Grieving

I've always been an animal lover.  I grew up with dogs, and have had one or more dogs or cats all of my adult life.  Add to that a near-fanatical passion for birding, and a general fascination with wildlife of all sorts, and it's no wonder I went into biology.

My background in evolutionary genetics has driven home the point that humans aren't as different from the rest of the animal world as a lot of us seem to think.  The false distinction between "human" and "animal" is a pretty hard one to overcome, however, which explains the argument I got into with a professor at the University of Washington over a mouse he'd killed for experimental purposes when I was in an animal physiology class.

Even back then, I understood that non-human animals die for experimental purposes all the time.  Despite my youth, I had thought deeply about the ethical conundrum of sacrificing the lives of our fellow animals for the benefit of science and medicine, and had come to the conclusion (an opinion I still hold) that it is a necessary evil.  But what I could not stomach was the professor's cavalier attitude toward the life he'd just taken -- joking around, acting as if the little warm body he held in his hand had been nothing but a mobile lump of clay, worthy of no respect.

"It's not like animals have feelings," I recall his saying to me, with a faint sneer.  "If you spend your time anthropomorphizing animals, you'll never make it in this profession."

I remembered, while he was lecturing me in a patronizing fashion about my soft-heartedness, pets I had owned, and I had a momentary surge of self-doubt.  Was he right?  I began to question my own sense that my dogs and cats loved me, and were feeling something of the same kind of bond toward me that I felt toward them.  Is my puppy's wagging tail when I talk to him nothing more than what C. S. Lewis called a "cupboard love" -- merely a response that he knows will get him fed and petted and played with, and a warm place to sleep?

But I couldn't bring myself to believe that forty years ago, and I don't believe it now.  I have several times gone through the inevitable tragedy of losing beloved pets, and what has struck me each time is not only how I and my wife have reacted, but how our other animals have.  Most recently, when our sweet, quirky little one-eyed Shiba Inu, Cleo, somehow got out of our fence and was hit and killed by a passing car, our big old pit bull Guinness went into a positive decline.

It was unexpected in a way, because Cleo and Guinness didn't really interact all that much; they kind of didn't speak the same language.  Cleo, typical of her breed, was independent, curious, and eccentric; Guinness is strongly bonded to us (especially my wife, whom he follows around like a shadow), protective, and thinks that chasing a tennis ball is the most fun hobby ever.  But when Cleo died, Guinness went into a prolonged period of grief that nearly matched our own.

Recent experiments have shown that the neurochemical underpinning of emotions in our brain are shared by dogs and cats -- they experience a surge of oxytocin when they see their friends (whether human or not) just like we do.  When I go out to get the mail and come back inside under a minute later, and my puppy Jethro greets me as if he thought I'd abandoned him forever and ever and OMIGOD I'M SO GLAD YOU'RE BACK, he really is experiencing something like the rush we feel when seeing someone we dearly love.

Of course, he does like belly rubs, too.

If you needed one more piece of evidence of the falsehood of my long-ago professor's contention that non-human animals don't experience emotion, it came out this week in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.  A study of pet cats -- an animal widely considered to be independent and self-sufficient -- experience genuine grief when a family member dies, even if that family member is another pet...

... and even when it's a dog.

The study analyzed the behavior of 450 cats that had gone through loss, and the results were widely consistent -- grieving cats slept and ate less, vocalized more, hid more, refused to play but became clingy, and appeared to look for their lost friend.  "Unlike dogs, we tend to think that cats are aloof and not social," said Jennifer Vonk, a comparative/cognitive psychologist at Oakland University and a co-author of the work.  "They may not form packs like wild dogs, but in the wild, cats still tend to band together and form hierarchies...  I think we’ve been mischaracterizing them."

The divide between ourselves and our pets -- and by extension, between us and the rest of the natural world -- is far narrower than many of us think.  A lot of pet owners say "he understands every word I say" (I've been guilty of that myself), which is certainly untrue, but the emotional resonance between pets and the rest of the members of their household is undeniable.  And grief is experienced deeply by a great many more species than ourselves.

But y'all'll have to excuse me.  Jethro is looking at me with his big, soulful brown eyes.  He hasn't lost a friend or anything, but probably would like a belly rub.

Gotta keep my priorities straight.

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Since this post is pet-related, I thought it was a good opportunity to put in a plug for our Third Annual Pandemic Pottery Sale.  My wife and I are both amateur potters, so we tend to get overrun with pottery we don't have space for.  Two years ago, we came up with the idea of selling a bunch of it and donating the proceeds to charity.  This year the recipient we chose is the fabulous Stay Wild Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation (where we got our two wonderful rescue dogs Jethro and Rosie).  They do fantastic work and are constantly dealing with costly animal care and bringing dogs and cats from states with kill shelters (Jethro came from Georgia, Rosie from Texas), which is crazy expensive.

The way it works is if you see a piece you like, you make a bid on it.  If no one else bids, it's yours.  If there are competing bids, the high one gets the piece.  A few provisos: first, the shipping costs outside of the United States are prohibitively expensive -- so unfortunately, this event is limited to our American friends.  Second, all of the pieces EXCEPT AS MARKED are food safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe.  However: we work with stoneware clay, which is not completely vitrified even when glazed and fired properly, so if you're using a piece to hold water long-term (mostly this caution is for vases) make sure to put something underneath it so you don't ruin nice furniture.  (Many of them won't leak, but don't take the chance.)

Once most of the pieces are claimed, we'll present Jane George, who runs Stay Wild, with what will hopefully be a big check!

So check out the website, take a look at the gallery, and bid on what takes your fancy!  Feel free to pass the link along to interested friends.  Enjoy!

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Catcalling

For many years we owned two cats, Puck and Geronimo.

Imagine two soft, gentle, affectionate, fluffy kitties.  Puck and Geronimo were the exact opposite of what you just pictured.

What neither of our cats looked even remotely like.  [Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Nicolas Suzor from Brisbane, Australia, Cute grey kitten, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Puck and Geronimo were siblings, both long-bodied, tough, lean, and solid black.  Puck had some odd features, though.  She had one single white whisker accentuating a face that was already kinda... off.  Her eyes didn't quite line up, so you never could be 100% sure of where she was looking.  She had one broken fang, so her tongue frequently protruded from the side of her mouth.  Plus, her voice sounded like a creaky wheel.  She was actually quite a sweet, affectionate cat, but even dedicated cat lovers had to admit she looked like she had a screw loose.

Geronimo, on the other hand, hated everyone, with two exceptions: (1) my wife; and (2) our dog, Grendel.  When we adopted Grendel, we were assured by the shelter that he was great with cats.  But shelter staff -- no insult intended, they do amazing work -- can sometimes overplay animals' good qualities in the interest of getting them adopted, so when we brought him home, we introduced him to the cats on leash, with me hanging on to my end of it like grim death.  Puck, he ignored completely.  Then he came up and sniffed Geronimo, who sniffed him back (without hissing, which was Geronimo's primary way of communicating with the entire world).  So I tentatively relaxed my end of the lead...

... and Grendel lifted his big front paw and body-slammed Geronimo to the floor.

I leaped forward, yelling, "Noooooooo....!!!!"  But then Grendel started to lick Geronimo's face.  Geronimo, although still pinned to the ground, started purring.  And thus was born the only interspecies gay romance I've ever witnessed.  They were boyfriends for as long as we had them.

But other than those exceptions, Geronimo viewed the entire world with something between haughty disdain and utter loathing.  Sometimes I'd look up from what I was doing to find Geronimo staring at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits, and he was clearly thinking, "I am going to disembowel you in your sleep."

What brings all this up is a paper that appeared in Nature last week about some research done at Kyoto University.  A team led by animal behavioral psychologist Saho Takagi did a clever set of experiments to see if cats could not only learn their own names but the names of other cats, and their results suggest that the answer is yes.

They worked with two sets of cats -- household pets, and "café cats."  Apparently in Japan, it's common to have cats living in cafés, for the benefit of patrons who would like to pet cats while they have their coffee and pastries, or at least have cats glaring at them and making harsh judgments about their general appearance.  They had their test subjects "softly restrained" by volunteers, who I hope were wearing body armor at the time, and the cats were given vocal stimuli (the cats' own names, the names of other cats living in the same place, and neutral words falling into neither categories), along with photographs of different cats, sometimes the photograph of the cat being named, sometimes not.

They found that the cats tended to look more quickly and for a longer duration at photographs when the photograph was of the cat being named.  It was evident that the cats tested did indeed know the names of the cats that cohabited with them.  (Except for one test subject who "completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach.")

I found these data mildly surprising, considering that our own cats gave no evidence of knowing either their own names or each other's.  Geronimo usually responded to being called as follows:

Us:  Geronimo!!!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  Geronimo, come get your dinner!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  C'mon, kitty kitty kitty!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us: We have a plate of fresh salmon for you!

Geronimo:  Fuck you...  Salmon?  Well, okay, maybe this time.

So I don't know how we'd have been able to tell if he did know his name.

But all of this does point out something I've always thought, which is that a lot of animals are way smarter than we give them credit for.  I know one of our current dogs, Guinness, always gives us this incredibly intent look when we talk to him, as if he's trying his hardest to understand every word we're saying.  Our other dog, Cleo, spends a lot of time ignoring us, but she's a Shiba Inu, which in my opinion is a cat wearing a dog suit.

So okay, maybe that doesn't exactly support the contention that our pets are really smart.  But my point stands.

In any case, that's our cool piece of animal behavior research for today.  If you are the owner of two or more cats, see if you can figure out if they know each other's names.

If any of your cats have a temperament like Geronimo's, you might want to have fresh salmon handy.

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Dog days

I've always felt like I grok dog behavior better than I grok human behavior.

I can't tell you the number of times I've looked at something my fellow humans have done and thought, "Who does that?"  Or, more to the point, "What the hell is wrong with you?"  Whereas with dogs, I usually (1) can tell from their body language what they're thinking and feeling, and (2) understand why they did what they did.

Even when they are aggressive, bite or attack people, their behavior is almost always consistent and explainable -- and predictable if you can read dog body language.

Angie Johnston, a Ph.D. candidate who works at the Canine Cognition Center at Yale University, agrees.  Her doctoral research has to do with the human/dog bond, and using facial and body language cues to understand what dogs are thinking.  She's working with Kathy Shae, of the Paws-n-Effect Canine Training Center, to work with and observe dogs interacting with strangers, their owners, and each other, in an effort to parse the mysteries of the canine personality.

"People love their dogs and want to know what they’re thinking, but we can’t ask them," Johnston said.  "The only way we can find out what they’re thinking is by getting these different studies to try to get inside their head."

Her studies and those of her colleagues have found that dogs release oxytocin, a hormone associated with bonding and love, when they're with their owners.  "When you see the same hormone released in dogs and families that are released in humans and infants, it suggests that some really similar things are going on," she said.  "So, I think dogs do love us...  It’s something dogs have developed and as they have lived with us, it has grown into true love."

Shae highlighted the uniqueness of the human/canine bond.  "It’s intuitive for them, it’s nonverbal and it’s empathetic in its purest sense," she said.  "Historically, humans and dogs have been partnered for tens of thousands of years, and of the 20,000-plus species on the Earth, dogs and humans have had a unique relationship...  There’s some connection there that’s incredibly, incredibly deep.  I think we’ve lost empathy and they’ve gained empathy in an evolutionary sense, and that’s why we’re partnered."

The fact that this study, which is still incomplete and has not yet been published, was the subject of a news story this week is timely.  In the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been perusing the listings over at PetFinder, a wonderful service that acts as a clearinghouse for animals who are available for adoption at various shelters in your area.  We met some dogs who were clearly wrong for completely prosaic reasons -- a couple of boisterous puppies who played a little too roughly for our sweet, gray-around-the-muzzle coonhound Lena, for example.  There was one tragic pit bull mix, gorgeous, but so afraid of people that he couldn't be trusted not to bite -- we had to meet him through a chain link fence, and even then he snarled and snapped at us.

Most interesting was a beautiful, blue-eyed cattle dog mix who wasn't aggressive at all, but just -- disconnected, uninterested in interacting with us.  Out on a leash, he was focused on smelling everything in our path (not that unusual), but there was something about his body language that was off.  He paid no attention at all to either of us, not just in the sense of obeying commands (that stuff can be taught), but as far as any curiosity about us.  My doggie intuition said, "No, he's not going to work out well."

Then we met a big, loping black lab/Akita mix.

He was, we were told, a little shy, especially around men.  They let him out into the meet-and-greet room, and he walked right up to me and gave me a big lick in the face.  The trainer's eyebrows went up.

"Or maybe not so much," he said.

Then we brought in Lena, so she and Big Black Dog could see if they liked each other.  They did the obligatory mutual butt sniff, and both tails started wagging.  Second box checked off.

Best of all, he was clearly focused on us, and very curious about these two strangers who were leading him around.  It didn't take us long to come to a decision.  There was something about him that just clicked.  My second sense about dogs said, "He's the one."

So without further ado, allow me to introduce:  Guinness.

We've had him for less than 24 hours, and already he's played a rollicking game of chase in the back yard with Lena (she's been in a positive depressive state since her buddy, our adorable rescue mutt Grendel, died a couple of months ago; this is the happiest I've seen her since that happened).  He's chased squeaky tennis balls 17,839 times across the living room floor (and counting).  He's already learning a few commands -- we're signing him up for obedience training soon, and hoping that brain-wise, he's inherited more from his Akita ancestry than his black lab.  He is a little skittish, still -- the shelter manager didn't give us details about his past (probably a good thing) but just said he "wasn't treated very well" by his former owners.  He startles if you reach for him suddenly, but that's another thing I can tell he'll learn to get past with some love, affection, and a safe warm home.

So I think my doggie intuition has chalked up another win.  He's a good 'un, as my grandma used to say.

But now I need to go, because he just walked into my office with a squeaky tennis ball.  Some things take priority, you know?