News on the tits: the great tits and the blues are now using the window feeder. Just as well as the squirrels keep emptying the special tit feeder. One blue tit has become somewhat obsessed by his reflection in the tattoo shop's back windows.
While I was out at Ring Haw, we had a conversation about wild animals always being on the edge: the idea that it's a dreadful scrabble to survive. I wanted to say that they experience happiness too. It seems anthropomorphic to say that although we are happy to claim they experience fear, hunger, anger, perhaps, and other negative emotions like pain and even loneliness. I said that birds look happy when they preen. Ian and Claire said that's for survival, they have to keep their wings clean. But, I said, that does not obviate an experience of pleasure. Sex is "for the continuation of the species" but can still be pleasurable (as far as I recall). If you want to be reductionist about it, pleasure is the drive that leads us and birds to do things, like preen, that are good for survival. The emotions are the motivations. If you want to go with trans-species psychology, animals (including birds) have the same neural correlates and hormonal responses for consciousness and emotion.
Besides which, so much research on animals has been done after habitats have been reduced, humans have stressed them, ecosystems have been damaged, that we are not seeing animals devoid of these new and unprepared for stressors.
I see much evidence of time to bathe in the sun, preen one's mate, explore, subsing, doze, play. Why make these into mechanistic survival strategies? It's the positive feeling that matters to the animal in the moment. They are not thinking, "Well, lookee here, if I just nibble the bugs from Mrs Mohican Blue, she'll be more tied to me and healthier."
I came across an apt comment from Craig Holdrege - he of the good plant book:
We do great injustice to animals when we make them into embodiments of our theories (as when we look at them as evolutionary survival strategies) or project our all-too-human characteristics onto them. With the open-ended question “Who are you?” and the will to let the animals themselves be my guide, I avoid the mechanistic and anthropomorphic interpretations that unfortunately take hold of so much writing about animals. - Seeing the Animal Whole: And Why It Matters
When I watch the birds, of course I do not know if they are "happy", but given enough time and enough exploration into their world and their behaviour (the calls and the actions) I do really believe that they live large lives replete in a range of feeling and being. Positive, negative and neutral. And they are the agents of their lives, not puppets of our theoretical understanding.
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