Mama's Last Hug: Animals Emotions and What They Teach Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal
In March 2016, Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch, was dying. She was fifty-nine years old, one of the world’s oldest zoo chimpanzees. Next to her was Jan van Hoof, a Dutch biologist. In two months, he would celebrate his eightieth birthday. It was an emotional reunion, the first of its kind. When Mama woke u from her slumber and recognised Jan, she expressed immense joy. “She gently stokes his hair,” writes Frans de Waal, “then drapes one of her long arms around his neck to pull him closer. During this embrace, her fingers rhythmically pat the back of his head and neck in a comforting gesture that chimpanzees also use to quiet a whimpering infant.” She was happy to see him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXTCGeAV9s&t=2s
Should we be surprised by Mama’s response? Have you ever wondered whether animals feel emotions, like we do? Until recently writes Waal, in his book Mama’s Last Hug, the prevailing view was that animals had instincts, “a series of inborn actions triggered by a particular situation.” But the tide is turning and de Waal’s message is that there are not uniquely human emotions; some human emotions are maybe more developed or more sophisticated, but basically the whole set of emotions that we humans have can be found in other primates. Darwin was the first to make these connections in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) but his book was fairly badly received and perhaps because of that it just disappeared from a whole century.
Even today the possibility that animals experience emotions the way we do makes many hard-nosed scientists feel queasy, writes Frans de Waal, “partly because animals never report any feelings, and party because the existence of feelings presupposes a level of consciousness that these scientists are unwilling to grand to animals.”
Emotions and feelings are not the same thing. Emotions are a process, a bodily and mental state, expressed as facial expression and gestures. They can be observed and measured. Feelings are private states that can be communicated through language, they are our response to our emotions. They can also be observed but indirectly. As De Waal puts it: “We show our emotions, but we talk about our feelings”.
So, what Mama’s Last Hug can teach us about ourselves? The whole idea that we, humans, are strikingly different from animals, that we special, it’s a human illusion. We have big brains, and this is a good thing, but our brains are not fundamentally different from primate brains. With this book, Frans de Waal, brings humans and animals closer, make us realise that we are part of the natural world, a product of evolution. This realisation has all sorts of implications, moral implications for example, such as how you treat animals and the world in general. Part of the climate crisis we live at the moment is because we have thought we are not part of nature but its conquerors, that we can do whatever we want with nature. Truth is, we are part of the natural system and if we are not careful we are going to go under the system.