment. Now, it seems science may not be so sure! daily mail collected from mumbai mirror
