Does My Pet Love Me?

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2019

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

Two animal psychologists and a historian of animal studies join Eleanor Rosamund Barraclought to discuss whether it's possible to recognise similar traits in humans, chimps, crows, hawks, dogs and cats in terms of affinity and attachment, despite different evolutionary paths. How do we know when a chimp wants to play? How does one crow decide what to feed its mate? The Free Thinking Festival explores the emotional similarities and differences between humans & animals.

Nicky Clayton is a scientist and a dancer who began as a zoologist and moved into psychology. She is Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is also Scientist in Residence at dance company Rambert and co-founder of The Captured Thought blog and project. Her expertise is in studying members of the crow family, who have huge brains for their body size, and in studying thinking with and without words.

Kim Bard is a Professor at the University of Portsmouth. She has studied the development of emotions, cognition, communication, and attachment in captive young chimpanzees for over 30 years. Her research concerns understanding the process of development in evolution and contributes to captive animal welfare.

Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies and Director of the British Animal Studies Network at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She has written widely on modern and historical human-animal relationships and has recently finished a study of people's lives with their livestock animals in early modern England titled Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes.

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds,
0:34.5	music, radio, podcasts. I'm Matthew Sweet, and in a moment we'll be bringing you one of the discussions recorded at our Freethinking Festival.
0:43.4	For this year's theme, we set out to explore the emotions, so be ready with your happy or sad or enraged face just after this short message.
0:53.1	It's amazing how many recordings you can find these days are a favourite piece of classical music. aged face, just after this short message. pick the very best? Consider it done. The Building a Library podcast from Record Review. Subscribe
1:13.0	now on BBC Sounds.
1:20.5	Hello. The oldest poem I know about someone and their pet is from the 9th century. It's an Irish scribe carefully crafting his letters
1:30.4	as his white cat frets over the mouse population.
1:34.2	It begins, I and Pangurban, we each stick to what we're good at.
1:38.6	His thoughts are set on hunting, mine on my special craft.
1:43.4	But did the fat white cat love him? Did he love the fat white cat?
1:48.8	Well, we have two pioneering animal psychologists with us today. Nicky Clayton, who studies
1:54.9	crow cognition, and Kim Bard, whose work has done much to further the welfare of the world's captive chimp population.
2:03.6	Kim, today we're asking, does my pet love me? But is that a question that any sensible scientist would
2:09.3	really ask? That's a complicated question, really. What is love? How do you know if an animal feels love?
2:17.1	We certainly know when we feel it, but it's very subjective.
2:20.3	In terms of my work with primates, we don't want to encourage anybody to have primates as pets.
2:27.3	So it's kind of a question that's antithetical to much of my research.
2:32.3	And it is worth pointing out that although there's a large population of captive chimps,
2:37.0	that is at least partly because of people thinking they'd make good pets,
2:41.5	but that is definitely not a good idea.
	...

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