Now that Ruby the elephant is back at the Los Angeles Zoo, questions remain: Is she happy? And how can you tell?
The 43-year-old African elephant came home this weekend after 1 1/2 years at the Knoxville Zoo. Ruby's planned transfer to Knoxville, where it was hoped she would be a good maternal role model for other elephants, prompted animal rights activist Catherine Doyle to sue to keep Ruby in Los Angeles and later for her return, claiming the elephant was sad and lonely in Tennessee.
The elephant's return was hastened by a videotape, shot in Knoxville by Gretchen Wyler of the Hollywood office of the Humane Society of the United States and televised in July, showing Ruby standing alone and swaying, according to Wyler, like "a desperate elephant."
But experts don't agree on what animals feel. Naturalist Charles Darwin wrote about animal emotions, but for much of the 20th century to say an elephant was sad was to be guilty of anthropomorphism, the unscientific projection of human feelings on animals.
Today, an increasing number of scientists believe that animals have emotions.
Whether those emotions are comparable to human ones is another matter.
"Do animals have emotions? Most people are willing to say they do. Do we know much more than that? Not really," said John Capitanio, associate director for research at the California National Primate Research Center and a professor of psychology at UC Davis.
Understanding is fairly limited even about human feelings. "There's not much known about positive emotions in humans compared to negative emotions. We know a lot about fear and a lot about anger," emotions that cause measurable physiological changes, Capitanio said.
In animals, said Capitanio, who has studied individual differences in rhesus macaques, "we don't know what love looks like, in spite of what animal activists would say. When we see a chimp cuddling its infant, we don't know if its internal feeling state is the same as what humans feel when they embrace their children."
"It's quite a stretch for humans to look at an animal and interpret their behavior," said Michael Hutchins, director of conservation and science for the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. in Silver Spring, Md.
"Animals can't talk to us so they can't tell us how they feel."
The inability of animals to speak -- there's the rub.
Everybody knows that Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn is happy that Ruby is back in L.A. He said as much.
