Animal Emotions

     One thing I did some research into this week was how animals expressed their emotions. It's obvious that we aren't the only ones who "feel" for others so I decided to just go ahead and prove it.
     Birds are remarkable at showing emotions. In one case, a group of magpies lost a bird. They stood round it for hours, stroking it with their beaks and cleaning its feathers as though it were still alive. One by one they flew away, and brought all of the shiny items they had and lay it by their dead member. The group was recorded each day for a month, and each day they returned to the spot where the dead magpie was. They never took back their shiny stuff, and often replaced it with nicer items. This is a show of mourning, even more regular than us. We put flowers in our graves, they put jewellery and shiny rubbish on theirs.
     Fish have personalities, and are surprisingly sociable animals. If you were to take, say a minnow, and keep it in a tank, alone with no partner, it would slowly starve itself to death, no matter how fit it is and how nice its environment is. If you put it in a tank with a few other fish, it will live a normal and happy life with its companions. On the side of them having personalities, fish will show preference for specific decorations in their tanks. Some will guard them selfishly while others will allow others to join in the fun with them. Some fish do not like schools, whereas others will fight just to be in the middle of them.
     And now for the order of animals least associated with emotion of any kind, reptiles. Most people think of reptiles as being cold-blooded, therefore cold-hearted killers or just boring sun bathers. Like all animals, reptiles show basic emotion, namely fear, pleasure and hunger. The one controversial idea is if reptiles can feel love, which is an emotion only associated with animals of a huge mental capacity for emotion. The argument against this is that it does not benefit reptiles, as they more often than not mate once and then abandon the young. Another argument is that even though say alligators look after their young, it is merely instinct not care. However, if you stroke a tortoise, it will close its eyes in pleasure and will playfully bite you to show its affection. Lizards will lick you if they like what you are doing, and will look you directly in the eye, a very human trait of affection. Sure, snakes have been proven to not show love, but we should not disregard other reptiles as not being able to show some form of affection.