![]() ![]() The next step – whether horses feel jealous of a rival who may threaten the bond they share with their human owner – is a sizable leap. This last argument speaks to the possibility of jealousy existing in horses that form enduring bonds within a herd. Similarly, jealousy might arise in animals that require cooperation from other group members for survival and in which alliances are formed, and can be threatened by rivals. Harris and Prouvost argue that this primordial jealousy may have evolved in social species (such as dogs) with multiple dependent young who compete for protection, food and affection from their mothers. This behaviour was significantly reduced when the owners ignored their dogs to play with a set of plastic pails or to read a book. Some even tried to attack the offending stuffed interloper. They pushed and nosed and positioned themselves between the toy dog and the owner. ![]() When owners ignored their own dogs to play with a realistic looking stuffed dog, most of the dogs showed behavioural responses that even hard-core scientists would have to call jealousy. The researchers replicated these infant studies with dogs and discovered that dogs react similarly. They note several studies demonstrating that infants as young as six months will fuss when their mothers pay attention to a realistic-looking doll, but not when mothers turn their attention to a book. Jealousy has been predominantly studied in romantic couples where cognitive appraisal of the threatening situation is key (Is she more desirable than I am? Is she going to be alone with him? Will he leave me?) But social psychologists, Christine Harris and Caroline Prouvost, from the University of California, reasoned that jealousy may well have a primordial form that could be triggered without complex cognitive understanding about the self, or appraisal about the meaning of the interaction. And, recent research is indicating that this may be so. Cognitive ethologists (those who study the mental capacities, emotions and motivations of animals) challenge the assumption that secondary emotions suddenly appeared in humans without precursors in other animals (e.g. Up until recently, most psychological researchers believed, as did I, that animals and humans may share primary emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger and fear, but that secondary emotions, such as pride, guilt, shame and jealousy, require self-consciousness, self-reflection, and an understanding of the conscious intentions of others, and that these qualities reside solely with humans and possibly some primates and cetaceans. When he finally took an aggressive lunge at me in what certainly seemed to be a desperate effort to gain my attention, and later used his head and chin to draw me into his chest and hold me there, this cynical scientist decided to rethink her assumptions. That was the stuff of anthropomorphic mumbo-jumbo, the dangers of which I have cautioned against in many previous articles…right?īut as I watched my formerly interactive and personable horse lunging at any horse that passed by, aggressively kicking the walls of his stall at the new arrival, and/or standing with his head pressed into back wall of his stall in the most heart-breaking apparent depression, I began to wonder. Although I expected my old horse to feel somewhat miffed now that he was one on a list of many instead of my number one guy, I was convinced that he was insufficiently cognitively sophisticated to experience real jealousy. This past spring I retired my old dressage horse, handed over the reins to a hunter/jumper professional at our stable to retrain him as a hunter, and brought in my new dressage horse to the stall next door. ![]()
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