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RSS FeedPets and emotion: Do animals have a sense of humor?
Results so far:
| Yes | 83% | 254 votes | Total: 306 votes | |
| No | 17% | 52 votes |
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Add to FavoritesDo Animals Have a Sense of Humor?
I once read about a behavioral study of crows. I forget what the objective was, but the report described some birds' habit of waiting for unsuspecting humans to walk beneath a tree they were perched on and then accurately and deliberately drop acorns on their heads. When they hit their target, they cawed in delight and, no doubt, to draw their victim's attention to the fact that they'd been punked. Now, this may not qualify as sophisticated wit, but it seems clear to me (as it was to the researchers) that these devilish birds were amusing themselves with this little game. I'd probably have found it funny, too, as long as I wasn't the one getting hit in the head.
Yes, I believe animals have a sense of humor, however perverted it may appear to the human mind. Let's take the case of squirrels. Who could spend five minutes watching squirrels and not conclude they live for a good joke? Well, that and driving humans crazy, which I think amounts to pretty much the same thing. The squirrels who lived in my backyard (and attic) at my last house were an imaginative gang of pranksters. Pretending to have lost their way back to their nest under my roof, they would frequently stroll up to my third floor window, where I sat at my computer, and bang on the screen demanding to be let in. I know this was their idea of a joke, because every squirrel in the neighborhood knew how to get into my attic.
Oh, they always had plenty of peanuts and assorted squirrel delicacies in their very own squirrel feeder, but they insisted on raiding the birdfeeders first. Why? Obviously, because it was more fun. Their favorites were inevitably the ones that were the greatest challenge to access, and I have no doubt they made this choice because it was so much funnier to dine dangling precariously upside down, balancing on a clothesline to knock a feeder to the ground (they later discovered it was much easier and more amusing to just chew through the clothesline and let the whole thing drop to the ground), or leaping 50 feet from a tree branch to a tiny bird perch on a high feeder they couldn't climb to.
But what about our domestic companions? I could answer that question in one word: ferrets. Seriously, have you ever watched a ferret going about his daily business? He runs through tunnels, lulls in a hammock, and wiles away the hours playing with a variety of toys. The ferret is all about having fun.
OK, maybe ferrets are an exception to the rule. I can testify personally to the sense of humor of rabbits. One of my bunnies, for example, enjoys tearing around the room like a maniac when I'm cleaning his litterbox and giving him fresh hay. He runs sideways, does acrobatic leaps and midair spins, then stops and looks at me to gauge my reaction. The harder I laugh, the zanier his performance gets. A couple of sibling sisters used to entertain themselves by fighting over food, which they always had a plentiful supply. The dominant bunny would chase her sister away, then the "submissive" sister would sneak back and steal a lettuce leaf right out of the other's mouth. I know she got a kick out of seeing her sibling looking around in confusion wondering what had happened to the rest of her morsel. It was a joke that just kept on giving.
An old family cat used to hide in unexpected places, where he could quietly observe his people searching the house, calling his name at dinnertime. He never revealed himself, but came out only when he was finally spotted. His commitment to this particular joke was admirable, since we sometimes took hours to find him. He'd also hide under a sectional couch and attack us from between the cushions or from behind when we sat down. I'; grant you, these jokes didn't always seem too amusing to us, but everyone's sense of humor is different.
One might expect a crafty sense of human from felines, but what about dogs? Sure dogs are playful and fun-loving, but do they get a good joke? I'd say yes. Not only do they get a joke, they are happy to make themselves the butt of one if it gets a good laugh. (Cats, of course, are careful to always make you the butt of their jokes.) I read a story online about one canine practical jokester who found he could get a laugh from his family by traipsing around the house with a train of toilet paper stuck to his paw. The joke may have been accidental at first, but after that, he quite deliberately repeated it frequently until he thought the joke had grown stale. Of course, dogs don't object to making their humans look ridiculous, either. For instance, I came across a story on more than one website about a dog named Crow, who got a kick out of startling his owner by ambushing her in the shower. A crude joke, but effective.
For those who still think a sense of humor is unique to humans, maybe the real question is do we humans have a sense of humor? Are animals constantly playing pranks on us, laughing at our bizarre behaviors, and we just don't get the joke? If you doubt that animals have a sense of humor, ask yourself this question: How could they ever put up with us humans if they didn't?
Learn more about this author, Dorothy Hoffman.
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No
I only voted no because the question is ridiculous. It is too general. Which animals? Of course some animals have a sense of humor. If we are talking about higher animals such as birds and mammals, the answer is yes, some of them have a sense of humor. Any visit to a zoo or animal park can confirm this: parrots among the birds, monkeys among the mammals. These animals have brains and the ability to communicate and they have senses of humour and often play jokes on each other and their keepers. And most people who have owned pets and farm animals can also come up with examples of playful behaviour that indicates a sense of humor in these species.
In the wild, a sense of humor can be harder to spot and of course there is always the difficulty of anthropomorphism: reading human emotions into animal behaviour. There are a few instances when I have been reasonably sure that an animal's behaviour was not just about finding food or sex but that it was just having 'fun'. I watched a bald eagle one day 'playing' with a merganser and her chicks. The merganser was trying to take her chicks up the river against the current. Every time she got them even with a big dead tree, the eagle would swoop on them, scattering the chicks and causing them to be carried back down the river. The eagle never made any attempt to catch the chicks and it repeated the stunt a half a dozen times and then in between went back to its tree to watch the mother swim frantically about, collecting her chicks and trying again to head upstream. Did that eagle have a sense of humor? I think it did.
So why did I vote no? Because the vast majority of animals do NOT have a sense of humor. Forget about the birds and the mammals for a moment. They make up only a small proportion of the world's species. The vast majority are invertebrates: single celled creatures such as paramecia and amoebae; all the groups of worms; all the arthropods, including millions of species of insects, spiders and crustaceans; the molluscs, the jellyfish, echinoderms and more. There are millions of invertebrate species and the only one that I can think of that seems to have a sense of humor is the octopus.
Most invertebrates have small brains and are not deep thinkers. Their actions are not that of robots and there is some plasticity in their behaviour and most have some ability to learn and modify their behaviour in changing situations. There is no doubt that we almost always underestimate their intelligence and abilities, but in this area I think we are correct in assuming that most of them do not have a sense of humor. It is the exception, not the rule.
So it doesn't matter which side you vote for in this debate, you are going to be wrong. If you say yes, animals have a sense of humor, you are correct for at the most a few hundred species and wrong for a few million species. If, like me, you vote no then you are wrong for a few hundred species and correct for a few million. So overall the 'no's' are more right than wrong and the yes's are more wrong than right. There is someting funny about that but I don't think your average insect would get it.
Learn more about this author, M E Skeel.
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