Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You Read Online Free PDF Page B

truly experiences envy, but it’s pretty close. To demonstrate conclusively that animals are envious, you first have to demonstrate that they comprehend that other animals have their own experience. Then you have to show that the animal can measure a difference between what they have and what a competitor has. And then, finally, you have to show that this imbalance makes the animal react negatively. That’s a tall order. Even if yousee animals doing the kinds of things humans do when they’re envious, like stealing from one another, you can’t really know it’s envy unless you do a rigorous set of experiments.
    But those experiments have been done with capuchin monkeys, and the results are pretty compelling. 13 Researchers trained some monkeys to put a small rock in a researcher’s hands. As a reward, the monkey would either get a grape, which they loved , or they’d get a little cucumber, which they found tolerable but far less exciting than a grape. To bring envy into play, the researchers fed monkeys their grapes and cucumbers in side-by-side cages, so the monkeys could always see what their neighbor was getting.
    So long as the reward a monkey got was the same as the reward their neighbor got, monkeys played along, happily taking grapes or cucumbers in exchange for their work. But if a monkey got a cucumber while it could see its neighbor getting a grape, the monkey got angry. Monkeys would sometimes throw the cucumber back in the face of the researcher or else just stop playing the game altogether. In essence, monkeys refused to do the same work if they saw someone else getting paid more for the same job.
    Now, what I’ve described so far might be monkey envy, but there’s another possible explanation. Perhaps the monkey getting the cucumber is reminded of how awesome grapes are when it sees the grape next door. Maybe it’s not envy but just that it’s hard to eat crap food when you think about delicious food. Maybe rather than envy, the monkey just feels disappointment.
    Well, the researchers designed their experiment to rule out disappointment so they could be sure that what they were seeing really was envy. The researchers did that by making sure that in those scenarios where both monkeys were getting cucumbers, they could both see a bowl of grapes right in front of them. Thefact that monkeys didn’t get mad those times showed that the thing upsetting the monkeys wasn’t being reminded of how awesome grapes are. The trigger was clearly the difference between what a monkey got and what its neighbor got. The careful design of those experiments nicely showed that capuchin monkeys experience envy.
    Dogs show the same tendencies. In another study, researchers put pairs of dogs side by side and asked them to “give a paw.” The dogs obeyed the order up to thirty times in a row when researchers gave both dogs treats as rewards, or even when the researchers gave neither dog a treat. But if one dog got treats while the other one did not, the dog getting nothing quickly stopped obeying commands. Again, researchers made sure it was envy rather than disappointment by leaving the treats out all the time, right where dogs could see them. 14
    I suspect that many other animals experience envy, but experiments just haven’t been done for them. (Experiments have been done with chimpanzees, but the results are less clear.) 15 There may be many other kinds of envious animals in nature, but without those kinds of experiments, you can’t ever know for sure. When you see a pigeon at the park stealing a piece of bread from another pigeon, you can’t tell if it was envious of the other pigeon’s property or if it just wanted some bread. The fact is, though, that nature’s a tough place because animals steal from one another. Splitting hairs about their inner emotional state sort of misses the point.
    Besides, envy can be a good thing. If a kid admires the possessions of the doctor next door and that motivates her to go to