In the recent issue of Science magazine, there is the report of studies in which a drugged mouse is helped to recover by another mouse. Here is a story about this study:
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This is really interesting, thank you. I don’t think it just refers to insight or intelligence, but also to compassion or empathy. We often wonder why animals will cry out when they’re in pain, and the only reason I can think of is to look for help. I wonder if the biologists in the forum can comment otherwise.
I remember some books by James Herriot, a veterinarian in Yorkshire, England. He mentioned how animals would suffer without understanding why and felt terrible for them. In some ways, it seems that we suffer in proportion with our desire to survive. However, those who have more insight, like humans, with more fore brain, may suffer actually less, in a way (at least, at times), than those with less of a forebrain and insight. I’m intrigued by this and how it’s an example perhaps of animals trying to help each other.
I am interested in learning more.
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I’d like to addend–one of the reasons it bothers me is not only that I really hate to injure animals, but when we were in training, we were told that newborns had no insight into or perception of pain. We did circumcisions, for example, without local anesthetic. The babies screamed, writhed and cried, much more than I would have expected from simply being restrained–but the staff (well intended as they were) said it was just normal, and from beng restrained. I am so glad that that changed as my children came along, and everyone uses local anesthetic, now.
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Hi Randy,
There are a few proposed reasons why wild animals might “cry out” when in pain (presumably if caught or wounded by a predator), and this relates to hypotheses for “alarm calling” in general. Note that these responses would have evolved in wild populations and may not be relevant to situations in captive populations like lab mice. Also note that none of these hypotheses require that animals mentally processes the situation like human “empathy”.
- Often kin selection is invoked: the individual tries to warn related individuals in the vicinity of danger, allowing them to escape (and because the relatives contain copies of the same genes as the individual in question, it benefits the fitness of the individual indirectly to warn its relatives even if it doesn’t survive the attack itself.
- Many animals (mammals and birds) give a loud scream-call when grabbed by a predator. This may also serve as a “startle-effect”, causing the predator to momentary flinch or be shocked/distracted, and it may release the captured individual, allowing it to escape
- The call may function as a “mobbing call”, attracting other individuals to the location (perhaps kin but also non-kin) who as a group attack the predator, the captured individual may then be released once the predator becomes too harassed.
- The call may also attract another predator to the area which tries to compete with the predator holding the screaming individual, and if the two predators then start to fight over the prey, the prey may escape in the kerfuffle.
- A funny option is deception. Some birds which forage in multi-species flocks give a fake “alarm call” when they see another individual with a food item that it wants. The fake call makes the other bird drop the food and fly away and the cheater then grabs the food!
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Beautiful description, thank you!
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It could be said that if the universe was created in order to produce beings capable of compassion, it makes sense that you would find examples of such behaviors in nature, even though it is arguably the most concentrated in humans.
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Could the “crying out” also be simply a by-product of a bunch of physiological responses like tensing of the muscles, which may have a defensive purpose?
Anyway, the mouse behaviour is interesting. I suppose biologists would attribute it to “kin selection” - taking care of kin in order to propagate genes of an individual. Though, I still cling to the unscientific hope of finding altruism in non-human animals 
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Why is it unscientific to consider altruism in non-humans?
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If one defines true altruism as “giving up some of one’s own biological fitness (resources and potential to have one’s own offspring) in order to increase the biological fitness (number of offspring) of a non-relative”, then the altruist’s genes will not be propagated to the next generation as much as the non-altruist’s (recipient’s) genes. This means that over evolutionary time, genes for “true altruism” (self-sacrificial altruism) will be weeded out of the population. In other words, natural selection will always favour those individuals that maximize their own net fitness.
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I also think one issue is that many people, even atheists, but especially religious people, don’t really grasp that humans are animals. They give extensions to humanity that they don’t give to others like love and friendship.
If a mother dies to protect her kids they say it’s love, sometimes they say it’s just biological.
If a step mother dies to protect her step kid, leaving no offspring of her own, they often say it’s love, or they say it’s social pressures or some kind of religious influence.
If it’s a bear that dies for her cub, they say it’s to protect the offspring, its instincts, its biological. They almost never say that this bear loves her cubs in a way similar to you loving your kids.
Part of the reason why I believe this happens so often is because it’s how 95% or something of our species justifies the horrors they contribute to animals.
The turkeys holding hands as they are being slaughtered is not because they are truly scared, living in fear, holding onto something they care about to seek comfort and give it, but instead it’s just chemicals and instincts.
A mother cow chasing a truck with her baby is just some kind of instincts. Even AI has learned we don’t give cows the power to grieve.
Oh they cry when they are stressed, or showing signs of sadness, but it’s not like when we cry……
I spent a half-week utterly miserable when a buck I shot kept running sixty yards or so after my shot; I’d always managed instant kills and didn’t know how to handle that fact that this animal had suffered even that short while.
A psychiatrist I knew contended that men used to have unrecognized trauma from that and attributed some common maladjustments to it.
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My mind expect the second clause to say something about it making sense that there would be pain, otherwise there would be nothing to have compassion about.
While it may work for biology, I find that a very limiting definition of altruism, even for animals. For example, when mother mammals who have taken in young from other species even though that means less resources for their own offspring fits it, but what of female mammals who have no offspring who rescue young from another species?
If the alternate translation from Genesis 1 of humans being made “as” the image of God had been chosen by the KJV team, I wonder if we would have considered that in order to represent God to the rest of the animals it makes sense that they would share attributes with us.
Meanwhile, from ChatGpt:
Elephants are known to engage in behaviors that resemble funerals when a member of their herd dies. These behaviors include a variety of emotional responses, such as mourning and rituals around the body of the deceased elephant.
When an elephant dies, particularly one that was part of a close-knit family group, the others in the herd will often display signs of distress. They may approach the body, touch it with their trunks, and linger around it for a period of time. Some elephants have been observed to cover the body with branches or dirt, and there are even reports of elephants visiting the remains of deceased herd members long after the death.
This kind of behavior suggests that elephants have a deep sense of social bonds and possibly an awareness of death, though whether they understand it in the same way humans do is still up for debate. It is a fascinating and complex aspect of their behavior, indicative of their intelligence and emotional depth.
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Whether or not one likes the definition of “true altruism”, i.e., self-sacrifice, it is clear why that can’t evolve in nature. “Cooperation” can evolve, certainly. But that is not the same as altruism (although lay people…non-biologists…often conflate the terms). Cooperation (and reciprocity) in nature is when there is a net fitness benefit coming to both individuals.
Can you give an example in the wild (not of domesticated animals or animals in captivity whose behaviours and environments are not natural) of female mammals routinely “rescuing other species”? I can’t think of any (although there are lots of bogus feel-good stories on youtube). There may be the rare anecdote…when hormones are running high, the urge to lactate is super strong, and one’s own offspring is suddenly lost?..but biologists would say this is the rare result of a misfiring of instincts in a maladaptive way–it would not be a behaviour that would be selected for. In fact mis-directed parental care would be selected against.
There are some interesting cases of “adoption” in waterfowl, where one sees a female duck with a “creche” of dozens of ducklings. The female may chase away other females and forcibly “adopt” the unrelated ducklings of other females. It turns out that this benefits the female’s biological ducklings because of the “dilution effect”. A predator is more likely to eat one of the adopted ducklings (which she keeps on the outer periphery of her own ducklings…sort of like a human shield!) Female parent ducks don’t invest much energy in feeding the ducklings…the ducklings can feed themselves. So the female pays little cost in “adopting” foreigners, and reaps large survival benefit for her own genetic offspring. So, it turns out that this is certainly not altruism, it is actually selfish 
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Darwin considered the case of sterile bees in chapter 7 of “Origin”.
Hi,
Sterile castes of eusocial insects are a form of “kin selection”. This is defined as passing on one’s genes indirectly through the reproduction of relatives, so biologists do not consider this “true altruism” (the sterile individual is still acting to get copies of its own alleles into the next generation). Eusocial insects happen to have an odd form of chromosomal inheritance (haplodiploidy) where the workers are actually MORE related to each other (workers-sisters are more related to each other) than they would be to their own offspring, if they hypothetically could have offspring with a male drone. So, this sets up the condition in the hive where a worker bee can actually get more copies of its alleles into the population (increase its fitness the best) by working to facilitate the queen of the hive to produce more workers (sisters).
cheers
K.
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Having anaesthetized perhaps thousands of mice in my past work, I can’t say I have ever noticed this behavior. At the same time, I never really looked for it, mainly because I am usually doing something else as the mice recover.
It is also worth mentioning that pain is strongly considered in experiments involving vertebrates. We often intervened with pain medication, even if it could alter the results of experiments. There is a very, very high threshold for the denial of pain mitigation. Animal studies are also scrutinized to make sure the fewest animals possible are used. While many studies will unavoidably result in pain there are still strongly held ethical standards that scientists gladly adhere to. The moral argument that undergirds this type of research is we could potentially improve the lives of millions of human lives based on the suffering of a few hundred mice.
I read his books growing up. They were great.
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I defer to @klw regarding the biological definition of true altruism.
The other option is philosophical in nature. If we believe that altruism exists in humans because we are “image-bearers” of God, as described in Genesis 1:27, then why not leave open the possibility that some animals are also image-bearers in some capacity? I don’t obsess over this, because the Bible is there as God’s revelation to people, not animals.
Anyway, whether or not you believe that animals are image-bearers in some sense, I think it is God’s will for us to “have dominion” over them in care and respect.
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I may have seen that once. I’m accustomed to seeing mother ducks with six to nine ducklings tagging along, but one day at a river spot I saw a string of ducklings fighting their way up the rapids above the swimming hole and went to investigate. I counted fourteen ducklings and noticed that while the mother was going back to help the first seven or eight, the rest were being left on their own to struggle. I intervened by getting upstream of the mother and sitting on a rock in the stream; she halted at a small calm spot ten yards from me and just circled, keeping an eye on me. I waited until all the ducklings had joined her, then sat another ten minutes (I counted) to let them all rest, then moved off to the other side of the river. I watched until they’d all made it up to the next big calm area, a “pond” twenty yards wide at the widest and a good seventy yards long. They stayed there for a couple of hours until a family with kids came down to play, then headed farther upstream.
I’m guessing that the “dilution effect” was in play above; that the tag-along ducklings she didn’t bother to help were “adopted”. At the time I wondered if perhaps another mother had been killed (big cat territory) and she had taken those in, or maybe they just joined her ducklings so as to have a mother.
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Okay that’s just weird! And my mind is going bonkers trying to figure out how something like that would evolve.
I read them in college. My mom read All Creatures Great and Small one summer and gave copies to everyone for Christmas – immediate family and all first cousins plus a few more distant cousins and “honorary” cousins.
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