Jeffery Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy
1 Humans believe they know what love is, and value it highly. Yet many who study animal behavior are cautious about saying animals experience love, preferring to say they are not displaying "true love", but simply following the dictates of their genes.
2 Is it really as simple as all that? What about the animals who stay together until one dies? Evolutionary biologists often say that pairing is a way to ensure adequate parental care, but it's not always clear this is the case. Some animals continue to accompany each other when not raising young. And they appear to exhibit sorrow or show a sense of loss when one of the pair dies.
3 Konrad Lorenz, studying the behavior of geese, describes a typical example. Ado's mate, Susanne-Elisabeth, was killed by a fox. He stood silently by her partly eaten body, which lay across their nest. In the following days, he hung his head and his eyes became vacant. Because he did not have the heart to defend himself from the attacks of the other geese, his status in the flock fell sharply. A year went by. Finally Ado pulled himself together and found another mate.
4 Animals may fall in love dramatically. According to Lorenz two geese are most likely to "fall in love" when they have known each other as youngsters, been separated and then meet again. He compared this to a man who meets a woman and—astonished that she is the same girl he used to see running around in a school uniform—falls in love and marries her. According to parrot specialist Sue Athan, it is common for some parrots to fall in love at first sight.
5 Instinct may urge animals to love, but it does not say whom they will love. Seeking a mate for a male parrot, Athan purchased a fine-feathered young female and introduced the two birds. To Athan's disappointment, "the male nevertheless acted like the female wasn't even in the room."
6 A few months later Athan was given an older female in extremely poor condition. "She didn't have a feather from the neck down," she says. "Her feet were all twisted. She had lines around her eyes. And yet the male thought she was the love of his life." The two birds immediately paired off and eventually produced young.
7 Zookeepers know, to their despair, that many species of animals will not breed with just any other animal of their species. Timmy, a gorilla in the Cleveland Zoo, declined to mate with two female gorillas introduced to him. But when he met a gorilla named Kate, they took to each other at once. When it was thought that Kate was unable to reproduce, because of her advanced age, zookeepers decided to send Timmy to another zoo, where he might have a chance to breed successfully.
8 Defending the zoo's decision to separate the animals, the zoo director said, "It sickens me when people start to put human emotions in animals. We can't think of them as some kind of magnificent human being: they are animals. When people start saying animals have emotions, they cross the bridge of reality." Jane Goodall, whose work has shed light on the emotional life of chimpanzees, also writes, " I cannot think of chimpanzees developing emotions, one for the other, comparable in any way to the tenderness, protectiveness, tolerance and spiritual joy that are the mark of human love in its truest and deepest sense."
9 Yet there is evidence of love in the devotion that members of pairs heap on each other. Geese, swans and mandarin ducks are all symbols of marital faithfulness; field biologists tell us this is true to life. Coyotes, often thought of as representing trickery, would make equally good symbols of devotion, since they also form lasting pairs. Observations indicate that they begin to form pair attachments before they are sexually active.
10 In his study of coyotes, Hope Ryden tells how pairs can be observed curling up together, hunting mice together, and greeting each other with elaborate displays. Ryden describes two coyotes mating. Afterward, the female tapped the male with her paw and licked his face. Then they curled up to sleep. This looks a lot like romantic love. Whatever distinctions may be made between the love of two people and the love of two animals, the essence frequently seems the same.
11 An animal raised by another species will often show affection for a member of that species when it grows up. Gavin Maxwell tells of an otter called Tibby, who was raised by a man who lived on an island off the coast of Scotland and who got around with the help of a walking stick. When he became seriously ill, he took Tibby to Maxwell and asked him to look after the otter. The man died not long after.
12 Tibby made a habit of escaping and visiting the nearest village. There she found a man who used a walking stick. She tried to build a nest under his house, but he chased her away.
13 A short time later Tibby disappeared again. One day Maxwell received a call from a person who had been alarmed by an otter that had acted strangely, even trying to follow him indoors. "You don't by any chance use a walking stick, do you?" asked Maxwell.
14 "Yes," he replied with astonishment in his voice, "but how in the world could you know that?"
15 While the idea of love among animals has been generally rejected by science, doubts remain. For stories such as these suggest that some animals may experience joy, love and heartbreak remarkably like our own.