It is clear how violent wild animals can be. But we have evidence and you can see it in documentaries - on YouTube - where it is shown that love, in the form of care from birth, changes the brains of all of them and they become gentle and affectionate companion animals. They and we develop ferocity to conquer territory, or when they attack us. We are made up of three components that we cannot study without including them as a functional unit, nor can we understand them separately. The body with its organs, the contents of our skull and the environment of which we are a part. And, we are part of nature.
When we are welcomed into the home with intensive, loving, empathetic care in the early years, we and the animals can diminish our territorial ferocity. An innate quality almost disappears, that of living with a mentality of good and bad, left and right, upper and lower classes and all that leaders with little training or with narcissistic or psychopathic traits are capable of awakening in us and fragmenting us by rekindling that fight for territory inherent to our animal condition, common to insects, mammals, volatile and humans.
We have brain structures that developed millions of years ago, the amygdalae, which remain as they are, with the same capacity to receive a direct line from the senses, without passing through the cerebral cortex, and set in motion a reaction of survival, flight or attack. They react with blurred, elementary data. A shadow, a stick on the ground in low light can be a snake. They are, so to speak, on guard, detecting dangers, we can see it in the little confidence that birds and other animals show towards us.
With parental care and love in humans or caregivers in animals, this influence will diminish, because the whole brain will continue to develop as programmed in its genes. If, like animals, all animals, when they receive the bottle and early intensive care, these structures no longer occupy the centre of behaviour and the animal becomes gentle and trusting, we should draw conclusions as to why there are so many maladjusted, fanatic, violent, sectarian...
Humans do not want to see this truth: that the great violence in its various variants, and under infinite forms, reveals neglect, negligence, little emotional stimulation in the first months and years. This is what gives rise to so many half-finished beings, so many narcissistic characters, so much fanaticism and delinquency in its various forms.
Thus, a tiger loves its keepers who gave it a bottle, others do not forget their keepers and greet them with hugs when they visit them at the Zoo. Empathy is present in all of them, a bear can save a drowning bird.
What do they have inside them, from their childhood, that makes them attack us like this? Is anyone interested in finding out the psychological and emotional reasons for these behaviours?
Seven EMT buses that have been trapped by snow on the streets of Madrid have been vandalised and assaulted over the weekend.
Stop the animalists from going crying to slaughterhouses and other media to defend animals and try to make these documents visible to as many citizens as possible so that they feel what we emotionally developed human beings feel: respect, consideration and admiration. A feeling that we extend to the rest of nature.
All of them, as I said, have skulls, which means that they have the same structures as us, different in that felines, wolves or dogs recognise and get an idea of the world through their sense of smell, equivalent to a highly developed hindbrain. They have an olfactory conception of the world, also from the data of the other senses. We should have one that is ethical, moral, just and cultural; and so complex that it does not include simplistic and radicalism - psychiatrists since 1919 have suspected that there may be emotional problems behind it, since they are too emotional positions. We should have a developed prefrontal brain, which would be equivalent to knowing how to manage, use our emotional system, know how to listen, be ethical, empathic, group-oriented in order to preserve and promote all that we are and have that is valuable.
The emotional system in all creatures works outside of consciousness, inside the body, in the service of survival and adaptation to the complexity of the environment; with training we could detect it, perceive it: feel it. But this is not the case because the vast majority have not received from their caregivers, in the first three years, the intensity of care that a circus menagerie of six tigers and two lions has received, and continues to receive. It can be seen in documentaries about the annual circus festivals in Monte Carlo. They are able to take, with great care, food from the mouth of their handler. I encourage you to watch the dozens of documentaries on the relationship of animals to humans and to each other.
In short, all mammals possess the same emotional system as we do, but they cannot analyse it, become aware of it, they do not feel it. They suffer it, they suffer from it, they enjoy it without much awareness. In us, all frustrating situations, deficiencies, negligence, disqualifications, remain in our episodic memory, if we are not lucky enough - the one we are looking for - to be freed by a therapy. But even so, when the hustle and bustle of living, of exercising trades or professions comes to an end, they return in dreams, and having undervalued their knowledge and having been excluded from our culture, we find ourselves trying to fix those situations in the form of dreams and nightmares. I have found that in all retired and elderly people in the last fifty years. That may be another difference between animals and us.
These experiences, more or less disastrous, leave us helpless because we do not use our dreams, so our emotional past is reborn and leaves us depressed. That is to say, it leaves us with the same mood, when we remember those dreams, that we would have had if we did not have the defensive mechanisms of forgetfulness, annulment or denial that we use to continue in the struggle for life. This is one of the reasons why retirement crushes, ages and traumatises most people. They think they are liberated when they retire and soon after they start to deteriorate and fall ill.
Dogs have emotions, joy, intense sadness when we are separated from them, or when so many uncaring people abandon them. Pay a visit to the shelters and see their faces. A neighbour had a fatal heart attack in the bush and his dog stayed by his side for two days without food or water.
Incidentally, animal rights activists, instead of massively spreading the videos I am referring to, have succeeded in getting circus animals banned, which will not even dream of having the care, feeding and veterinary care of their stay in circuses. These necessary minorities, on the other hand, should improve their pedagogy and identify less emotionally with animals. Because they are using the same fight as many political parties in the defence of their territory, physical, mental or ideological. They are not contributing to the development of societies in their coexistence, nor in the joint work and analysis of our problems and in the conjunction of consensual solutions.
Macrobiota and the brain
Midlife in men is a transitional period in which many physiological and psychological changes occur, leading to cognitive and behavioural alterations and deterioration of brain function. However, the mechanisms underlying these changes are unclear. The gut microbiome has been implicated as a key mediator of gut-brain communication and regulation of brain homeostasis, including brain immune cell function.
We have a potential pathway by which targeting the gut microbiome with prebiotics can modulate the peripheral immune response and alter neuroinflammation in middle age. This is a novel strategy for the amelioration of age-related neuroinflammatory pathologies and brain function.
This text may be reproduced provided that PROA is credited as the original source.
José Antonio Rodríguez Piedrabuena
Specialist in psychiatry, management training, group and couple therapies.