Manu Joseph: Jane Goodall may have helped us see ourselves in animals but have we taken it too far?

A part of what made her endearing to ordinary people, though, infuriated her own scientific establishment. She named the chimps she was studying instead of maintaining an objective distance by numbering them, thus humanizing them, a perilous thing to do in the study of animal behaviour.

She defended her method through more sacrilege, saying that individual chimps had personalities, and that they could feel many things that were then considered unique to humans, like joy, grief and jealousy. She even observed that they could organize and go to war against rivals.

For long, the Western view was that animals were incapable of emotion—they only had mindless instinct. René Descartes considered them complex machines. Goodall is greatly responsible for changing that opinion. Even so, the most regressive part of the study of animal behaviour is that humans keep looking for humans in animals.

If viral reels are any indication, people clearly wish to see human traits in animals. So when a guy performs a magic trick for a monkey and it bares its teeth, people think it is baffled by the trick, while it might just be showing aggression towards the annoying magician.

When an elephant is rescued, it has to only turn around for people to imagine it is thanking them. And most of what people claim to see in dolphins, like their love for humans, is nonsense. These water mammals may not be seeking humans for honourable reasons at all. In fact, some wild dolphins have tried to mate with swimmers.

We seek humanness in animals because we are narcissists. Even our divinities reflect us. Sophisticated and scholarly humans, too, ail from this condition, though they might see it as science.

In our understanding of animals, we are limited by our senses. Although modern scientists accept that animals are not just machines, we cannot fathom what they feel or the very meaning of feeling in an animal.

In An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong writes, “People often assume that pain feels the same across the entire animal kingdom, but that is not true. Much like colour, it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable… nothing is universally painful..."

We cannot tell what an animal might find painful, nor whether it is experiencing pain the way we know it. This is one of the most comforting things I have read, partly because I want it to be true. Yong points out that pain does not exist in nature without a reason.

Pain is information. In the animal world, this distress signal does not always dissuade all species from avoiding the source of the pain. Male praying mantises continue mating with females that are devouring them. In Yong’s words, “Perhaps caterpillars don’t feel the pain of being eaten alive because they can’t alleviate that pain."

Whatever it is, it’s a feeling we simply cannot know, at least with current technology. This is not a reason to boil live lobsters. Just that when we speak of animal suffering, we do not know what we are talking about. (Oddly, his book is about how animals sense the world, but has no mention of Goodall.)

There is no doubt, though, that animals feel a host of emotions that we recognize. In a famous experiment that is available on YouTube, two monkeys in separate cages are given different treats. One is given cucumber, while the other monkey, next to it, is given grape. Watching the other one get grapes, the first monkey is clearly livid, presumably because it knows what grapes taste like. After accepting the first slice of cucumber, it throws the rest back at the researcher.

Frans de Waal, the primatologist who presented the video, said, “This is basically the Wall Street protests you see here." It is part of his talk, ‘Moral Behaviour in Animals’, which is a bit of a stretch.

This, in fact, is an experiment that clearly reveals not moral outrage in monkeys, but how humans, including scientists, want to see humans in animals.

One monkey, which knows the taste of sugar, wants the grape instead of cucumber. Its behaviour need not be elevated to a ‘moral’ objection. If this experiment had been done without the second monkey, the first monkey, upon seeing the option of a grape, probably would have behaved in the same fashion.

As someone who has corrupted animals by introducing them to bananas, I attribute the monkey’s aggression to plain and simple sugar rather than to any ‘moral’ outrage.

A common way to humanize animals is to see grief in them. Even Goodall used words like ‘mourning’ to describe how chimps reacted to death. However, it is unlikely that animals fully perceive the finality of death. A lot of grieving behaviour may not be that at all.

For instance, primates are known to carry their dead babies around even for days. But then, they do not carry the babies with any care; they keep banging the corpses against things. Some mate while holding their dead babies. Recently, a monkey in a Czech zoo carried its dead baby for days, then started eating it.

We humans do not do that, though sometimes when I see some young people, I begin to understand why some species may want to eat their young.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’