
Do animals feel empathy? the decades-long quest for an answer - shawndumas
http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/2/8/10925098/animals-have-empathy
======
roywiggins
It comes down to "do animals feel emotions" which is really just a sneaky way
to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It's easiest
imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in
every way, what authority can you claim to say they don't? If there's no test
to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a
meaningful question?

Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere
between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs,
whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along
with each other if they didn't have empathy?

~~~
gambiting
Well, people always find a way to doubt that animals have a sense of "self".
Like in the test where they painted a dot on a chimps forehead and gave him a
mirror - he wiped the dot off after looking at the mirror, which you know -
would be a pretty good indication that he understood, in some way, that the
creature in the mirror is him and not some other chimp. But obviously you have
people who will say that the chimp might have thought that touching his own
forehead made the other chimp touch their forehead, without realising that the
image in the mirror is him and not another animal.

~~~
stuxnet79
But every scientific experiment should withstand scrutiny, regardless of how
malicious or creative in its criticism it may be. We currently do not have any
machine that can measure "qualia" in animals let alone a formal way of
quantifying and making sense out of it.

~~~
roywiggins
We don't have a machine that can measure qualia in humans for that matter!

------
kristiandupont
I don't think anyone who's had a dog could ever question whether animals can
feel empathy, it's just so obvious. I am sure that the level varies from
species to species and also within a species, as it does in humans. But a
story like this [https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-
friend-135355...](https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-
friend-1353550663.html) is hard to read and not feel a little warmer.

~~~
amelius
Slightly OT: according to actual scientific research ([1]) done by Rupert
Sheldrake, dogs are even telepathic.

There is also a very interesting Google-talks video of Sheldrake explaining
the experiments.

[1]
[http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy](http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy)

~~~
laumars
I struggle with the telepathy argument. I think it's just a placeholder
explanation for something a little less sci-fi. Such as scent, body language
or just dumb coincidence.

However I do like the "Falling Skies" (a Sci-Fi drama starring Noah Wyle)
explanation for telepathy; which was communication over the electromagnetic
spectrum in a frequency that humans wouldn't normally detect (long waves IIRC)

------
jmnicolas
I'm not some kind of crazy animal activist, but seriously what's wrong with
people : researching empathy by dipping mice tails in hot water or injecting
them with vinegar is seriously fucked-up.

Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?

~~~
belorn
The article is clear that the purpose of the research was not empathy study,
but pain study.

 _" Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his
own empathy. He research is about understanding why two people may experience
pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for
managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil
tells me. For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing
the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain
tolerance."_

There are human studies on pain reception where people are exposed to cold
water, where extreme cold water is reported to use similar pain receptors as
heated water but cause less damage to the skin. Researchers also injects
subjects with capsaicin (Mythbusters did this on camera in one episode), and I
wonder why vinegar was used here.

~~~
staticelf
Sounds like a terrible job nonetheless. I guess you'll have to have a lack of
empathy to do it ;)

------
staticelf
I am a dog owner and I am completely in the belief that my dog can feel
empathy. I see it from time to time. I have a really hard time understanding
why some would even make the suggestion that animals generally don't feel
empathy? If every animal does it, however, is a different question.

~~~
Theodores
Tell me about it...

I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt
does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a
funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to
hold it together, shaking.

This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of
some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze.
There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the
walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most
strange.

------
dschiptsov
Empathy has been evolved in animal communities who collectively care about the
offsprings. It is an evolutionary strategy to make communities possible. It is
protection for offsprings from being murdered and eaten as it happens among
reptiles, fishes, etc. It is a weak bond though. What they need a decade-long
quest for, except funding? And, obviously, higher animals do have at least
some cross-species empathy toward pups. Any villagers who had cat and dog pups
will tell you that. The sexual attraction and parent-offspring bonds,
including affection towards young, are the strongest evolutionary forces.

~~~
anon4
Could it be that all animals have empathy, but some have a much smaller and/or
different set of feelings they experience? As an analogy, if I see you eating
candy, I can understand that you're currently tasting sweet, but if a cat sees
you, it has no concept of sweet, because its tongue doesn't have those
receptors. You can also see this in people, the most egregious example being
"Let them eat cake" oft mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette. If you have never
felt something yourself, either due to your upbringing or because your species
has no capacity to experience that feel, is it that you have no empathy
towards someone having that experience or that you simply cannot so much as
conceive of the feeling in question?

~~~
maxxxxx
I know quite a few humans in the business world that I think don't really have
empathy but have learned to behave as if they had it.

------
madaxe_again
To say that animals can't be empathic because they have selfish motives is
bizarre - empathy _is_ selfish, as it's a social survival and ingratiation
tool, whether you care to admit such or not. both sides falling into an
anthropomorphic trap.

------
contingencies
Yes, because humans are animals. Ignoring humans, while we are different to
other animals, we are not really that different, particularly to other social
mammals. So the answer remains yes.

Note that this answer is self-evident and did not require torturing other
beings.

~~~
antientropic
This is not at all self-evident, and your logic is flawed: you're saying that
X (humans) is a subset of Y (animals), all X have property P (empathy),
therefore all Y have property P.

~~~
contingencies
The point was that, while you can raise the query from a western scientific
reductionist perspective and put ethics completely on hold, we're ridiculously
similar genetically and behaviorally, such that the certainty is very high
without the need for torture.

~~~
contingencies
To put this another way, all science is probability-based. To take your
philosophical bent to its logical conclusion, you never know that all animals
of a similar species have similar abilities for empathy so you should torture
them all!

------
coldtea
> _The wrong conclusion to take away from all these studies is that these
> rodents are humanlike. The right conclusion is that we 're animal-like._

And yet those two statements are totally analogous -- except for the
irrational fear of anthropomorphizing...

~~~
araneae
They're not, actually. The former statement uses rodents and humans, the
latter humans and animals.

You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a
smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates,
etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait.

Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human
share traits that are likely common among many mammals.

~~~
coldtea
> _The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and
> animals._

One just uses "animals" as the universal (generic) thing we all participate in
(as a continuum), while the other uses "humans" (or "humanity") for that.

Sure, we're animals too, but not "just another animal", but (what we know of
as the) pinnacle of the thinking/empathy/etc spectrum".

We can think of being human-like in this sense as the top degree in that scale
that animals can participate too.

(So, "human-like is used a stand-in for "empathetic/thinking/conscious", not
as "like an actual human person" \-- as it doesn't concern other human
attributes -- physiology, looks, etc, only emotional and cognitive ones).

------
reitanqild
Had an interesting experience a few years ago.

Me and some friends visited another friend that had a parrot.

    
    
      * When we came the parrot said hello to everyone.
      * One of my friends aggravated the parrot by
        standing on the far side of the cage and making funny
        faces.
      * When we left the parrot said bye to everyone but him.
      * When we came back a couple of weeks later and he had 
        forgotten about the parrot and came too close to the
        cage it tried to bite him.
    

Would hardly have believed it if I hadn't been there on both occasions.

------
csn
Perhaps the thing we call empathy is just a strange side effect of the
negative subconscious feedback a member of group-oriented species gets when
their friend is, or is going to be harmed, physically or otherwise. The choice
between gaining/saving an ally or gaining a treat can certainly be a selfish
one, and in my opinion most likely is.

------
eternalban
data point:

Once saw a cat rush a squirrel in the back yard. I yelled at it and it ran
away but apparently the poor thing died in fright.

What was amazed me was seeing another squirrel come over and actually hug the
other one, trying to get it to stand up.

------
DCPOS_Anthony
As much as they can afford to I reckon.

