Naga_Kanya
Active Member
I have PMed some to a few members on here before, and I might have posted in previous threads - I'll scan through and have a look.
Otherwise, I'm at work at the moment so will have to take a look through my material when I get home.
I'll PM you and well done for being interested in material other than that posted on internet forums - you seem to be a rarity
Melissa, I'm incredibly interested in this, even if I'm coming late to the party. If it's not too much trouble would you mind PMing me with the articles too? My best friend's a philospoher in the field of cognitive science - we have long talks about the issues of measuring animal cognition, and it's something I'm very interested in, both from an academic perspective, but also from personal interest as an animal keeper/pet owner. If you could that would be great!
I may be doubling up on what others have already posted (I'll find out as I read down I guess), but I think most definitely that snakes can recognise an individual. I haven't seen anything approaching emotion in my snakes, (though like most humans I do tend to describe their actions in emotional terms for my own amusement/good story-telling, it's not what I *objectively* believe) but my Prossie and Stimsons both come straight to me like arrows if they're outside and something threatens them, or if I hand them to someone else and they're not comfortable with them. I particularly had a "breakthrough" with Guin (my Proserpine) a little while after I got her from her previous owner who hadn't handled her in over 2 years. Guin was snappy and anti-social, and I did a *lot* of work gentling her and getting her acclimatised to being handled again. One night I had her out with me on the back patio for ages; it was chilly and she snuggled up in the small of my back, under my jumper. After that, she stopped being snappy, and when I took her out, if something startled her she'd make a beeline for me and wrap around me until she felt confident enough to head off exploring again.
I don't kid myself that this was "love"; rather it seems a recognition that "this creature = safety/warmth", but she does it to the point that a number of others have commented on it. She also now lets me wrap my hand entirely round her head, when she doesn't like others touching her there. Again, I think that's a familiarity response rather than affection, but it does indicate trust to a certain degree, to me (which I find touching enough, without needing it to be love). I don't think she needs to have emotion to experience that, but I'm prepared to keep an open mind.
Emotion in animals is not transmitted solely - or in some animals mainly - through the face. Anyone who has kept pets or spent time studying wild animals will know that there are a vast array of responses indicating states of mind or 'emotional' states which are completely non-facial - muscle tension in various parts of the body, tail response, breathing changes, movement of limbs, even angles of the head and neck, which are close to the face without being facial, etc. I've worked with horses for nearly 30 years; they have a huge array of non-facial communications. My reptiles do too, to a lesser degree (admittedly it's harder when you're pretty much just a tube). I can tell a lot about what "mood" they're in by their body language. We as humans communicate to a large extent by using our faces, so it stands to reason we instinctively try to do the same with other animals. But, in the same way we would need to learn French to speak properly with someone from France, we also need to learn animal to understand them, rather than judging them by our standards. It took years for scientists to ascertain that cats were not less intelligent than dogs, because they were testing them both in the same ways. For years, our best and brightest thought you could test a pack animal and a solitary hunter using the same reward/problem-solving tests. As an intelligence test for humans that doesn't speak volumes.
I'm also interested in ideas of animals and play, when it comes to demonstrations of abstract thought. There was an observation from people studying cephalopods recently that octopi were displaying traces of mischief and a sense of humour (from memory one of the octopi in question was sneakily squirting its keepers down the back of their neck, then flushing with the "pleasure" colour), and what that might mean in animal terms. Many domestic animals have quite a sophisticated sense of play. I haven't seen this in snakes, and I don't have lizards (yet!) to observe, so I'm not sure this relates to reptiles, but it's another way to think about abstract thought in animal cognition.
Thanks so much for this thread, Longqi. It's made for some fascinating reading, and made me want to do a lot more reading into the subject. I'm also interested to hear of any more anecdotal evidence (like RedLittleJim's experiments). Thanks everyone.
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