And Now - Empathic Ravens!

Over the last couple of weeks we have been besieged by a number of articles trying to persuade us that chimps show enormous empathy and signs of distress over the dead. Always, such displays of emotion are held to be further proof - if proof were needed - that chimps are incredibly closely related to us, and share much, if not all, cognition with us. Now comes this paper by raven-enthusiast Thomas Bugnyar and his colleague, Orliath Fraser, suggesting that ravens who are uninvolved bystanders to an act of aggression are capable of displays of "post-conflict affiliation" to the victim or loser. The victim invariably shares a more rewarding relationship with the bystander than the bystander does with the aggressor. The researchers rule out the interpretation that bystanders acted thus to reduce the chance that they would also be attacked - the victims of re-directed aggression. They point out that, in the many cases where such behaviour has been noted in chimps, there has never been any mention of the victim soliciting bystander affiliation and that the victim raven invariably directs such solicitation toward those bystanders with which it shares a strong relationship - perhaps to reduce the chance that it will be attacked again.

But is it "consolation" which implies a degree of emotional concern - empathy? The authors believe so because the affiliation is more likely to occur after a severe "dust up" where the victim appears to be in some clear distress. Furthermore, at the risk of contradicting some earlier statements, they maintain that, in some cases, consolers, or would-be consolers, were attacked by the former aggressor - implying that "consolation" is not without risk and therefore is a case of altruism. Ravens, unlike rooks which have a long-lasting pair-bond social structure, live for much of their lives in more loosely related non-breeding communities, and therefore form patterns of valuable relationships with a number of individuals.

All very interesting stuff but I cannot help feeling queasy about the use of such loaded terms as "consolation", "empathy" and "altruism" to describe these behaviours. They are no more acceptable in descriptions of raven social behaviour than they are in, for instance, Frans de Waal's descriptions of post-conflict affiliation and "concern" in chimps. However, the important thing to note is that such behaviour is not the exclusive province of a near-related primate. It is shared by a bird and, as such, cannot be used, tiresomely, to underscore the evolutionary proximity between us and chimps. The behaviour has its roots in similarities between the social complexity of ravens and chimps not their cognitive or genetic proximity to humans.