Not very long ago, a scientific definition of a human was an animal that could use a tool. But in 1960, the British scientist Jane Goodall observed that chimpanzees could use blades of grass to extract termites from a nest, to eat them. Goodall, who died on Wednesday, would go on to become one of the most popular scientists in the world. A part of what made her endearing to ordinary people, though, infuriated her own scientific establishment. She named the chimps she was studying instead of maintaining an objective distance by numbering them, thus humanising them, a perilous thing to do in the study of animal behaviour. She defended her method through more sacrilege, stating that individual chimps had personalities, and that they could feel many things that were then considered unique to humans, like joy, grief and jealousy. She even observed that they could organise and go to war against rivals.

For long, the Western view was that animals were incapable of emotions and that they only had mindless instinct. René Descartes considered them complex machines. Goodall is greatly responsible for changing that opinion. Even so, the most regressive part of the study of animal behaviour is that humans keep looking for humans in animals.

If viral reels are any indication, people clearly wish to see big human traits in animals. So when a guy performs a magic trick to a monkey and it shows its teeth, people think it is baffled by the trick while it might only be showing aggression towards the annoying magician. And when an elephant is rescued, it has to only turn around for people to imagine that it is thanking the humans. And most of what people claim to see in dolphins, like their love for humans, is nonsense. They may not be seeking out humans for honourable reasons at all. In fact, some wild dolphins have tried to mate with swimmers.

We seek humanness in animals because we are narcissists. Even our gods are just us but in costume. Sophisticated and scholarly humans, too, ail from this condition though they might think it is science. For instance, when NASA searches for life in other worlds it spends billions looking for water and organic life as though that is the only way life is possible, something recognisable to us.

In our understanding of animals, we are limited by our senses. Even though scientists today accept that animals are not just machines, we simply cannot fathom what they feel, and the very meaning of feeling in an animal. In An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong writes, “People often assume that pain feels the same across the entire animal kingdom, but that is not true. Much like color, it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable… nothing is universally painful, not even chemicals in scorpion venom that specifically evolved to inflict pain.”

We cannot tell what an animal might find painful, nor whether it is actually experiencing pain the way we know it. This is one of the most comforting things I have read, partly because I want it to be true. Yong points out that pain does not exist in nature without a reason. Pain is information. And in the animal world, sometimes, the information does not dissuade an animal from avoiding the source of the information. Male praying mantises continue mating with females that are devouring them. Cockroaches eat their own guts. “Perhaps caterpillars don’t feel the pain of being eaten alive because they can’t alleviate that pain.”

Whatever it is, it is a feeling we simply cannot know, at least according to current technology. This is not a reason to boil lobsters alive. Just that when we speak of animal suffering we do not know what we are talking about. (Oddly, his entire book, which is about how animals sense the world, has no mention of Jane Goodall.)

There is no doubt though that animals feel a host of emotions that we can recognise. In a famous experiment that is available as video on YouTube, two monkeys in two separate cages are given different treats. One is given cucumber, while the other monkey, right next to it, is given grape. The first monkey, which presumably knows what it is to eat a grape, is given only cucumber. Watching the other one get grapes, the first monkey is clearly livid. After accepting the first slice of cucumber it throws the rest back at the researcher. Frans de Waal, the primatologist who presented the video, said, “This is basically the Wall Street protests you see here.” The video is part of his talk, “Moral Behaviour in Animals”, which is a bit of a stretch.

This, in fact, is an experiment that shows very clearly not moral outrage in monkeys but how humans, including scientists, want to see humans in animals. One monkey, which knows the taste of sugar, wants the grape instead of cucumber. Its behaviour need not be elevated as a “moral” objection. If the scientists had conducted the experiment without the second monkey, the first monkey, upon seeing the option of grape, would have behaved in the exact same fashion. As a person who has corrupted some cows in India and one donkey named George in Italy by introducing them to bananas, I attribute the monkey’s aggression to sugar rather than to any “moral” outrage. Elephants, for instance, routinely raid vehicles to steal bananas and sugarcane, not out of any moral sense.

A common way to humanise animals is to see grief in them. Even Goodall used words like “mourning” to describe how chimps reacted to death. However, it is unlikely that animals fully perceive the finality of death. A lot of grieving behaviour may not be that at all. For instance, primates are known to carry their dead babies around even for days. But then they do not carry the babies with any care; they keep banging the corpses against things. Some mate while holding their dead babies. Recently, a monkey in a Czech zoo carried its dead baby for days, then started eating it. We don’t do that, though sometimes when I see some young people I fully understand why some species eat their young.

(My latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us’)