Emotions: Feelings to die for

A few millennia ago, due to certain ‘mistakes’ on the part of mother nature, sea-bound whales chanced upon land. The rest, as they say, is history.

A quick survey of the phenomena concerned with the surroundings and the development of nature around that time leads us to a chilling question – did the animals kill themselves emotionally? Did the animals, with their well developed brains evolve too fast emotionally for their own good? Did the plants and trees, with their lack of decision-influencing brains have an ‘emotional’ edge over the animals and insects?

Well, owing to the obvious absurdity on the scale regarding the questions above, perhaps not. But of late, socio biologists have come up with a new claim – animals unconsciously time their demise. This revolting statement manifests itself to many spheres of conclusions, some seemingly far fetched. Take for instance the salmon, which swims upstream and up waterfalls. A totally suicidal mission in the interest of a bizarre homing and nesting habit. A mistake in evolution. Or, consider the sad story of lemmings. Lemmings are known to actually commit suicide. Each 4 years there is a cyclic demographical boom of the lemmings (small arctic rodents) followed by a desperate massive migration during which many die throwing themselves into the rivers, lakes and seas. It has been regarded as a collective suicide, conscious or involuntary, caused by over-population.

The attention which I wish to draw is to be focussed on the emotion behind such decisions taken by animals. Even psychologists of today have agreed that emotionally weak people are medically the toughest nuts to crack, if an otherwise easily and totally curable disease afflicts them. Plants, which as such suffer few diseases when compared to animals, seem to get over them in the course of an evolution interval or two. Rarely does a particular species of plants suffer from the same disease years on end. They totally adapt to the environment, and quickly.

This draws us to another question – the role played by emotions in mentally advanced species of organisms in the ability to adapt to new environments. Here though, the answer is obvious. The better the brain better is the chance of survival over diverse environments. But the answer pertains to only a long term quo. According to noted socio biologist Edward O. Wilson, 85% of all organisms with a reasonably advanced brain structure showed signs of mental depression when something they liked, or were used to, were taken away from them. Which means, in a way, the more mentally (and hence emotionally) developed an organism is, the chances of its survival in a new territory or environment is diminished. Not just that, even a small change in the DNA structure in the genealogy of such organisms has wide spread changes in its emotions, as is explained by the case of lemmings.

Before we conclude, let us examine a few more cases of over-development of the emotional instinct has made the fauna seem like fools before the ‘brainless’ flora around us.

• In a natural reserve in Zimbabwe, chased from their pride, luck seemed to have encountered a pair of old hungry male lions. They cornered a warthog, but the animal escaped in the last moment in a den. One of the lions, pushed by the hunger, tried to follow it, but he got trapped in the narrow hole. His partner tried to help him, pulling him out with the paw, but when the trapped lion started roaring of pain, he stopped. The trapped lion died asphyxiated, and the next day, his partner hardly managed to pull out his corpse. Sooner, the second lion was found dead next to the body of the other. He had refused to go hunting, and died of hunger.·
• This case occurred in Ostiglia (in Italy): Franz, a German shepherd dog, was lying on the railways line, near the railway station. Workers always chased away with stones the dog, but soon after the dog returned, and one day, the dog met with the Verona-Bologna train, and was run over. Franz had lost his master, condemned two weeks before to one year in jail. Since she had disappeared, the animal refused food, haunting through the city, like a suffering soul missing a beloved one
• Some birds, with a more complex behaviour, can suicide, like parrots. In a pair of pet love birds, the male got an injury that killed him in one hour. The female, witnessing the sufferance of her partner till he died, imitated all his movements, like she would have suffered the same way like him. She kept on imitating this even after her partner died, and this had a harming effect on her inner organs. Her vitality dropped, and she died soon.
  

Drawing congruities with human behavior in the same light is too obvious, and unnecessary. As we are at the threshold of a vast era of new-age discoveries and inventions, much attention has been diverted away from the essence of man, and the human soul. For, examining within the deep insides of our spirit has wrongly become synonymous to emotional weakness. The not-so-mystic ‘mystic’ yogis of India have long held it that salvation can only be achieved with disillusionment of worldly entities, and emotions.