Slanted Science

New research out of Italy suggests that female rhesus macaque monkeys treat their babies just like humans do: kissing, intense eye contact, raised voice pitch and more. As well as being fascinating and more than a bit cute, will this bring anything to the ethical debate concerning how we treat primates in both captivity and research?

Pier Francesco Ferrari (University of Parma, Italy) and others have just published their research in the journal Current Biology. They had spent some time monitoring how the macaque mothers interacted with their offspring during the first two months of life. Pier, describing what they found, says:

“What does a mother or father do when looking at their own baby? They smile at them and exaggerate their gestures, modify their voice pitch—the so-called ‘motherese’—and kiss them. What we found in mother macaques is very similar: they exaggerate their gestures, ‘kiss’ their baby, and have sustained mutual gaze. For years, these capacities were considered to be basically unique to humans”

Other human-like behaviors apparently included the baby repeating lip-smacking noises made by its mother, and the mother going so far as to turn baby’s face to hers so she could make sustained eye contact.

Pier says:

“[Now] we can trace the evolutionary foundation of those behaviors, which are considered crucial for the establishment of social exchange with others, to macaques…[they are signs] of interpersonal communication and perhaps even a mutual appreciation of others’ intentions and emotions”

Our treatment of primates, in the entertainment, educational and scientific realms, has long given me a slight prickly feeling of unease. I’ll be posting sometime my own thoughts, and a look at those of others much better qualified than I, sometime. So here, I’ll just leave this thought:

At what point in our knowledge of primate behaviors and feelings do we decide that, actually, they are far to closely aligned with our own to permit our use of them as pets and laboratory models? And how small a step is it then to extend this viewpoint to a few other species (I’ll throw pigs, rats, birds and whales in there for a start)? Let me be clear, at this point it seems to me that the use of certain species in certain types of scientific research is still of such benefit to man that it outweighs the ethical argument against it. But aht may not be the case for long. Please feel free to give your own opinions on this in the comments.

Don’t Hold Your Breath, But This May Lead To: widespread acceptance that many more species than we ever thought are actually just about as human as we are in their behaviors and feelings. Just without the communication skills we have.