What animals are thinking and feeling, and why it should matter | Carl Safina | TEDxMidAtlantic

Translated by: Kim De Groot Reviewed by: Peter van de Ven We start with a simple question: Does my pet really love me or does he just want a treat? (Laughs) Of course she really loves us. Of course, right? (Laughs) How do we know

what

's really going on inside those furry little heads? Something is happening in them. Why does the question always arise: Do they love me? Why is it always about us? Why are we so narcissistic? (Laughs) I have another question. Who are you? I think it's better to ask the

animals

. Things go through our heads that we assume are exclusively human.

However, there are other types of brains in this world. Some of them are very big. What do they do with those big brains? Can you think? Can you feel? How can we find the answer to those questions? There are ways to do it. We can observe the brain, evolution and behavior. The first thing we must realize is that we inherit our brain. Our brains come from somewhere else. The jellyfish had the first nerves. From the first nerves the first vertebral columns emerged. Those first columns gave rise to the first vertebrates. Vertebrates left the ocean and caused a lot of problems.

It remains true that the nerves of a fish, a dog or a human are essentially the same. Your organization is different. But if the nerves are the same,

what

does that say about the possibility of mental experiences? Take a crayfish as an example. It turns out that you can give a crayfish an anxiety disorder by giving it electric shocks every time it tries to leave its nest. However, if treated with a medication made for anxiety disorders in humans, the crayfish relaxes, goes outside, and looks around. Or look at dogs with obsessive-compulsive disorder: give them the same medication that counteracts OCD in humans and it will work for them too.

What does this say about the similar way our brains work? Are we praising the fears of crayfish? No, we mainly cook them. (Laughter) Octopuses use tools, like most monkeys. They recognize human faces. Do we praise the monkey brains of octopuses? We mainly cook them. When groupers chase a prey fish into a crevice in the coral, they will go to where they know a moray eel is sleeping and tell it to follow them. The brunette will follow him and slide into the crack. Sometimes the moray eel catches the fish. Sometimes the fish runs and the grouper catches it.

They conspire. How do we celebrate the collaboration between groupers and moray eels? Generally fried. (Laughter) Sea otters use stone tools and sacrifice time from their own activities to teach sea otter pups things. Chimpanzees use tools, but they don't spend time teaching. Orcas teach and share food. When we look at human brains, we see that the human brain is an extension of previous brains, an extension created along the long path of evolution. If you compare the human brain and the brain of a chimpanzee, you will see that the human brain is actually a very large chimpanzee brain.

At least it's big, and from that we can derive an insecure sense of our superiority, and that's what

matter

s most to us. But, oh no, here's a dolphin brain: bigger, with more twists. What does it do to that brain? We can see brains, but not thoughts. However, we see the functioning of thoughts in the logic of behavior. These elephants from this family of elephants have found a shady place under the palm trees. It is a good place to put babies to sleep. Adults also rest, but they simply doze and remain somewhat alert all the time. We understand this because they see the world similarly to us.

They seem relaxed because they are relaxed. They chose shadow for the same reason we would choose shadow. These elephants don't look relaxed. No one would make that mistake looking at them. They seem alarmed; They are alarmed. Dangers lurk. There are people who hurt them. When you record the tourists' conversations and the herders' conversations that sometimes hurt the elephants, and play them back through a hidden speaker, the elephants ignore the tourists, but swarm and run away from the herders' conversations. They classify different types of people into different categories. They know what's going on. They know who their friends are, they know who their enemies are, they know who their relatives are.

They have the same objectives as us. Whether it's life on land or at sea, the goals are the same: survive, keep your children alive, let life go on. We see and understand useful behavior. We see curiosity in young

animals

. We see the bonds between family members. We recognize affection as such. To seduce each other is to seduce each other. Sometimes people still ask: But are they aware? When you receive general anesthesia, you lose consciousness. All your sensory perception disappears. You are not aware of the world around you. That is being unconscious. When you are aware of the world around you, you are conscious.

Awareness is widespread. Some people think that empathy is something very special that only humans have, but it is just the ability to adapt to other people's moods. It is very useful and very important. You have to know what's going on around you, what everyone is doing. The oldest form of empathy is known as contagious fear. When you're in a company that suddenly starts and leaves, it doesn't do you any good to sit there and wonder why everyone left. (Laughter) Evolution has only improved empathy. I think there are about three degrees of empathy. There is sympathy for someone: seeing you happy makes me happy;

Seeing you sad makes me sad. Then there is compassion: I'm sorry your grandmother died. I don't feel the same as you, but I sympathize with you. Then there is what I call mercy, which means acting on your

feeling

s toward others. Far from being something special that only humans possess, human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathetic animals, kill them and eat them. You could say that this is just hunting, which involves other species. Humans are predators, but we are often not so kind to our own kind. I have noticed that those who only know one thing about animal behavior know this word and that "human emotions

should

never be projected onto other animals." However, I believe that projecting human emotions and thoughts onto other animals can give us our first idea of ​​what they do and why.

After all, it's not very scientific to say that they are hungry when they eat and tired when their tongue sticks out of their mouth, and then, when they play and seem happy, to say that we have no way of knowing what's going on. for their heads. I recently spoke to a journalist who asked me, "That's kind of compelling, but how do you really know what other animals think and feel?" I thought about the hundreds of scientific references I had read while writing my book, but then I realized that the answer was in my room: that when my puppy leaves the mat and comes to me, he turns on his back and I can see his belly.

You have had the thought: I want someone to caress my belly. She knows that she can come to me, not the couch, that I will understand her request and that I can do the job, and she anticipates the pleasure she will get from belly rubs. She can think and feel. It's not much harder than that. Usually when we see animals we say, "Oh, look, there are elephants," or "There are killer whales," or whatever we see. But they know exactly who they are. These are not just orcas. The one with the big fin, that male, is L41, 36 years old.

To his left is his sister, L44, who is 42 years old. They have lived together for decades and know exactly who they are. This is Philo the elephant. This is Philo the elephant, four days later. People don't just feel sadness, people create sadness. We want to work on your teeth. Why don't we wait until they die? Elephants once lived from the coast of the Mediterranean Sea to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. In 1980 they still had a strong presence in Central and East Africa. Their numbers are breaking up and fragmenting. This is the geographic distribution of a beautiful creature that we are driving to extinction.

We are doing much better here in the United States, in our own national parks. We simply killed all the wolves in Yellowstone. Then, 60 years later, we reintroduced them because the moose population grew too much. Many thousands of people spent many millions of dollars to come to the park and see the world's most famous wolves. These wolves form the alpha trio of a very stable pack. The wolf on the right is the breeding male. The wolf on the left is his companion. The other wolf is his brother. And suddenly wolves were no longer covered by the Endangered Species Act.

Parliament had wolves killed. The wolves moved to the edge of the park. Those two were shot to death. The once stable pack fell apart due to fighting and division. The leader of Yellowstone's most well-known and stable pack lost his companions, his hunting grounds, and his entire family. We are causing them tremendous pain. One of the mysteries is: Why don't they hurt us so much? No wild orca has ever hurt a human. He had just finished eating a piece of gray whale killed by him and his family, but those people on the boat had nothing to fear.

This orca had just eaten a seal that weighed as much as the people on the boat, but they had nothing to fear. They eat seals. Why don't they ever eat us? How can we trust our preschoolers with them? Why have orcas repeatedly returned to researchers lost in the fog, guiding them home for miles? In the Bahamas, dolphins who knew Denise Herzing well (she is a researcher there) and interacted with her a lot suddenly became extremely skittish. What happened suddenly? Suddenly someone on the ship realized that a person on that ship had died while she was taking a nap in her bed.

How could the dolphins realize that one of the human hearts had stopped? Why did it scare you? These are the mysteries of other brains. In an aquarium in South Africa there was a baby bottlenose dolphin. Her name was Dolly. One of the keepers was taking a smoke break right outside the aquarium window. Dolly saw him smoking, went over to her mother, drank for a few seconds, went back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like a cloud of smoke. (Laughs) For some reason she came up with the idea of ​​simulating smoke with milk.

When we use something to represent something else, we call it art. (Laughs) The things that make us human are not the things we think. What makes us human is that we are the most extreme. We are the most compassionate, we are the most violent. We are the most creative and most destructive animals that have ever appeared on this planet. But we are not the only animals that love each other. We are not the only ones who worry about our partners or our children. Albatrosses regularly fly ten to fifteen thousand kilometers to feed their chicks. They live on the most remote islands in the world and those islands are covered in plastic waste.

The sacred chain of being that gives life from generation to generation is interrupted by our waste. Here is an albatross chick that was about six months old. He was about to fly, but he died. It was full of red lighters. This is not the relationship we

should

have with the world, but we, with our big, famous brains, don't use it. And yet, when we welcome new life into the world, we do so with images of animals. We don't draw mobile phones or workshops on the walls of children's rooms. (Laughter) We want to say, "Look who's still here!" And yet, every one of them, everyone who was deemed worthy of salvation in Noah's Ark, is now in mortal danger and we are the flood.

We start with a question: Do they love us? We need to look a little beyond ourselves and ask: Can we afford to allow life to continue on Earth? Thank you. (Applause)