Anthropomorphism, according to the English dictionary, is “the showing or treating of animals, gods and objects as if they are human in appearance, character or behaviour”.

If you’ve studied animal behaviour, or ethology to give it it’s proper ‘ology' name, you will know that giving or comparing human behaviours and emotions with those in animals is a big no-no. I remember many a George Michael hair piece in the mid 80’s being completely destroyed by a lecturer-induced board-duster throwing incident. An acute and sudden onset of rage and derision would quickly follow any unintentional slip into the personification of animals by any ill-prepared and uninitiated student. After all, it was the great Pavlov (the bloke with the salivating dogs and the bell experiments) who proclaimed that animals should be thought of as "without any need to resort to fantastic speculations as to the existence of any possible subjective states”.

So there. Don’t do it.

Monty doing his fair share of incubating and looking thoroughly miserable in the rain. Really?

So when your dog greets you in an excited state after coming home from work , making those characteristic vocalisations, wagging his tail with vigour, is he not 'happy' to see you? How about the cat that hisses and spits at a new cat the first time she encounters next door’s new moggie. Is she not ‘unhappy’ at seeing this cat for the first time?

How about something less domesticated then. A mother chimpanzee is killed in a tribal attack and her surviving three year old daughter clings on to her lifeless body, orphaned. We can imagine this scenario, no photograph needed, and visualise the young chimp looking painfully ‘sad’ by the loss of her mother.

Surely, we can describe emotions in other animals and relate them to our own can’t we? (Warning: look out for a board duster approaching you at the speed of sound..)

How about if I told you about the frog I saw this morning on Cors Dyfi reserve in the rain, looking rather ‘sorry' for himself? How about the ‘happy' dung beetle I saw, soon after finding the largest piece of dung she’d ever seen? An ‘ecstatic' tapeworm anyone?

We’re all anthropomorphic to some degree, but we have given ourselves boundaries and rules as to when and which situation we choose to flick the switch and release our anthropomorphic tendencies. You can see why, from a purely scientific and objective point of view, an ethologist would gravely warn against the dangers of bestowing animals with human behaviours and emotions. The happy dog example is easy for us to relate to and understand, but good luck telling your friends in the pub tonight about the happy tapeworm you’ve befriended.

The tapeworm and the dog are made of the same biological materials - cells, DNA, amino acids, nerve cells and lots of other stuff. So where do we draw the line…… butterflies, mice, invertebrates, birds, apes?

It’s probably fair to say that the anti-anthropomorphic vigilantes of the 1980s and 90’s have mellowed down a bit over time. Maybe they ran out of board dusters. One of the greatest ethologists and primatologists of our time, Frans de Waal, reckons that "To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."

It’s the last word, “us”, that I find interesting. By observing and studying behaviours in animals that appear, in simple terms anyway, to resemble our own, we will learn more about emotions, behaviours and ultimately, what makes us human. After all, aren’t we predisposed to have anthropomorphic tendencies, hasn’t evolution given us this trait to help us make good decisions in life?

Look at these two chimps:

If you had to choose one chimpanzee over the other to be three feet away from on a dark Saturday night, which one would it be? Both apes have their mouths open and are showing both sets of teeth. They could be lions, bears, hippos, it doesn’t matter. Many studies have shown that we are born knowing the difference in behaviours between these two chimps. One could kill you, the other one almost certainly won't. Natural selection over many millions of years has given us the ability to recognise and distinguish between different, often subtle, behaviours. Get it wrong and you’re dead, and unless you’ve produced offspring yet, so are your genes.

So isn’t this a form of anthropomorphism that we’re born with then? Trying to work out what behaviours and emotions animals are displaying and making sense of them, and what simpler way of doing just that than by comparing them to our own behaviours. Understanding these behaviours and getting them right could, one day, save your life. It most certainly did save your ancestors' lives.

But there’s another problem. The states of happiness, sadness, tiredness, and loneliness, for example, are fairly easy to understand. How about something a bit more tricky?

What about jealousy? What about regret? What about shame? What about embarrassment? Does Monty get embarrassed if he drops a fish in front of Glesni?

If you watched this video without the sound, you would get a very different perception of Monty than if you had the speakers on. We have ‘anthropomorphasised’ Monty into being a bit dim, clumsy and embarrassed, just by putting the Steptoe music over it. Of course, he isn’t any of these things.

These more ‘complex’ emotions are generated in a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex - it’s the grey matter we learnt of in school. The cerebral cortex is the outermost layer of the brain involved with complex mechanisms such as states of consciousness and perception. Only mammals have a cerebral cortex, birds and other vertebrates don’t.  

So before deciding whether being anthropomorphic is appropriate or not, maybe the best way of analysing behaviours and emotions in other animals is on a linear scale, starting from simple life forms like single-celled animals, all the way up to apes and modern humans. Would being anthropomorphic towards animals higher up the scale be more appropriate than further down it?

The cells of an animals’ nervous system that transmit information are called neurons.

Our happy tapeworm has around 10,000 neurons, a cockroach around a million, the frog in the rain has approximately 16 million neurons, whilst the dog has around a trillion. The chimpanzee has 7 trillion whilst modern humans have, wait for it.. 85 trillion neurons. And a quarter of these are just in the cerebral cortex alone. So on that basis, with humans having a massive 12 times more neurons than even our closest living relative, we shouldn’t even think of being anthropomorphic to any species.

So strictly speaking, we shouldn’t really anthropomorphise even simple emotions to our ospreys, but we do. Why?

The Dyfi Osprey Project is a conservation project but it’s also about learning and discovering - telling a story helps us do this. How many times have we seen behaviours in the nest that we can relate to our own human lives? On a daily basis almost, when the ospreys are here, people on Facebook are putting words in Monty and Glesni’s mouths. He said this….she said that in reply.. and so on. “That Monty better get back soon with my fish supper, or there will be trouble…” That kind of thing.

It doesn’t do any harm, and it certainly doesn’t do any harm to the ospreys. I’ve yet to see an osprey harmed by GHAA - gross human anthropomorphic abuse! It helps us engage people with the ospreys, we can connect and relate to them. We are better able to tell their story. Ultimately, we are in a better position to protect them and other wildlife to boot.

Even the great man himself, Charles Darwin, was ‘guilty’ of the odd bit of anthropomorphism. From The Descent of Man, 1871:

"Even insects play together, as has been described by that excellent observer, P. Huber, who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies.”

The following year, 1872, Darwin published a book about a subject that had fascinated him all his life. "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”. The book was about those behaviours that are genetically determined. One rather famous emotion that, as far as we know only humans exhibit, is blushing. Why on earth do we blush Darwin thought, and do we blush when we’re alone or in the dark? He never did find out, but he did propose a solution in his book.. ”Several ladies, who are great blushers, are unanimous in regard to solitude; and some of them believe that they have blushed in the dark ... I have no doubt that this latter statement is correct.”

Well, he was right!  Just this year, over 140 years later, German and Dutch researchers using a thermomagnetic camera, demonstrated that women (and men) blush when they are on their own and even in the dark. Blushing is most likely a "social behaviour similar to laughing or yawning", they explained.  

Oh Clarach, please..

Perhaps there is no definitive answer as to whether we should attribute human behaviours and emotions to animals. If we choose to do so, but by understanding the boundaries and the situation we are doing it in, wouldn't that be acceptable? Whether you see yourself as the next Alfred Wallace, Johnny Morris, or Iolo Williams (all Welsh by the way!), you yourself should decide how high up the anthropomorphic ladder you should climb, nobody else.

I wish I could have that George Michael big hair back that I had in my youth in the 80’s. Monty wouldn't be too ‘happy' to see that mullet in his nest..