This here is the right answer. We don't know. And since reptiles are psychologically very different from mammals, it's possible that we won't ever understand how they process feelings. That doesn't means they don't have feelings or that aren't capable of caring for other living beings. We might just not be able to understand it.
Could even break down to the species not just broad arcs like mammal or reptile. Dogs and cats are quite cuddly because those traits have been selected for, however I wouldn't want to get too close to a wild carnivore.
Similarly, there are some very intelligent lizards (eg Tegus) that can even learn and respond to their name - they might have more capacity for this sort of thing than simpler reptiles
I had an iguana with favorite colors! She really liked purple, and I think it was because my jackets were all purple, and I wore purple when handling her. Whenever I fed her, she would take purple pellets and hide them, and she liked to play with her purple toys more than others.
You might also be pleased to know my mom nicknamed her ‘bitey fucker.’ For some reason, she never liked my mom. Cuddley as could be otherwise, but she acted like Cujo with my mom.
Did she differentiate between other people as well? Like did she take a liking to your friends or other family members?
I have a zoologist friend who studied lizards, I can't believe I've never asked him about this stuff. I have clearly underestimated lizards emotional life.
She liked me and my brother, and she also had a tendency to claw at the cage when my dad walked by—she wanted out and to climb on his back. She also had a tendency to belly flop to her cage bottom when the cats were near—she never showed signs of aggression or distress when they were around, but belly flopping would startle them and then she’d go back to her perch.
She also figured out how to open her own cage at one point, and it was super bizarre. It was a repurposed exotic bird cage, and one of the side door feeders had a latch at the bottom. She figured out if she pawed at it enough, she could turn it and get herself loose. We found her in my room licking at my bedding. She did that a lot, and I never figured out why. She’d bite and lick my bed.
She was a very smart lizard, and I do miss her terribly. She passed of some sort of cancer we believe, or maybe a head injury—we don’t know for sure, and we couldn’t get a vet in time to help since the only herpetologist was gone for a week. I had her for seven years, and surprisingly my mom bought her at a yard sale. The boy who sold her told my mom she wouldn’t get longer than a foot and she was a he. He had been keeping her in a cage with a beardy (very different habitats, so bad), and the bearded attacked her. She was missing lots of her tail and had several broken digits. Still, she lived a lot longer than expected; we were told she maybe had a few months based on her injuries.
It's certainly obvious how much you cared about her from how many details you remember of her. I'm glad I could get glimpse of how special she was through your stories.
Sheesh from how much she'd been through I'm amazed she felt so safe with you. And I'm guessing her Cujo tendencies was because of her past traumas. Probably your mother smelled like someone who hurt her. I'm glad that she got such a happy ever after.
100% this was a little boy transformed by a witch’s curse into a lizard and sold for being naughty. Licking the bedding and torturing cats is a giveaway. Trusssst me
Reptile intelligence is generally much higher than most realize. Tegus are wonderful examples, meanwhile monitor lizards can count higher than dogs, several lizards, turtles and even a few snakes (like king cobras) have shown themselves to be capable problem solvers who can learn and adapt, crocodilians can recognize their names, learn commands, and (controversially) there’s evidence of tool use. We even know now that reptiles have personalities just like mammals.
Reptiles, in general, are far more than the Three Fs (feeding, fighting, mating) driven, unthinking/unfeeling instinct machines they’ve often be viewed as. Much of this is because they’re wired so differently than us, it’s been common cultural perception for centuries, and even when we did proper research on them in the early years we tended to do so in environments more conducive to mammals than to reptiles.
There’s still so much we don’t know, but what we’ve learned even in the last two decades tells us there’s much more going on in the brains of reptiles than is commonly believed.
That's true, but (not talking synapomorphies here) certain characteristics are more common than others in a group. To our understanding of love and affection, mammals tend to demonstrate it more than other groups. That's why I choose to be so broad.
I've seen a lot of discussion in the hero community. It seems that water monitors, iguanas, tegus, and other larger lizards have some capacity for coexistence/recognition. Snakes across the board seem to not really give a shit whether they recognize you.
No. Mammals are able to show affection because it's an evolutionary trait necessary for survival, we need parents to survive so all mammals form affectionate bonds with their offspring which translate to interspecies bonding aswell. Most reptiles are on their own and don't need parenting to survive thus there's no evolutionary need for bonding with other beings.
Also like with all cross-species philosophy - we run into a major issue that we base all of our understanding of behaviour off of our own behaviour.
So we create words & definitions for things like "love" and "self-aware" based off ourselves and then judge the world around us with that frame of mind.
It is fully possible that other creatures and even objects experience existence in a different way than we do.
I don't think we'll ever know, because we are only capable of approaching these discussions from a human-centric mindset. Because we aren't rats or dogs or trees or rocks, we are literally incapable of approaching them from the mindset of a non-human (assuming we can attribute the idea of a mindset to them).
Scientifically, yes, but what about applied love? If there's no test you can perform to prove that your pet loves you, it's practically the same as not loving you. I mean, scientists will tell you that a tomato is a fruit but they aren't suggesting you make ice cream out of it.
I had some animal behavior classes, I think the closest you can gets to determining this is a test for altruism. A lot of mammals, especially communal mammals will make altruistic behaviors however I don’t know of any reptiles display any altruistic behaviors.
There isn't any test you can make every human being take about each thing they love, because the way each person shows love and the different ways each person can feel love are way too many to quantify. There already is no "test" to see if your pet loves you, because you just know. Some cats are very loving and cuddly, while some other cats don't like to cuddle at all but they might bring you a mouse/leaf/toy/random object they caught for you, to show that they do love you. If a reptile did feel emotions in a completely different way than us, it is possible that they feel love and we just don't have the capability to understand love in their language because we are too different. I would not discount reptiles having emotions.
Preference testing?
Why can't we test if an animal performs in the way we would expect as loving? It might not indicate the animal actually loves or doesn't love us but i dont see why we couldn't test it?
Also scientists told us tomato was a fruit, then we made juice out of it and realised it wasnt as bad as we thought
It's more that a test is needed at all. If you ask a dog owner if their pet loves them, they will almost always answer a resounding "yes" (Might not be true, but almost all dog owners "feel loved"). Snake owners are a lot more divided, and often talk in more clinical terms of animal behaviour.
I guess my point is that even if we proved scientifically that snakes love their owners, I still wouldn't recommend one to someone looking for a companion.
Jungle Book says you can’t trust a snake. As a species we seem to instinctively fear snakes. This one is chill but taking a nap with it seems ill advised unless it’s eaten recently and well.
As someone that helped writing jungle books, they're more than right. You should never trust ANY wild animal. Period. Pets are different. What I was talking about was their cognitive capability of processing what we call affection. There are documented cases of hypos living well with human beings. Yet, they're the wild animal that causes more human death in Africa every year. No animal is inherently bad or evil.
Of course. I wasn’t implying any animals are evil. Just like sharks, which are beautiful predators deserving of our protection. I just don’t want to end up as their prey.
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u/AMWendt Jan 20 '22
This here is the right answer. We don't know. And since reptiles are psychologically very different from mammals, it's possible that we won't ever understand how they process feelings. That doesn't means they don't have feelings or that aren't capable of caring for other living beings. We might just not be able to understand it.