Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Interspecies Love

Recently I saw a video on YouTube that shows kittens and dogs meeting for the first time.

The video is incredibly sweet, and watching these natural enemies play together made me think that humans are bringing about an incredible new thing on this planet: interspecies love and affection. Without the influence of humans, these cats and dogs would never be snuggling together for naps or playing games.
Anyone who has ever owned a pet knows that animals are loving, caring, loyal, trusting, and forgiving. But in the wild, animals can usually only share this love with members of their own species. There are the rare examples of animals caring for members of another species in the wild, but from what I can find these are usually cases where a mother has adopted an infant.
But when animals get domesticated, because they no longer have to worry about survival, particularly obtaining food, they are freed up to express empathy and take care of other animals. This article gives examples of some unlikely pairings, including an orangutan caring for tiger cubs, a male pig with a lamb, and a chihuahua with a marmoset (great pictures at the website). The book Unlikely Friendships, by National Geographic magazine writer Jennifer Holland, documents 47 stories of interspecies relationship, including the Biblical lion lying down with the lamb: a female lion adopted a baby antelope at a nature reserve in Kenya.
Animal research is now demonstrating scientifically that many animals act from what can only be called moral impulses. According to the book Wild Justice: The Moral Life of Animals, by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce 
recent research is demonstrating that animals not only act altruistically, but also have the capacity for empathy, forgiveness, trust, reciprocity, and much more as well. In humans, these behaviors form the core of what we call morality. There’s good reason to call these behaviors moral in animals, too. Morality is a broadly adaptive strategy for social living that has evolved in many animal societies other than our own.
Even more striking, within this huge repertoire of prosocial behaviors, particular patterns of behavior seem to constitute a kind of animal morality. Mammals living in tight social groups appear to live according to codes of conduct, including both prohibitions against certain kinds of behavior and expectations for other kinds of behavior. They live by a set of rules that fosters a relatively harmonious and peaceful coexistence. They’re naturally cooperative, will offer aid to their fellows, sometimes in return for like aid, sometimes with no expectation of immediate reward. They build relationships of trust. What’s more, they appear to feel for other members of their communities, especially relatives, but also neighbors and sometimes even strangers—often showing signs of what looks very much like compassion and empathy.
In other words, there is continuity in the realm of morality between humans and animals.
But this moral capacity has been mostly restricted to within an animal’s own species until just recently—even for humans. Just recently I saw a Betty Boop cartoon called “Be Human,” from the 1930s, encouraging people not to mistreat animals. 

The animal rights movement of the last 40 years has quite profoundly changed the moral and legal attitudes towards cruelty to animals.

Humans are creating the opportunity for animals to extend their moral sense across species lines. And hopefully we’re also creating the ability in ourselves to reach across ethnic and racial lines and learn to care for each other as though we were family—because we are.


  1. Great post! I think the implications of this article for humans is hopeful and that when we are no longer in survival mode, and all of our needs are met, we can do things like explore personal growth and development, spirituality and expressing empathy and caring for others.

    1. Thanks Thea. That is exactly what I hoped people would take away from the post!

  2. Oh, and I love Betty Boop, by the way! Awesome.

    1. Yes! Got to grab every opportunity to use a Betty Boop cartoon!!