Animal behaviour

[susie_flo]

Today I am pondering a question about animal behaviour.  Why do animals make a noise when injured or in pain.... what is the evolutionary advantage of this?

The only plausible answer I can come up with so far is that it may stem from the need for baby animals to alert their mother when they need assistance.  But shouldn't animals grow out of this when their mothers are no longer around to protect them?  

A farmer's son once told me that an easy way to catch a fox is to make a squealing noise like an injured rabbit.  Foxes will come running if they are within earshot of the easy prey of an animal in distress.  So... why do the rabbits squeal?   (Is it just that they have not needed to evolve the survival mechanism of suffering quiet distress, because the strength of their breeding speed off-sets these losses?)

A slightly related question is this:  are humans the only species that will run to the aid of a fellow creature in distress, assuming that the creature is not one of their own immediate offspring?  I hear tales of dolphins rescuing drowning men...  is this for real?  

I once saw an interesting (and tear-jerking) David Attenborough documentary about lemurs.   A baby lemur died while calling for its mother - she did not reach it in time and it fell from the tree (believe me it was *really* tear jerking).  Immediately afterwards the other lemurs in the social group clustered around the mother and started to stroke and groom her, as if comforting her on her loss.  I found this quite a profound example of animal behaviour that hints at a lot more going on in the minds of animals than we currently understand or assume.

Comments

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

The noise might be a warning for other members of the pack (or whatever) that there's danger around.

I'm also mindful of pregnant women being told to breathe in a certain way to alleviate pain - which really does work, up to a point - so maybe it has something to do with that.

Dolphins are known to rescue people (sometimes) from sharks as well as drowning - and other species like whales. The Greeks noticed they occasionally did this, too; there's a legend about a singer called Arion who jumped overboard rather than be killed by pirates, who was carried to the shore by a dolphin attracted by his singing. Which makes me wonder what his singing voice was like if it attracted dolphins :-O

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes... alerting others of danger is a good theory.

With the breathing thing - do you mean that making a noise of distress might help alleviate pain as a side effect by requiring deeper breaths?

As for dolphins and whales... it's fascinating. I wonder if altruism (especially cross-species altruism) only manifests in animals that we think of as having higher intelligence... is there a level of intelligence where the ability to sympathise / empathise kicks in? (Many people contend that these abilities "only" exist in humans.)

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

When you're scared your breathing is much faster and shallower. You don't get enough oxygen if you breathe this way for very long, so breathing deeply might help. I wonder also if it might have some physical effect the way crying releases endorphins that calm you down.

Hmm... I know someone I could ask about this...

Society through history has had some odd beliefs about sentience and the ability to feel pain. People used to believe that babies couldn't feel pain (so didn't give them anaesthetic or painkillers). They thought the same at one time about black people - they were talked of only a century ago as less than 'really' human with a range of muted senses and less intelligence than whites. It's the same with animals. Makes me wonder more about our presumptions.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

You're quite right - we should never be too cocky about our theories of the day. There is so much that we do not yet understand. The question of whether animals "think" and/or "emote" makes a fascinating debate. As a non-scientist I am always way out of my depth, but I struggle with a lot of the assumptions upoon which the pop science theories seem to be based.

To me, there is some compelling (albeit unscientific) evidence before our eyes to suggest that animals both think and emote, though it does depend what we mean by those words. The idea that "thought" is dependent on language makes a lot of sense in terms of rational and abstract thought. But maybe there is another category of thought, based more on images and emotions, and the ability to recall memories of events and sensations.

For example - I frequently see my cat enter a stage of sleep where she is chomping her jaws and twitching her feet, apparently in the throes of a dream... maybe she is having image-based or sensation-memory dreams of catching a mouse or fleeing the hoover. Isn't that a type of "thought"? And we have all seen dogs rush to comfort and nuzzle their owner when they appear to be in distress. Surely this implies some emotional capacity.

Am I just spouting a load of romanticised anthropomorphic nonsense?

Most of the time, when I discuss this topic with someone more sciencey than me, my examples of apparent organisation or sentient behaviour in animals are usually explained as nothing more than "mechanical instinct" that can be easily mistaken for human-like behaviour. But this argument always seems to me like a bit of a cop out... I mean surely lots of human behaviour could be described that way too, if you look at our core drivers as a species.

Take insects - they are so different to us biologically, they may as well be aliens, but the highly organised societies of ants and bees almost seem like communism in action. Can they really be explained as just 'mechanical instinct'? If so, then should we not acknowledge that much of our own social behaviour could be described likewise... maybe mechanical instinct and thought are not mutually exclusive.

And when an ant runs away from your foot because of the "mechanical instinct" to survive, what makes the ant's experience different to the fear that a man may feel while running away from a falling building? Why do we assume that the ant does not feel a sensation equivalent to fear, via whatever biological route its system may deliver it? (After all, aren't pain and fear just biological triggers to make us take remedial action, whatever the species?)

Hmmmm. perhaps I should stop there and go away and read some more science books... (I wonder whether anyone at Imperial specialises in this... and what they would think if I emailed them with my questions!?)