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Do animals experience love like people do?

Dr. Gregory Berns is a researcher, author, and distinguished professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University. In his book Cowpuppy, he writes about how he transitioned from doing his work in a lab to a farm, and about the surprising emotional lives of the cows that he began raising.
In this month’s Highlight Podcast, Vox environmental correspondent Benji Jones and Berns talk about how research on dogs and cows can lead to surprising philosophical questions, including the possibility that mammals might share what many think of as our most human of emotions — love.
What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation edited for length and clarity. We encourage you to listen to the full version the player below:
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Are our dogs in a relationship with us just for the food or do they actually love us? Did you figure it out?
I think that we eventually did come to a reasonable conclusion about that question. We did an experiment with either a piece of hot dog on the end of a stick or simply praise from the owner and asked, “What goes on in the dog’s brain when we hold up these cues?” We were specifically looking at their reward system to see if one caused more reward activation in the brain than the other.
The answer, somewhat surprisingly, was that for about three-quarters of the dogs that we studied, the food and praise were essentially equal to them. And then for about a quarter of them the praise was even more valuable in terms of brain activation than the food was.
In this case, you are defining love as a want or desire for a human without knowing that there is food involved. So love is non-transactional in a way.
That’s exactly how I define it. We have to acknowledge that there are of course different forms and probably it’s different for everyone to some extent. But I think the important part is that it’s non-transactional, meaning it’s not dependent on something else.
What did those results mean for our understanding of animal behavior and cognition?
Philosophically, it’s important because it suggests that, while we’re talking about dogs, I don’t really see a reason to stop with dogs. It shows that other animals have this same capacity for feelings that we have. So, what does that say about how we treat them? Should we give them the same considerations that we do for people?
You wrote a book called Cowpuppy. I think the title reveals that maybe these animals are not so different from dogs. How did a neuroscientist studying dogs become interested in cows and cow brains?
It goes back to Covid. Like a lot of people in 2020, I was essentially locked down at home doing everything over the computer and having a bit of cabin fever. I started looking for farms and amazingly, I found a beautiful property about 50 miles south of Atlanta. Probably about a month-and-a-half later, we plopped down in rural America not knowing anything about farming, agriculture, or livestock. I had this vague notion that I would start growing vegetables. I’d use animals to create nitrogen [by eating] grass, and it would be recycled into the food garden. I landed on the idea of getting some cows, because they’re great at eating grass and then they’ll turn it into manure.
So where do you go to get cows? The normal way would be to go to the auction. If I were kind of a serious farmer, that’s where I would go. But those are big animals. They weigh well over 1,000 pounds each, and that was intimidating for me. So I chanced upon an ad on Craigslist for miniature cows. And I thought, hey, that sounds about right. So I ended up with a bull and two cows. They’re called miniature zebus. They’re about 300 or 400 pounds each.
You’ve studied the minds of animals, of dogs specifically. Were you immediately already interested in the mind of a cow?
Well, no, I wasn’t. Because I got them to be mowers and manure producers. I was just trying to learn how to take care of them, but that changed pretty quickly, because when the guy dropped them off he told me, “You’re going to have a surprise.” Well, the cows were pregnant. The first one calved two weeks later. That’s how I open Cowpuppy, with the birth of that first calf.
It was emotional for me. It was moving. I could see these bonds forming between the calf and the mama and these very deep and complicated social relationships with the other members of my little herd. Then as the other calf was born, we went from three to five. I kind of fell in love with them. And they in turn, I say, fell in love with me, or I should say they accepted me into their group by showing me affection in ways that I found amazing.
Do you think that cows have a capacity to love humans as well?
Absolutely. And in many ways, I think it’s deeper than what I’ve seen with dogs. This gets back to whether it’s transactional or not. With dogs, we share food — they sit at our feet at the table and we give them table scraps. And that works because our digestive systems are very similar because we’re both omnivores, so we can eat the same food.
But that’s not at all the case with cows. Cows are ruminants. They eat grass. So to say that I feed them is not exactly correct. I manage their environment. I manage the pasture so that they can forage to eat and I give them treats from time to time called cattle cubes. But that’s not what they’re really about. Once they got used to me and accepted me, all they wanted were neck scratches. And then when they really got comfortable with me, then they started rolling over for belly rubs.
What are the moments where you really felt loved by a cow?
Ricky Bobby, that’s the name of the bull, he was kind of always goofy. From day one, he didn’t have a lot of boundaries, he would always come up to me. Initially it was for little cattle cubes, and he would stick out his tongue and wave it around. Sometimes I would just take a bucket and put them in the feed trough and they gobble them up. Well, he was such a pig about it. One night he just gobbled up too many and they lodged in his throat. And so he started gagging and his eyes peeled back and snot came out of his nose and he crapped himself.
I didn’t know what to do. So instinctively, I went up to him and I started rubbing his neck and trying to move whatever was lodged there down. That seemed to relax him and he swallowed and it was fine. That changed our relationship very significantly because after that, he started coming up to me and, instead of sticking out his tongue asking for food, he’d stretch out his neck and just put it on my shoulder. Really touching.
The neat thing about cows is because they’re so social and they live together with each other, they learn from each other. So pretty soon the others started doing it, too. The last one to do it of the originals was Lucy. One evening, six months into this, she came up to me and put her head down and wobbled a little bit, which is what they do when they want one of the other ones to lick them. She was asking me to scratch her neck. It was at that point she accepted me into the group and was asking me to reciprocate with some form of affection.
Is the capacity for love, as we’ve been talking about it, different from intelligence?
I would have to say so, because if they were linked closely together, then you would be denying the capacity of love to infants, to children who haven’t reached their full intellectual capacity.
What are the remaining questions that we haven’t answered that you want to work on now?
My goal when it comes to animal research is to understand how animals think from their perspective as much as possible, not as much from the human perspective and not so much for how it is going to better humankind. Although I think it does in the end — anything that improves our relationship to the animals that we share this planet with, I think benefits everyone. And ultimately, it’s my goal to make life better for everyone, whether you’re a human or another animal.

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