Can animals feel love? │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin

If elephants mourn dead relatives, then surely, they must be able to feel love. Unless we set apart our human ability to understand love, or do we?

My name is Dr Anna Machin and I research the science behind love.

Is love exclusively human? This question gets to the heart of our definition of love. If love is a flood of neurochemicals in the brain that motivate you to start relationships and then reward you for staying in them for those survival-critical relationships, then voles, which first showed us the importance for example of oxytocin in the neurochemistry of love, must be able to feel love.

If love is attachment, then the mammalian mothers are certainly attached to their children. And if love has to encompass relationships beyond the reproductive, which are arguably instinctive, then baboons build lifelong, sometimes cross-sex friendships which appear to exist solely for the happiness and contentment of their members. But if we define love as having to have a cognitive element, such as empathy or trust, can animals have love at this level?

Empathy exists on the spectrum from emotional contagion that's simply reflecting the emotions you have around you, to emotional empathy and to cognitive empathy. There is strong evidence for empathy in animals. Pigeons, mice, rats, monkeys, apes and even your family dog exhibit empathy. Empathy is on a spectrum from instinctive alarm calls that we see in birds, to complex support and helping behaviours which we see in dolphins or our fellow primates. Both wild and captive macaques show the desire to help and protect weaker adult members of the group. And chimps understand excitement, grief, sadness, frustration and fear in their conspecifics and try to comfort them. Explicitly they console those who have lost fights and can show cognitive empathy to other species, for example injured birds that happen to be in their enclosures and zoos.

And if grief is mourning the absence of love, then animals certainly feel grief. The famous primatologist Jane Goodall described the grief of Flint on the death of his mother Flo. He fell into a deep, deep depression and died three weeks later. Segarisa, a juvenile gorilla, built a nest next to her mother's dead body and stayed with her, grooming and resting against her. Several monkey species carry dead infants and hold a vigil beside their bodies. They give out specific vocalisations that are only associated with death. And when carrying the corpse, they will withdraw from interaction, lose their appetite and often fall silent. In many primate species, the extent of the attention to the corpse is related to the closeness of the relationship, implying that they do indeed feel grief and grieving states in the animal kingdom do have close parallels with those that we see in humans.

So, non-human animals have the same neurochemistry, experience attachment both to partners, children and friends, exhibit empathy and possibly experience grief. But there is one thing that humans do in the name of love which we do not see in other animals, and that is the ability to use love to manipulate, to control, to use it for its darker ends. Does this mean human love sits on a separate level of complexity and cognition? Is human love unique or are the aspects of human love which apparently set it apart from that of our fellow animals, such as the ability to daydream about a loved one or plan an exciting future together, just delicious embellishments, but unnecessary for the experience of love?

While we still can't agree on what exactly love means, we know attraction when we feel it. Why exactly are we attracted to certain people or types?

Tune in next time to find out.

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Bye for now!