Do Animals Suffer From Mental Illness?
Anxious dogs, compulsive parrots, and elephants in recovery
On a warm May afternoon in 2003, a little boy I’d never met was doing his homework in the sunroom off his family’s kitchen in Mount Pleasant, a leafy neighborhood in Washington, D.C. The back of our apartment building faced the boy’s house, and as he worked, he looked out to the row of urban yards along the alley, separated by chain link or small planks of sagging wooden fencing. He happened to look up that Saturday just as Oliver, our dark-eyed Bernese Mountain Dog, jumped through the kitchen window of our fourth-floor apartment.
No one had seen Oliver at the window, even though it must have taken him a long time to push the air-conditioning unit out of the way and rip a hole through the wire mesh of the screen that was big enough for his 120-pound body to fit through. The pet sitter that we’d left him with had gone to the farmer’s market, leaving Oliver by himself for two hours. He must have begun to slash and chew through the screen as soon as he realized he was alone. Once he made the hole large enough, Oliver hauled himself through the opening, more than fifty feet above the ground.
“Mom!” the boy screamed. “A dog fell out of the sky!”
Later the boy’s mom would tell us that she thought her son was making up a story, but there was fear in his voice that made her think otherwise. They found Oliver in the backyard of our building. He’d landed inside the cement stairwell of the basement apartment.
I’ll never forget the phone call that followed. I was clutching a gin and tonic and had, until that moment, been worrying about underarm stains on my new chiffon dress. Jude was drinking a beer and sweating through the knees of his pants. We were milling about, uncomfortable in the heat, at a wedding reception for one of Jude’s cousins in South Carolina. The wait staff had just announced the opening of the buffet when his cell phone rang.
The woman told us that she found Oliver lying in a heap. When he noticed her and her son pushing the backyard gate open, he’d tried to get up, wagging his tail weakly. Oliver’s lips and gums were bloody and raw from gnawing at the metal screen, and he couldn’t walk. The mother and son carried him to their car and rushed to the local animal hospital. In order to begin treatment the hospital required a $600 deposit; the woman gave them a check and then drove home to knock on the doors of our building to find out who this odd, broken dog belonged to.
“The vets didn’t know the extent of his injuries when I left him,” she told Jude and me when she reached us at the wedding, “but they did say that they’d never seen a dog survive a fall like this.”
Overwhelmed, we thanked the woman for her generosity and hung up. I begged Jude to leave with me immediately. But it was almost evening in South Carolina and we couldn’t make the last flight out in time. So we called the animal hospital to ask for any news (there wasn’t any yet) and sat through the rest of the wedding, distracted and scared.
When I was twenty-one and on my way into the bathroom of a bar in upstate New York, I met Jude. We fell for each other in a way that felt like head injury—wholly and completely, with the sort of blurred vision that seemed to make anything possible. Before long we had a list of top-ten future pets. After a trip to China and Tibet, it grew to include a pair of yaks, and from the beginning I wanted to live with a capybara, but mostly we dreamt of dogs. At the very top of the wish list was a Bernese Mountain Dog. Bred to guard livestock and pull carts of cheese and milk through the Swiss Alps, Berners are handsome, broad, and regal, with an air of accessible friendship. Dog food companies know this. So do automakers. Bernese are the supermodels of the canine world, popping up in advertisements for organic kibble, paper towels, perfume, SUVs, and phone plans.
When Jude and I moved into an apartment in Washington that allowed dogs and was located just off Rock Creek Park’s pools of water and walking trails, I started looking for puppies. I found them. But I was crushed to learn that purebred Bernese Mountain Dogs sold for nearly $2,000 each. I was working for an environmental conservation organization at the time, and Jude, a government geologist, wasn’t earning much more than I was. We couldn’t afford a puppy that expensive, and even if we could, I couldn’t justify spending that much on a dog. So a few months went by during which we felt like perverts at the dog park—dogless people who came to look at dogs, luring other people’s pets over to be petted with clandestine pockets of treats. “Heeeeere doggie doggie.”
And then one day I received an email from a breeder I’d contacted a few months earlier. One of his adult dogs was available now, “for free!” He told me that this Berner, named Oliver, was four years old and wasn’t getting the attention he needed from his current 8 Anima l Madness family. He said that since Oliver was an adult dog he required slightly less exercise than a puppy and would be more easygoing.
I scheduled our first meeting to take place within twenty-fourhours. When we pulled up to the veterinary office to meet Oliver and his current family, we saw a young girl walking a gigantic dog on the clinic’s front lawn. He carried his white-tipped tail like a flag, raised high and arching over his back. His white paws were lion like, huge and spreading, and his coat glossy and feathered like a 1970s shag. He looked happy to be walking with the small girl, and his gait was jaunty as she led him back and forth across the lawn.
When I think about it now, it’s striking how much I didn’t notice. Adopting a family pet from a veterinary office and not the family’s home was perhaps the first clue. There were many others but I was blind to all of them.
Oliver was being boarded at the vet because he wasn’t legally allowed to remain in the family’s neighborhood. He’d had an altercation with a neighbor and her dog, and they were threatening to sue.
While it sounds quite serious to me now, it didn’t at the time. The mother of the family, Oliver’s primary human, explained that he’d “just gotten so excited about the neighbor’s new dog that he dashed through their electric fence to say hello.” The dogs began to fight and the woman tried to break it up with her hands. Oliver bit the woman while she was trying to separate them. I didn’t need to hear more.
Everyone knows you shouldn’t break up a dogfight with your bare hands; that’s what garden hoses are for. Plus, this neighbor must have been unreasonable. Jude and I would be able to control our dog. He just needed some training.
In retrospect I know the biting story was the tip of the iceberg, or really the tip of the tail on a very large dog, but at the moment I didn’t, I couldn’t, absorb it. We’d fallen for Oliver at first sight. It felt more like a physical sensation than a conscious decision. It certainly wasn’t rational. We brought him home that same afternoon.
After a few days of cool appraisal, Oliver settled into a routine with Jude and me and became very affectionate. We spent hours playing hide and seek in our apartment and the park, playfully tweaking his whiskers, wondering aloud what his voice might sound like if he could talk, and filling endless trash bags with the fur we brushed from his coat. It wasn’t until a few months into our relationship with Oliver that his truly bizarre behavior started to manifest. But once it did, it spread like spilled molasses: sticky, inexorably expansive, and difficult to contain.
The first real sign of trouble I discovered by accident. Jude had already left for work. I said goodbye to Oliver and locked the house, only to realize as soon as I reached my car that I’d left the keys in our apartment. As I headed back up the block to our building I heard a plaintive yowling—not feline or human and not from the National Zoo, a few blocks away. It was a bark that sounded like the squeak of an animal too large to squeak (this was before I knew any elephants), and it was coming from our apartment.
When I stepped onto the front porch the barking stopped and was replaced by a loud skittering sound. As I climbed the steps to the top floor, the crablike skittering got louder. It was, I realized, the sound of Oliver’s toenails on the wooden floor as he sprinted back and forth along the length of the apartment. When I opened the door he was panting and wild-eyed. He bounded up to me as if I’d just returned from a months-long expedition, not a five-minute trip to the car. I picked up my keys, walked Oliver back to his dog bed, petted him a bit, and then got up to leave. When I reached the sidewalk I sat on the porch and waited. After about ten minutes of quiet, I stood up in relief. Then suddenly, after only a few steps, there it was—the yowlingsqueakbark. Again and again and again. I looked up and saw Oliver’s giant head pressed against our bedroom window, his paws on the sill. He was looking down at me with his tongue lolling. He’d waited to bark until he saw me leave the porch. I was already late for work. As I walked down the sidewalk I kept turning around. Oliver had moved to the living-room window so that he could watch me walk farther down the street. The barking increased when I turned the corner, and the whole drive to my office I could hear it inside my head.
That evening, when Jude got back from work, he discovered that Oliver had gnawed through the center of two bath towels and turned the pillows on our bed into a pile of goose down and shredded cases. There was also a mysterious pile of wood shavings in the hallway and toenail tracks in the floors, like ghost tracings on a chalkboard, in front of all the windows in the apartment. Strangely, his front paws were also quite wet.
Later that night, as Jude and I lay in bed, our heads resting on folded sweaters, he slid close to me and said, “Do you think there’s anything that his old family didn’t tell us?”
I could feel Oliver’s presence next to us in the dark. He always began the evening curled into a large oval in the doorway to our bedroom and then, after we’d fallen asleep, moved to his dog bed, a round cushion with the footprint of a Smart car, next to the sofa. He was breathing softly.
“I can’t imagine they would have lied.”
And yet, even as I said the words I could feel the doubt coming loose within me like disturbed sediment on the bottom of a pond.
Trying to understand what was happening between Oliver’s furry ears while he savaged our towels or yowled alone at the window was confusing. In many ways, attempting to understand the relationship between what animals are thinking and what they are doing always has been.
In 1649 the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were automatons, lacking in feeling and self-awareness and operated unconsciously, like living machines. For Descartes and many other philosophers, capacities for self-consciousness and feeling were the sole province of humanity, the rational and moral tethers that tied humans to God and proved we were made in his image. This idea of animals as machines proved to be sturdy and enduring, revisited time and again for hundreds of years to prop up arguments for humanity’s superior intelligence, reasoning, morality, and more. Well into the twentieth century, identifying humanlike emotions or consciousness in other animals tended to be seen as childish or irrational.
The most resounding blow to this idea of human exceptionalism, at least in Western scientific circles, was delivered by Charles Darwin, first in On the Origin of Species, then in Descent of Man, and quite richly detailed in On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872. Expression was one of Darwin’s last published arguments in support of his larger theory that humans were just another kind of animal. He believed that the similar emotional experiences of people and other creatures were additional proof that we shared animal ancestors.
In Expression Darwin described surliness, contempt, and disgust in chimps, astonishment among Paraguayan monkeys, love among dogs, between dogs and cats, and between dogs and humans. Perhaps most surprisingly he argued that many of these creatures were capable of enacting revenge, behaving courageously, and expressing their impatience or suspicion. A female terrier of Darwin’s, after having her puppies taken away and killed, impressed him so much “with the manner in which she then tried to satisfy her instinctive maternal love by expending it on [Darwin]; and her desire to lick [his] hands rose to an insatiable passion.” He was also convinced dogs experienced disappointment and dejection.
“Not far from my house,” he wrote, “a path branches off to the right, leading to the hot-house, which I used often to visit for a few moments, to look at my experimental plants. This was always a great disappointment to the dog, as he did not know whether I should continue my walk; and the instantaneous and complete change of expression which came over him, as soon as my body swerved in the least towards the path (and I sometimes tried this as an experiment) was laughable. His look of dejection was known to every member of the family and was called his hot-house face.”
According to Darwin this doggish disappointment was unmistakable— his head would droop, his “whole body sinking a little and remaining motionless; the ears and tail falling suddenly down, but the tail was by no means wagged. . . . His aspect was that of piteous, hopeless dejection.” And yet, “hot-house face” was really only the beginning for Darwin.
He went on to document grief-stricken elephants, contented house cats, pumas, cheetahs, and ocelots (who expressed their satisfaction with purring), as well as tigers, whom he believed did not purr at all but instead emitted “a peculiar short snuffle, accompanied by the closure of the eyelids” when happy. He wrote about deer at the London Zoo—who approached him because, he believed, they were curious. And he talked about fear and anger in musk-ox, goats, horses, and porcupines. He was also interested in laughter. “Young Orangs, when tickled,” reported Darwin, “. . . grin and make a chuckling sound” and “their eyes grow brighter.”
It wasn’t until he published a revised edition of Descent of Man in 1874 that Darwin opined on insanity in other animals directly. He wrote:
Man and the higher animals especially the Primates, have some few instincts in common. All have the same senses, intuitions, and sensations—similar passions, affections and emotions, even the more complex ones, such as jealousy, suspicion, emulation, gratitude, and magnanimity; they practise deceit and are revengeful; they are sometimes susceptible to ridicule, and even have a sense of humour; they feel wonder and curiosity; they posses the same faculties of imitation, attention, deliberation, choice, memory, imagination, the association of ideas, and reason, though in very different degrees. The individuals of the same species graduate in intellect from absolute imbecility to high excellence. They are also liable to insanity, though far less often than in the case of man.
Darwin doesn’t seem to have done any original research on the topic; instead he cites William Lauder Lindsay, a Scottish physician and natural historian who believed nonhuman animals could lose their minds. In a paper Lindsay published in 1871 in the Journal of Mental Science, he wrote, “I hope to prove that, both in its normal and abnormal operations, mind is essentially the same in man and other animals.”
Lindsay knew a fair bit about both, particularly the human insane. He’d been appointed medical officer to Murray’s Royal Institution for the Insane at Perth in 1854 and held the job for twenty-five years. Meanwhile he kept up with his botanical interests, publishing a popular book on British lichen in 1870, and like Darwin, he was a member of the Royal Society, which awarded him a medal for “eminence in natural history.” Lindsay combined his interest in natural history and his experience treating the mentally ill in a two-volume masterwork published in 1880 titled Mind in the Lower Animals. It covered morality and religion, language, the mental condition of children and “savages,” and more. But it is the second volume, Mind in Disease, that is truly remarkable.
Like Darwin, Lindsay believed that the minds of insane people, criminals, non-Europeans, and animals were similar. Insane people could be recognized by “their use of teeth for vicious biting” and their “filthy habits.” Lindsay wrote that many of these insane people “ ‘eat and drink like beasts,’ tearing raw flesh and lapping water; they bolt their food and gorge themselves as certain carnivora do.” He also believed many preferred to spend time with other animals instead of people, acquiring something like animal language that allowed them to communicate with their nonhuman companions. Lindsay noted that an Italian “idiot” known as the Bird Man would leap on one leg, stretch his arms out like wings, and hide his head in his armpit. He also chirped when frightened or at the sight of strangers.
Lindsay also wrote about feral children like the Wolf Children of India, said to be raised by wolves. He classified them as a subtype of lunatic that walked on all fours, climbed trees, prowled around at night, lapped water like oxen, smelled food before eating it, gnawed on bones, refused clothing, and had no language, sense of shame, or ability to smile. Like generations of physicians before him, Lindsay understood his patients by analogy to other animals.
Insane humans were also compared to—and treated like—animals at the famous Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, the place that inspired the word bedlam for the chaos so often found within. Until the hospital outlawed visits by the general public in 1770, Bethlem was a popular spectacle. Watching the mentally ill, like the patient supposed to crow all day long like a rooster, was considered good entertainment, along with other pursuits, like prostitution, that flourished in and around the hospital. Despite serving as a human menagerie of the insane, Bethlem almost certainly housed sane people too, who had been committed because they were inconvenient or too eccentric for their families. As in an animal menagerie, the more uncontrollable patients were chained by the neck or foot to the wall and stripped naked. It’s not surprising that the stench and brutal conditions of the hospital, as well as the weird behavior of so many of its patients, tended to remind people of dog kennels or circuses. Conditions improved over time, but one 1811 visitor reported that chains and handcuffs were still being used, and some of the incurables “are kept as wild beasts constantly in fetters.”
Lindsay is intriguing because, despite working as the medical officer at another British insane asylum, he didn’t limit his studies to crazy humans acting like animals. He also refused to see animals themselves as dumb beasts. Instead Lindsay believed that animals themselves could go insane. He was even convinced that some human lunatics were more mentally degenerate than sane dogs or horses.
In Mind in Disease, a sort of Victorian mental illness field guide, Lindsay posited many forms of animal insanity, from dementia and nymphomania to delusions and melancholia.
Lindsay was also convinced that animals exhibited what he called “wounded feelings” of many kinds, and he tells story after story on the subject. There was a mother stork who “let herself” be burned alive rather than desert her young and a Newfoundland dog who was so sad after being scolded, then ceremoniously beaten with a handkerchief, and finally having a door shut in his face when about to leave the room with the nurse and the family children (his usual companions) that he “tried twice to drown himself in a ditch but survived . . . only to stop eating.” He died soon thereafter.
All of this was a worthy course of study for Lindsay not simply because he was convinced that insanity in other animals was a lot like insanity in humans but because it was also dangerous. “Mental defect or disorder,” as he called it, in horses, oxen, or dogs could be terrifying. The cause of violence or aggression in these animals was often puzzling and mysterious, and it inspired fear because there were so many horses, dogs, and cattle living in close proximity to people in his day, even in big cities. Angry oxen bent on murder or horses mad with the desire to kick or stomp were actual public health risks during Lindsay’s lifetime and for some time afterward.
The day after Oliver jumped out of our apartment window, Jude and I caught the first flight back to D.C. and drove straight to the animal hospital. A tech ushered us into the back area of the clinic and said, “We honestly have never seen a dog survive a fall like this. We’ve been bringing all of the vet students by to see him.” She led us to a bank of cages along a far wall and said that Oliver was a bit groggy but awake.
He was curled into a sleepy lump inside a cage that was barely big enough for him to turn around in. A rectangular area of his front left leg was shaved clean, and his freckled muzzle was marked with jagged cuts and scratches. “Beast!” I called, his nickname.
Oliver raised his head and looked straight at Jude and me. His tail thumped awkwardly against the floor of the cage and he tried to get up. I felt relieved and also useless, unable to figure out how to stroke him through the wire mesh.
The attending veterinarian approached and asked if we had a moment to talk. “The silver lining,” he told us, “is that Oliver is too sore to try and jump out of your apartment again any time soon.”
Even though Oliver had fallen fifty-five feet onto cement, to the shock of every vet and vet tech at the hospital, he hadn’t broken a single bone. He was bruised and sore and wouldn’t be able to walk for weeks, but the clinic staff told us that he’d make a full recovery, at least physically. “Make a sling from a bed sheet and carry him downstairs to use the bathroom every few hours,” the vet told us. “Also, you are going to have to see a veterinary behaviorist. I will give you some Valium you can dose him with now, but that is not a long-term solution.”
“What is the long-term solution?” I asked.
“Move to a first-floor apartment,” he said and left the room.
Had we known what to look for, Jude and I might have noticed the full extent of Oliver’s anxiety before he jumped out the window. Looking back, I was distressed by his distress, and humbled by it, but I’m not sure I ever completely understood what he was capable of.
As our first year with Oliver wore on, Jude and I had begun to notice ever stranger behavior and continued to wonder if Oliver had experienced something traumatizing when he lived with his previous family. His anxiety accreted steadily whenever we left the house. He then exploded in a slobbery, excited fiesta of return, even if we’d only gone downstairs to take out the trash. In the evenings he’d snap at flies that didn’t exist. Training his gaze on what seemed like invisible insects, he tracked them like a pointer. Oliver was in a kind of trance as he did this and couldn’t be distracted with cheese, bits of meat, or affection. He was also becoming something of a liability at the dog park; he had begun to approach the place as a sort of canine buffet, the smallest Dachshunds and pugs like unattended snacks. He hadn’t bitten another dog yet, but he would catch sight of a creature that piqued his interest and take off at a sprint, no matter how far away the other animal was, his large bulk stopping just short of bowling the dog over, terrifying their human companions. This did not seem to be done playfully.
Oliver also ate a variety of inedibles with gusto, things like plastic and sometimes hand towels; since he was years out of puppydom, Jude and I found this troubling. One night, after watching Oliver
retch for hours and produce nothing, we made a late-night trip to the vet hospital, where the staff took an X-ray and found a large obstruction in his lower intestine.
“Surgery is likely the only solution,” the vet told us, “but first we can try something else. It’s a long shot, but a doggy enema might work.”
An hour later a tech appeared in the waiting room and presented us with what I thought was a small brown, plastic accordion. “This is a first for us,” she said, “but we think it is an intact sleeve of Saltines.”
Oliver had not only eaten the sleeve of crackers whole; he’d also eaten the ziploc bag that they were stored in. His intestinal tract had compressed the plastic into what looked like a bile-cured musical instrument.
Then there were the wet paws. The soggy feet that Jude and I noticed early on were quickly traced to a habit in which Oliver licked his front paws for hours at a time. We tried changing his diet, washing him with different shampoo, and walking him along different trails, just to make sure he wasn’t suffering from an allergy, to no avail. The licking continued, to such an extent that tongued spots on his once lushly furred front paws turned bare and oozy. Sometimes he gave up on his paws and focused instead on his tail, chewing open a sore that he licked until it looked like pastrami and smelled worse. The vet told us that this was a compulsive behavior and to make him wear a plastic cone collar. Oliver, like most dogs, hated that thing. At first he tried to outrun it. He could see the cone out of the corner of his eyes, looming uncomfortably just out of reach. He would rush around the house, running a few steps and then looking anxiously side to side. But no matter how fast he dashed to and fro, the cone stayed in his side vision. We felt embarrassed for him and took it off.
By this point Oliver’s anxiety was beginning to wear on me. If we didn’t return home by five or six in the evening, we knew he would have destroyed pillows and towels or chewed on wooden moldings. He scratched so hard at our floorboards that it looked as if we lived with giant termites. Hiring a dog walker to come in the afternoons helped but didn’t fix the problem, and one afternoon when the dog walker took Oliver back to his own house and left him alone for an hour, Oliver clawed and chewed his couch upholstery into damp shreds. Jude and I ended up coordinating our schedules so that one of us went into work late and one of us came home early. If we were with him, outside of the fly-snapping and prey drive at the dog park, Oliver was the picture of calm. Alone he was a tornado.
I found this out because I filmed him. Jude and I were curious why some days were worse than others on this new Richter scale of destruction, so I borrowed a video camera and set it up to film the apartment when we left. There was, it turned out, something else besides being left alone that could send Oliver beyond the brink of composure: thunderstorms. If those two events were combined, it was as if someone had tossed an anxiety grenade into the apartment. He frothed at the mouth, paced, quivered, and settled down in the crack between the bed and the wall, only to get up again seconds later and try to wedge his large body underneath the coffee table. Unfortunately it seemed as though every other day in the summer the humidity built into a thunderstorm that crested a few hours before we returned home. Sitting in my office across town I’d see the flashes of light through the window, feel the thunder in my chest, and worry about Oliver, a quaking fur ball of nerves, back at the house.
In his beautiful book Dog Years, Mark Doty writes, “Being in love is our most common version of the unsayable; everyone seems to recognize that you can’t experience it from the outside, not quite. . . .
Maybe the experience of loving an animal is actually more resistant to language, since animals cannot speak back to us, cannot characterize themselves or correct our assumptions about them.” Caring for animals like Oliver happens outside of verbal language, but it’s a descriptive language all the same. Dogs in particular make us more expressive in all kinds of ways. They make us act more like dogs, rolling on the floor or hopping side to side to get them excited, a sort of transspecies basketball drill. They make us stop at good places to pee. They make us go to the park and notice the weather, mouldering bits of trash, entrances to the burrows of small animals. In short, they make us pay attention to what we might otherwise miss.
Dogs are also good barometers for relationships and often act like the third corner of a triangle connecting two people who otherwise would look only at each other. Oliver was no exception.
As his anxiety grew, and with it his need for structure, exercise, companionship, and routine, life became more stressful for Jude and me. We also had different ideas about what structure and routine actually meant. Jude had raised a guide dog for the blind, and while he knew a lot about training confident, calm dogs, I thought he lacked compassion for Oliver’s idiosyncrasies. Once, he’d taken Oliver on a work trip out of town and left him alone for the day at a friend’s house—something that would not have been a problem for an easygoing dog. Oliver, however, jumped out of the living-room window (luckily on the first floor) and brought the friend’s two dogs with him. It took hours for all three to be rounded up again. Jude, feeling that he couldn’t leave Oliver at his friend’s house again lest he make another jailbreak, took him to a nearby kennel and left him there for the rest of the week. When they came home, I felt that Oliver’s anxiety over being left alone had only increased. He jumped out of our apartment a few weeks later.
In general, of the two of us, Jude was much more likely to say, “He’s a dog. He can handle it.” Looking back, I don’t know who was right. I think we were both alone at sea in our particular ways. But I was beginning to think of Jude as more callous than he should be. And Jude thought I was becoming the kind of person who spent too much time and money worrying about something that we couldn’t fix and blamed him unfairly. I suspected that Jude lacked compassion not just for Oliver but for me too. Our leash was fraying.
My preconceptions about nonhuman minds were fraying too. I was suddenly seeing Olivers and potential Olivers everywhere. It was as if my own dog’s crisis had given me canine-tinted goggles that gave the world an anxiously doggish perspective. I still noted dogs doing dog things, but I was beginning to regard them as individuals with their own emotional weather systems that guided their behavior as they whizzed, panted, lolled, and humped. These weather systems could also compel them to do odd things. As I talked about Oliver’s puzzling behavior with other dog owners at the park, at dinner parties, with people I’d just met and others I’d known for years, I started to collect their stories as well.
It turns out that almost everyone has come across a disturbed animal at some point, and most people want to tell you about it. I’ve been pulled aside at almost every social gathering I’ve attended in the past six years to be regaled with tales of cats peeing only on left shoes or plucking their bellies bald while hidden under the bed, other dogs who’ve jumped from apartment buildings or reacted with mortal fear to stop signs or anything that makes a flapping sound, hamsters who wouldn’t get off their wheels, and parrots who developed violent fixations on people who wear baseball caps or have long hair.
Just how similar are these experiences to human ones? Extrapolating from a monkey’s seeming depression to a human’s, for example, may, because of our many primate similarities, be relatively easy. But what about the emotional experiences of other animals? Of dogs like Oliver? Was what he felt when left alone anything like the terror I remember feeling when I woke from a nightmare in the middle of the night at a friend’s sleepover party, unable for the first few minutes to remember where I was or find my mother?
MIT PhD in the history of science, Laurel Braitman has written for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Orion, and a variety of other publications. She is a TED Fellow and an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her new book Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves is available now.
