Father-Daughter Traditions Aren't Just for People

Not so long ago, people flatly denied that animals other than humans could have feelings or intelligence. I always found this a shock, however often I heard it. I could see how happy my dog was to see me when I came home from school. I could tell that when one of our cats passed away, the other mourned her. My decision to go vegetarian at age six was partly based on my inability to forget that the burger on my plate had been someone's child.

Now, my own alma mater, the University of Exeter, has brought forth new research to assert that animals have a great deal more to their inner lives than we've given them credit for. Scientists from the university's School of Biosciences have, through observing and experimenting with banded mongooses, concluded that even smaller-brained animals are capable of passing along rudimentary cultures and traditions. 

In mongoose families, the biological parents do very little in raising their young. Instead, the young choose a grown mongoose — who might be an older sibling, cousin, or uncle — to be something of a father figure-type mentor. This mentor teaches the young mongoose its preferred method of getting into hard-shelled prey. The researchers found that the young mongoose nearly always still used the learned method later in life, teaching it to its own tutees and thereby passing on a tradition.

With this type of research, science has finally caught up with what those of us living around animals have known all along. It seems (at long last) to be an accepted fact in the scientific community that animals do think and feel, even if it's questioned what they think and feel, and to what extent. Yet, why it's taken this long is a mystery to me.  Especially when one considers the unsurprising revelations of McGill University neuroscientist Jeffrey Mogil, that mice feel pain and even express themselves in many of the same ways as humans, or the recent studies that have shown chimpanzees experience grief.

Some, I know, still deny these things in animals. I've heard it said time and again that when animals appear to show emotion or intelligence — or display complex family dynamics — it's just some chemical or evolutionary reaction meant to serve a purpose, and it doesn't really mean anything. Well, if we want to get technical about it, couldn't we argue that's what emotion, intelligence, and family are, even in humans?

But when we're spending time with our dads, or watching mongoose pass on family traditions, we know there's more to it than that. We're not so different, after all.

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