Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

323 Pages·2019·20.06 MB·English

by  Frans de Waal

MAMA’S
LAST HUG
ANIMAL EMOTIONS AND
WHAT THEY TELL US
ABOUT OURSELVES
Frans de Waal
With photographs and drawings by the author
W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
For Catherine, who lights my fire
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 MAMA’S LAST HUG
An Ape Matriarch’s Farewell
2 WINDOW TO THE SOUL
When Primates Laugh and Smile
3 BODY TO BODY
Empathy and Sympathy
4 EMOTIONS THAT MAKE US HUMAN
Disgust, Shame, Guilt, and Other Discomforts
5 WILL TO POWER
Politics, Murder, Warfare
6 EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
On Fairness and Free Will
7 SENTIENCE
What Animals Feel
8 CONCLUSION
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations Insert
Index
MAMA’S LAST HUG
PROLOGUE
W
atching behavior comes naturally to me, so much so that I may be overdoing
it. I didn’t realize this until I came home one day to tell my mother about a scene
on a regional bus. I must have been twelve. A boy and girl had been kissing in
the gross way that I couldn’t relate to but that is typical of teenagers, with open
mouths moistly clamped onto each other. This by itself was nothing special, but
then I noticed the girl afterward chewing gum, whereas before the kiss I had
seen only the boy chewing. I was puzzled but figured it out—it was like the law
of communicating vessels. When I told my mom, however, she was less than
thrilled. With a troubled expression, she told me to stop paying such close
attention to people, saying it was not a very nice thing to do.
Observation is now my profession. But don’t expect me to notice the color of
a dress or whether a man wears a hairpiece—those things don’t interest me in the
least. Instead, I focus on emotional expressions, body language, and social
dynamics. These are so similar between humans and other primates that my skill
applies equally to both, although my work mostly concerns the latter. As a
student, I had an office overlooking a zoo colony of chimpanzees, and as a
scientist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, near Atlanta, Georgia,
I have had a similar situation for the last twenty-five years. My chimps live
outdoors at a field station and occasionally get into upheavals that cause such a
ruckus that we rush to the window to take in the spectacle. What most people
will see as a chaotic melee of twenty hairy beasts running about hollering and
screaming is in fact a highly ordered society. We recognize every ape by face,
even just by voice, and know what to expect. Without pattern recognition,
observation remains unfocused and random. It would be like watching a sport
that you’ve never played and don’t know much about. You basically see nothing.
This is why I can’t stand American television coverage of international soccer
matches: most sports narrators came late to the game and fail to grasp its
fundamental strategies. They have eyes for the ball only and keep on blabbing
during the most pivotal moments. This is what happens when we lack pattern
recognition.
Looking beyond the central scene is key. If one male chimpanzee intimidates
another by throwing rocks or charging closely past the other, you need to
deliberately take your eyes off them to check the periphery, where new
developments arise. I call it holistic observation: considering the wider context.
That the threatened male’s best buddy is asleep in a corner doesn’t mean we can
ignore him. As soon as he wakes up and walks toward the scene, the whole
colony knows things are about to change. A female gives a loud hoot to
announce the move, while mothers press their youngest offspring close.
And after the commotion has died down, you don’t just turn away. You keep
your eyes on the main actors—they aren’t finished yet. Of the thousands of
reconciliations I’ve witnessed, one of the first took me by surprise. Shortly after
a confrontation, two male rivals walked upright, on two legs, toward each other,
fully pilo-erect—meaning their hair was standing on end, making them look
twice their regular size. Their eye contact looked so fierce, I expected a revival
of the hostilities. But when they got close to each other, one of them suddenly
turned around and presented his behind. The other responded by grooming
closely around the anus of the first male, uttering loud lip-smacks and tooth-
clacks to indicate his dedication to the task. Since the first male wanted to do the
same, they ended up in an awkward 69 position, which allowed each of them to
groom the other’s behind at the same time. Soon thereafter they relaxed and
turned around to groom each other’s faces. Peace was restored.
During reconciliations after fights, chimpanzee males are eager to groom their rival’s behind,
which may lead to awkward 69 positions if both of them try to do so at the same time.
The initial grooming location may seem odd, but remember that English (as
well as many other languages) has expressions such as brown-nosing and ass-
licking. I’m sure there is a good reason. Among humans, intense fear may cause
vomiting and diarrhea—we say we “crap our pants” when we’re frightened.
That’s also a common occurrence in apes, minus the pants. Bodily exits yield
critical information. Long after a skirmish has ended, you may see a male
chimpanzee casually stroll to the precise location in the grass where his rival had
been sitting, only to bend down and take a sniff. Although vision is about as
dominant a sense in chimpanzees as it is in us, smell remains critically
important. In our species, too, as covert filming has demonstrated, after we shake
hands with another person, especially someone of the same sex, we often scent
our own hand. We lift it casually close to our face to gather a chemical whiff that
informs us about the other’s disposition. We do so unconsciously, as we do so
many things that resemble the behavior of other primates. Nevertheless, we like
to see ourselves as rational actors who know what we’re doing, while we depict
other species as automatons. It’s really not that simple.
We are constantly in touch with our feelings, but the tricky part is that our
emotions and our feelings are not the same. We tend to conflate them, but
feelings are internal subjective states that, strictly speaking, are known only to
those who have them. I know my own feelings, but I don’t know yours, except
for what you tell me about them. We communicate about our feelings by
language. Emotions, on the other hand, are bodily and mental states— from
anger and fear to sexual desire and affection and seeking the upper hand—that
drive behavior. Triggered by certain stimuli and accompanied by behavioral
changes, emotions are detectable on the outside in facial expression, skin color,
vocal timbre, gestures, odor, and so on. Only when the person experiencing these
changes becomes aware of them do they become feelings, which are conscious
experiences. We show our emotions, but we talk about our feelings.
Take reconciliation, or a friendly reunion following a confrontation.
Reconciliation is a measurable emotional interaction: to detect it, all you, as an
observer, need is some patience to see what happens between former
antagonists. But the feelings that accompany a reconciliation—contrition,
forgiveness, relief—are knowable only to those who experience them. You may
suspect that others have the same feelings as you, but you can’t be sure even
with respect to members of your own species. Someone may claim they have
forgiven another person, for example, but can we trust this information? All too
often, despite what they have told us, they bring up the affront in question on the
first occasion that arises. We know our own inner states imperfectly and often
mislead both ourselves and those around us. We’re masters of fake happiness,
suppressed fear, and misguided love. This is why I’m pleased to work with
nonlinguistic creatures. I’m forced to guess their feelings, but at least they never
lead me astray by what they tell me about themselves.
The study of human psychology usually relies on the use of questionnaires,