Laugh with the Animals

The more I read, the more I think the laughing yoga people are on to something.
Latest evidence comes from the University of Portsmouth in Great Britain. Researchers there were curious about animal laughter. So they set about to map similarities between recorded sounds made by young apes and human babies as they were tickled. The sounds were then acoustically analyzed for similarities and differences.
Conclusion: Laughter shows a clear path down the evolutionary tree from. In other words, human laughter can be traced back 10 to 16 million years to a common ancestor of great apes and humans.
(for a synopsis of the study, click here)
On the road to finding this, I also stumbled across references to experiments with rats. Apparently they make high-pitched sounds when being tickled and played with. And they enjoy and seek out these vocalizations.




MSNBC science editor Alan Boyle writes in his blog that other researchers have found that animals do laugh. Neuroscientists are now studying whether that laughter has a healing effect. So there you are. Another case for laughing yoga (though I haven't been back in a while.)
This is some of the coolest research I've ever seen. So much better than what usually happens to rats in a lab. The very idea of giggling animals makes my inner Disney child delighted.

Also more conflicted than ever.
Animals can laugh? What else are they saying that we aren't hearing? Do they cry, too? How about despair? Can animals feel despair? If it's all about brain chemicals and evolution, can they also have nervous breakdowns? (Just going by our new puppy's behavior, I vote "yes". We all recognize the "crazy eye" he gets just before he goes rampaging through the house like a cackling maniac.)
And what about all those bears that are climbing trees in suburban neighborhoods? What do they want, really?

Just as all the research about early fetal development made everyone uneasy about abortion, I think knowing that animals can laugh might change the way we think about them and treat them. Johnson County, KS, for instance, is going to have a mass deer shoot to get rid of a surplus of deer in a park at the edge of Shawnee and Lenexa. While just about everyone agrees that something needs to be done to get things back in balance, it's unsettling to think about now. That little fawn we saw last night, probably no more than a week or two old. He'll be in with the mix of does and bucks that will be lured with bait to the waiting sharpshooters. Will they all be screaming?
So here's my plan of action for the week. Find an animal and make it laugh. It's the least we can do. Maybe it will take some of the sting about the bad human-induced things that are going on.
Our garden scarecrow probably sends the birds and squirrels into fits. That's a good start, I guess.