Why Animals Love: A Mystery
It took me nearly an hour to publish my last post because my cat Suleyman was hungry for love. No, he wasn't hungry for cat food. He was just dying to be petted and fondled and generally reassured of his importance to me. He wasn't willing to take no for an answer.
Looking at his face reminded me of a profound mystery. Perhaps you take this phenomenon for granted in cats, but let me remind you of this video, which I'm sure many of you have seen already--it was an Internet sensation, and rightly so. The reaction to it is universal.
The story behind it: In 1969, two friends, John Rendall and Ace Bourke, purchased a 35-pound lion cub named Christian from Harrods, in London. They raised him in their home. One year later, Christian had quintupled in size. Knowing they could not keep a full-grown lion in their London flat, Rendall and Bourke contacted the conservationist George Adamson, in Kenya. Christian was released into the wild.
Four years later, Rendall and Bourke decided to visit Christian. He was now a wild animal. He had not been seen in nearly a year. Adamson told them it was unlikely the lion could be found and impossible that he would recognize them. They men nonetheless flew to Kenya. On the day they landed, Christian appeared outside Adamson’s camp. Somehow, he knew.
The video of the reunion is astonishing. The two men are standing in the African bush, not a soul in sight. From a distance an enormous, adult male lion appears, moving toward them with every indication of purposefulness. Then the lion gets close enough to see them properly and catch their scent. Suddenly he bounds toward them and when he reaches them, simply throws himself into their arms, standing on his hind legs and wrapping his gigantic paws around their necks. It is clear from the video that the beast is overcome with emotion—that he remembers everything.
“Everyone was crying,” said Rendall. “We were crying, George was crying, even the lion was nearly crying." The lion had brought his pride. The men played joyfully with the animal all through the night, hugging him, wrestling with him, all of them frolicking like puppies. At last, when the sun came up, Christian left his friends and returned to his pride. “We watched him go back to the two lionesses, who were not at all happy with this man, smelling of nicotine, whisky and humans,” Rendall remembers. “He just walloped the two of them with his paw, then collapsed.”
The lion was never seen again.
What are we to make of this? This is more than a charming curiosity: It's evidence of an extraordinary phenomenon in the natural world. Animals have the capacity to love. And no one knows why. Not only are animals capable of love, they are capable of remembering the emotion for a very long time.
What does this tell us about life, its mystery, its grandeur, its unutterable longings?
The natural world is bursting with similar stories. We see this kind of love in cats and dogs, of course, but also in lions, tigers, elephants, all the way down the evolutionary chain to octopi and fish—yes, even fish. The whole animal kingdom has this power. Although this phenomenon is patently obvious—writers from Aesop to Kipling have described it—it seems to me its significance has been entirely overlooked.
Everyone is charmed and moved by stories about animals and their capacity for deep emotion. But these stories also raise a fascinating question, in scientific terms. How could random variation and natural selection have assigned to a lion, of all animals, the adaptive power to form deep attachments to human beings? For the entire course of biological history, the only thing that evolution could have provided the lion is a deep distaste for these miserable two-legged pests who keep throwing spears at its hapless hide—or a solemn interest in humans as a form of lunch.
The power to form affectionate bonds goes deep down the phylogenetic tree. What are we to make of the sight of a monster crocodile who slobbers his way toward the edge of his pool, snorting with satisfaction, in order to be chucked under his chin by his trainer? This is a reptile, one whose ancestors were on the planet millions of years before human being appeared. So where does this power to love come from?
There's no obvious selective advantage to a wild animal to have the latent power to love human beings. These emotions are supererogatory. They can't easily be explained in terms of the animal’s way of life and its competitive advantages. What possible benefit could accrue to a lion to have the power to love human beings, given that the lion species emerged well before any evidence of consistent exchanges between men and lions? The same is true of domestic cats: From everything we can piece together, the domestic cat is not a new species. Its nature was formed before its domestication. Breeding could serve only to increase the proportion of affectionate felines in a population, but it could not explain the emergence of these powers in the first place.
These emotions suggest just what love in human beings suggest: Animals, like humans, have both a base and a higher nature. Men and women are ennobled by love; so are lions and tigers. They know it, we know it.
No one knows how to explain this. It is a mystery. I am glad that it is.
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Jul '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
You have stated it beautifully. Nothing more really needs to be said. Nice start to the morning. Thanks. I am going to go hug my labs.
Jun '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Too profound for my poor words.
May '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Am I the only one who wonders about Siegfried and Roy? Did they mistreat their animals? Isn't there a wild nature in some creatures there that doesn't necessarily respond to human affection?
Of course, my puppy perfectly reflects Claire's sentiments above. He just follows me anywhere, and plops down just to be in the same place.
Jul '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Duane, I may be mistaken but I believe the conclusion with that incident was that the animal was spooked, and attempted to drag her trainer off-stage...to safety. It was an instinctive, protective response but unfortunately when you're being protected by by a 700-lb animal with those kinds of teeth, you might get a little torn up in the process. They still possess the animal and I think she's been fine ever since. When I'm sick, my cats go out of their way to take care of me. If they were that big, I'm sure it wouldn't be nearly as cute...
Claire, I've never asked but now must know...what are the other cats named? You have something like 47 of them, right?
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Jonathan Matthew Gilbert
Claire, I've never asked but now must know...what are the other cats named? You have something like 47 of them, right? · Aug 5 at 9:42am
Ah, you're sweet to ask. There's winsome Daisy, tiny Smudge (the survivor!), the delicate and ethereal Feline (pronounced "Fay-leen"), Toshiro the Love Bomb, Poor Fat Mo (short for ... Moishe, yeah, Moishe), Suleyman the Magnificent, and Zeki, the background cat. Four boys, three girls, enough love to make this house a home, enough fur to knit a year's supply of sweaters.
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Yeah, that's the official story--distracted by the bright lights, Montocore was attempting to pull Siegfried to safety. But come on. Let's not sentimentalize. That thing was a tiger. That's what tigers do: They kill people. That's why it's so remarkable and mysterious when they decide that instead they'd just like to cuddle.
Jul '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
When we get into the discussion of wild animals in captivity I am reminded of a good friend who reared and maintained a cougar for nearly 15 years. To all intents and purposes the relationship between the cat and my friend was loving. One day she walked into the animal's enclosure and was attacked and nearly killed. Dogs and cats have been domesticated by man for thousands of years. My labradors display behaviors towards small children which can only be the product of thousands of years of selective breeding. However, animals in the wild are not so programmed genetically and do act far less predictably. When a caged animal reacts in an unwonted manner it should not come as a surprise. They are not genetically conditioned to act sociably with humans. Humans are a potential source of protein. That is genetically hardwired. Even highly social dogs are known under some circumstances to eat their dead owners. My labs, along with their wonderful loving nature, have a little bit of the wolf from which their kind arose still inside. I love that in them, but I also remember it when we play.
Jul '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Oh, I'm definitely not going into that cage or taking the animal out to perform tricks, I just don't think the behavior in that instance was indicative of poor treatment by her handlers or a lack of affection on behalf of the animal. If the official story is to be believed, the animal exhibited abnormal affection for a human being. I don't dwell on ancestral nature with my cats but with dogs--especialy large dogs--it's definitely something I'm aware of, and I don't think domesticity should be taken for granted.
Awesome names, incidentally. I feel like you should have an album of them on Facebook.
Aug '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Geeky fun fact: it only took breeders 50 years to domesticate the red morph of the silver fox. Not that every fox must be bred domestic to make a charming addition to the family (though it's always risky with a wild beast). Here's a wild type that behaves for all the world as if it were a cat (I love cats, but am deathly allergic to them, so I secretly long for a fox substitute).
As for me, I can take the hard-line tack that it's not at all mysterious than animals can love when we do, considering we evolved from them.
But even so, my heart says love is a mystery. The Magnum Mysterium.
Aug '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Putting on my "amateur evolutionary psychologist" hat (free with five box tops of fruit loops), Natural Selection doesn't only create traits that improve the odds of survival. Sometimes traits stick around simply because they don't HURT the odds of survival. It's why we still have an appendix.
Most animals have a built-in distrust of unknown creatures. Those that assume strangers are threats live longer than those that assume strangers are friends.
However, this instinct would serve no purpose for creatures that the animal ALREADY KNEW were not a threat. It would make no sense for lions to be afraid of gazelles by default until they were CERTAIN the gazelles are not a threat. Why run away from food?
So, when the lion already KNOWS that this PARTICULAR human is friendly, there is no reason for instinct to warn the lion to be on guard. If the lion was programmed not to be able to differentiate strangers from friendlies, THAT would actually HURT the odds of survival, on average.
Aug '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
In other words, the answer might become more clear if it was rephrased, "why SHOULDN'T animals love?" What evolutionary advantage would animals gain from the complete INABILITY to love?
A good test of this question would be to see if psychopaths (people who are incapable of most emotion) are more or less likely to reproduce than the general population. If psychopaths are less likely to reproduce than the general population, that's a good indicator that the inability to love would tend to be weeded out through natural selection.
Jul '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
My experience in raising my Labradors and other large dogs is that they have very few behaviors that are locked in. They learn to hunt from their mothers. They may have certain "drives", but few specific patterns of behavior to accomplish their needs. One of my Labs has a whole range of behaviors which are, to the best of my ability to interpret, imitations of things that I do in ways that I do them. I got her when she was barely weened, about 4 and a half weeks old. Her attachment to me is very strong. There are other behaviors which are distinctly vulpine, ways she greets me in the morning and such are much more like those I have seen wolves display. Her love for me is a very powerful thing. It is likely the reason that wolves, the ancestors of dogs, first began to bond with humans, and in their turn human bonded with them. Without love that initial bond never would have happened. Love has an enormous advantage from the standpoint of survival, at least in terms of the animals we have domesticated as pets.
May '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
This reminds me of a story my friend sent me a while back:
In 1986, Mkele Mbembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mbembe approached it very carefully.
He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant’s foot and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mbembe worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments.
Mbembe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Mbembe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.
Continued...
May '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
...Continued from above
Twenty years later, Mbembe was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.
Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn’t help wondering if this was the same elephant. Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder.
The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mbembe’s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.
Probably wasn’t the same elephant.
May '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Lions are the only wild felines that live in groups, I read somewhere. They must have developed some kind of group "loyalty-feeling." If that had been a tiger they'd be dead now.
(Of course, tigers don't live in Africa, so that's a double conditional.)
Aug '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Wait a minute. I can't believe this thought JUST came to me. I also can't believe that nobody else has brought this up yet:
Harrod's sells lion cubs?! WTF?
Aug '10
Re: Why Animals Love: A Mystery
Jonathan Matthew Gilbert
When I'm sick, my cats go out of their way to take care of me. If they were that big, I'm sure it wouldn't be nearly as cute...
Someone once mentioned to me that if cats were the size of dogs they'd be illegal. Considering that some of my cat's cutest behaviour could potentially be lethal if he was much bigger, I cannot say I disagree with the theory.