Of animals and love

For this article I wanted to talk about animal love and how they show it to each other. 

This month we've had Mother’s Day and Easter is fast approaching – all events with love at their centre, whether it is showing love to each other, or our own mother or mother figure or where people commemorate Jesus giving his life for humans.

But can animals show and feel love? And if the answer is yes, then how do we see them demonstrate it?

The Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 now recognises sentience in animals and is something campaigners have fought for over a number of years.

The RSPCA says that this means “animals have the capacity to experience positive and negative feelings such as pleasure, joy, pain and distress that matter to the individual”.

But does this sentience mean they can love each other in the way that we humans can? How do you define love between humans? Is it that we value a person above ourselves, that we respect them and want to care for them?

We all love seeing those pictures of cute little kittens being fed by their caring mothers and elephant parents looking after their babies. 

Those who work closely with animals (for example, in rescues) see at close hand how capable animals are of showing love to each other. 

We have many examples of love shown by parent birds for example, not just in feeding and nurturing but by protecting them by putting their own lives at risk. I was involved in two very sad local rescues locally last year.

One was where a young pigeon was trapped in netting and the parents were trying desperately to free them. The other was where a human took baby birds and a mother out of a nest and stamped on them. This act was seen and the birds taken for urgent care.

The mother desperately clung onto life until she could no more, we thought she knew her babies were now safe and she had to give in to her terrible injuries.

We can also look at the distress mother cows go through when their newborn calves are taken away from them (an expose by Panorama in 2022 revealed that the distress caused to mother cows was one of the two main reasons members of the public choose not to consume dairy).

We have seen many cases of mother cows chasing after their babies or fighting the human trying to take their baby away.

Is this love? Is this not what humans would do in these situations? Is their love lesser than ours? Or is love just love?