Hi,
I found this very interesting so wanted to share!
Jean
****************
One of our newsletter readers sent us this article that was in the
Chicago paper. We thought it was kind of fun and interesting
and thought our animal lover friends would enjoy knowing for
certain that our pets laugh (probably at us). As a pet lover, we
would venture to say that you already knew this and you
most likely aren't even a scientist.
"Animals Enjoy A Good Laugh, Too, Say Scientists"
By Peter Gorner, Chicago Tribune Science Reporter
Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as
a scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to
revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest.
Joy and laughter, they say, are proving not to be uniquely human
traits.
Roughhousing chimpanzees emit characteristic pants of
excitement, their version of "ha-ha-ha" limited only by their anatomy
and lack of breath control, researchers contend.
Dogs have their own sound to spur other dogs to play, and
recordings of the sound can dramatically reduce stress levels in
shelters and kennels, according to the scientist who discovered it.
Panksepp, of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, sums up the
latest studies in this week's edition of the journal Science in hopes of
alerting colleagues to results that he terms "spectacular." The research
suggests that studying animal emotions, once a scientific taboo, seems
to be moving rapidly into the mainstream.
"It's very, very difficult to find skeptics these days. The
study of animal emotions has really matured."
"Neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of
the brain," Panksepp said, "and ancestral forms of play and laughter
existed in other animals eons before we humans came along."
Research in this area "is just the beginning wave of the
future," said comparative ethologist Gordon Burghardt, of the University
of Tennessee, who studies the evolution of play. "It will allow us to
bridge the gap with other species."
"Tickles are the key," Panksepp said. "They open up a previously
hidden world." Panksepp had studied play vocalizations in animals
for years before it occurred to him that they might be an ancestral
form of laughter. "Then I went to the lab and tickled some rats.
Tickled them gently around the nape of their necks. Wow!"
The tickling made the rats chirp happily--"as long as the
animal's friendly toward you," he said. "If not, you won't get a single
chirp, just like a child that might be suspicious of an adult."
During human laughter, the dopamine reward circuits in the brain
light up. When researchers neurochemically tickled those same areas in
rat brains, the rats chirped.
Panksepp said that laughter, at least in response to a direct
physical stimulus such as tickling, may be a common trait shared by all
mammals.
Laughter in chimps, our closest genetic relatives, is associated
with rough-and-tumble play and tickling, Provine found. That came as no
surprise.
"It's like the behavior of young children," said Provine, of the
University of Maryland Baltimore County. "A tickle and laughter are the
first means of communication between a mother and her baby, so laughter
appears by about four months after birth."
"We humans laugh on outward breaths. When we say `ha-ha-ha,'
we're chopping an outward breath," Provine said. "Chimps can't do that.
They make one sound per inward and outward breath. They don't have the
breath control to ... make the traditional human laugh."
The breakthrough in dog laughter was accomplished by University
of Nevada, Reno, researcher Patricia Simonet while working with
undergraduates at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe.
With extensive chimp research behind her, Simonet was open to
the idea of animal emotions, but the laughing sound she discovered in
dogs was unexpected: a "breathy, pronounced, forced exhalation" that
sounds to the untrained ear like a normal dog pant.
But a spectrograph showed a burst of frequencies, some beyond
human hearing. A plain pant is simpler, limited to just a few
frequencies.
Hearing a tape of the dog laugh made single animals take up toys
and play by themselves, Simonet said. It never initiated aggressive
responses.
"If you want to invite your dog to play using the dog laugh, say
`hee, hee, hee' without pronouncing the `ee,'" Simonet said. "Force out
the air in a burst, as if you're receiving the Heimlich maneuver."
When she played a recording of a laughing dog at an animal
shelter, Simonet found that even 8-week-old puppies reacted by starting
to play, something they hadn't done when exposed to other dog sounds.
"Some sounds, like growls, confused the puppies. But the dog
laugh caused sheer joy and brought down the stress levels in the shelter
immediately."
We thought you would want to know.
Yours for happy pets,
The Team
www.petmedicinechest.com
"Sick Pets Our Specialty, Healthy Pets Our Mission"
peth...@petmedicinechest.com
(712) 644-3535
PS. As always, call us or email us if we can help you with
any pet health questions.
PPS. Pass this along to another pet lover if you wish.
PPPS. Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety
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