ls ima lan thoughts/ mora

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Justice, co-written with Jessica Pierce, for a useful overview). Let us look at some evidence.

First, my favourite – delusional dog-owner that perhaps I am. A dog has been hit by a car, and lies unconscious on a busy motorway in Chile. The dog’s canine companion, at enormous risk to its own life – personally, I cringed my way through the video – weaves in and out of traffic, and eventually manages to pull the unconscious dog to the side of the road. You can check this

YouTube is a repository of evidence for apparently moral behaviour in animals out on YouTube – www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJTG6RRN4E – and you’ll find plenty more cases like it there. Indeed, it seems YouTube is rapidly becoming the biggest single repository of evidence for apparently moral behaviour in animals.

Eleanor, the elephant matriarch of her family, is dying. Unable to stand, Grace, a female elephant from another family, attempts to help her, lifting and pushing her back to her feet. She tries to get Eleanor to walk, nudging her gently along. But Eleanor falls again. Grace appears very distressed, and shrieks loudly. She persists in trying to get Eleanor back to her feet, to no avail. Grace stays by the fallen figure of Eleanor for another hour, while night falls. In the morning, she returns with another elephant, Maui, and they both try to get Eleanor to stand. Eleanor dies an hour later.

Grace is not unusual among elephants. A young female elephant suffers from a withered leg, and can put little weight upon it. A young male from another herd charges the crippled female. A large female elephant chases him away and then, revealingly, returns to the young female and gently touches her withered leg with her trunk. Joyce Poole, who described this event, concludes that the adult female was showing empathy.

Binti Jua, a gorilla residing at Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, had her fifteen minutes of fame when she came to the aid of three-year-old boy who had climbed on to the wall of the gorilla enclosure and fallen twenty feet to the concrete floor below. Binti Jua lifted the unconscious boy, gently cradled him in her arms, and growled warnings at other gorillas that tried to get close. Then, while her own infant clung to her back, she carried the boy to the zoo staff waiting at an access gate.

Continuing with the simian theme: Knuckles has cerebral palsy – the only known chimpanzee with this condition, one that leaves him impaired, both physically and mentally. The other chimpanzees in his group treat him quite differently from the way in which a young male would normally be treated. For example, Knuckles rarely has to contend with the intimidating displays of aggression typically directed at younger males by their older peers. Even the alpha male tolerates Knuckles, and often grooms him gently.

The evidence of apparently moral behaviour in animals is large and growing by the day – these examples barely scratch the surface. Indeed, much of the evidence has been around for a long time but – because of various idiosyncrasies in the development of psychology during the last century – languished unrecognised. As long ago as 1959, Russell Church demonstrated that rats would not push a lever that delivered food if doing tpm 1ST QUARTER 2014