Honor in Animals

From Shelley on Tazi List comes this fascinating Time article on play and fairness in dogs and other social animals. "...Thanks to Bekoff and other researchers, ethologists are also starting to accept the once radical idea that some animals--primarily the social ones such as dogs, chimps, hyenas, monkeys, dolphins, birds and even rats--possess not just raw emotions but also subtler and more sophisticated mental states, including envy, empathy, altruism and a sense of fairness. "They have the ingredients we use for morality," says Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to the monkeys and chimps he studies".

"Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity..."

(Which is also one of the very few late Ezra Pound lines worth quoting).