by Dorothy Hoffman

Created on: September 17, 2009   Last Updated: September 30, 2009

Compassion and Mourning in Animals

Asked what she'd like for her birthday one year, Koko, the gorilla famous for communicating in sign language, requested a kitten. She named her little gray, tailless companion All Ball, and carried her everywhere. When All Ball was killed by a car, Koko at first acted like she didn't hear the news. Then she sobbed, and expressed sadness at her loss. For a week she cried whenever anyone talked about cats. Koko understood that gorillas, too, die when they are old, sick, or injured.

Koko is an unusual case, because she was able to communicate what she was feeling to her human trainers in human language. Scientists who refuse to accept that animals can be feeling sorrow, depression, and grief in the same way as humans do, even when they show all the same physical signs, can't so easily explain away the emotions Koko clearly expressed. Yet, many rational people still insist only we are capable of love, altruism and grief.

At times, it seems our fellow animals have more "humanity" than we do. In a typical scientific experiment described in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's book, When Elephants Weep, researchers placed baby rats on a cage floor to see if mother rats would cross an electrified grid to "rescue" them. Invariably they did. They even rescued unrelated babies as quickly as their own. And female rats who weren't mothers often crossed the grids to bring the little ones to safety. One rodent supermom managed to retrieve a total of 58 babies, crossing and recrossing the electrified grids.

The scientists were intrigued. How far could they take the experiment? Would rats rescue baby mice and rabbits? Yes. Helpless kittens? Yes, though their efforts to nurse the alien babies were frustrated by interspecies differences. They "eagerly and repeatedly" tried to tuck young bantam chicks safely into their nest, over the strenuous protests of the feathered adoptees.

Scientists generally explain this kind of altruistic behavior in animals as purely instinctive, but it's illogical to ignore the mother rats' emotional response that made them willing to risk painful electric shocks to help the young of even their natural enemies. The behavior of the scientists who design such experiments, on the other hand, is anything but "humane."

If animals are capable of feeling compassion and acting altruistically, sometimes even toward other species and at significant risk to their own life, surely they are capable of mourning the loss of someone close

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