Animal depression?

[Deleted member 149562]

Most humans and animals who end up being contained (cage, cell, home etc) it is not by their own choosing. They are placed there for a variety of reasons.

Animals are caught from the wild and contained or they are born into containment and have never known what it is like to be free and "wild". Animals seem to be able to adapt better to containment, that said many larger animals regardless of being caught and contained or born in containment suffer from "cage stereotyphy" (pacing behaviour brought on by a lack of enrichment activity and stimulation). Hence why there has been a movement away from restrictive cage use in zoo's and more towards the enclosures that replicate natural habitat as close as possible. The enclosure is not perfect but is certainly better for the animals than the restrictive cage. The use of enclosure is two fold...to improve the life of the animals but to also educate the humans who visit the zoo as to the natural habitat and behaviours. Animals both contained and wild can and do experience depression and anxiety, often as a result of situations such as birth and death within their group or if an animal is injured they will drift away from the group, often to die alone.

In fishkeeping, the same principle applies. The bigger the aquarium, the closer to the natural habitat (even if the scaping looks like a scruffy teenagers bedroom) the more relaxed the fish will generally become, they also suffer less stress and are not so likely to be harmed by poor water chemistry...that said, being in a larger aquarium does not give the keeper of the fish a pass on weekly maintenance.

Humans on the other hand are not used to being contained. Those who are contained often show signs of high anxiety, stress and depression that frequently expresses itself in self harm or even taking their own life. Humans. like animals generally do not choose to be contained. They become contained by virtue of their circumstances. The only human who has a hand in the choice of containment is the criminal since committing the criminal act always has the chance of containment when caught & tried. Those who are disabled either with a mental, physical or both can also find themselves contained, very rarely by choice. You can still request to be committed to an institution such as a rehab or an asylum. On the whole most people who remain contained within their home are driven there by having no viable alternative thanks to physical disability such as being wheelchair dependent and not having adapted housing or family or mental health conditions such as agoraphobia.

Animals and humans share alot of emotive and behavioural traits, they show those signs in very similar ways if you care to actually sit and watch their interactions closely enough.

Afterall, the apes like Orangutans, Gorillas and humans share 97% of DNA, it is then only natural to consider that all animals will experience the same wealth of emotions and behaviours that we humans experience. Animals also share very similar variants of physical illness and disease and disability as humans do, such as cerebral palsy is found in apes just as it is found in humans. Mental health illness and disease and disability is no different tween species.

 

[GaryE]

I used to keep canaries, and had one male that wouldn't leave his cage if you left the door open. Did he like that? I doubt it, in hindsight. I think I'd institutionalized the poor guy. I won't keep birds again, as much as I love canaries. Once that doubt creeps in, and you listen to it, I don't think there would be much pleasure in the pursuit.
I'll stick to hanging around with the chickadees behind the house.

The whole issue of animal psychiatry opens a can of worms that makes you question all the world views, and views of self we've built up over many years (if you are so inclined). We have people who can't accept the implications of evolution, and if you add the idea of forms of intelligences evolving early in the history of life, that's a real shocker. In a world of flat earthers and people who still believe the sun revolves around them (not even the planet, it seems), that's scary stuff. I just feed all this into my enjoyment of fishkeeping, to my enjoyment of diversity and the things fish do.

The glass box? My personal view is that small fish can be satisfied with good set ups. I like fish that come from extreme habitats - shallows, small streams, tiny ponds and puddles, and are small themselves as a result. If you give them something approximating their home waters, with rocks, branches and plants if that's what they are evolved to deal with, then for fish that don't travel around a lot, life is good. Most of my killifish are ambush predators for small food, and the data on them seems to suggest they travel very little in their lives. Two streams a few meters apart can have two different colour forms, and in some cases, two different species.

A fish like a Bala Shark that swims many kilometers at high speed every day is a different story. I think tanks must be misery for the wanderers and racers. It comes down to size mattering to me. Little fish that wander get eaten quickly, and life from small islands becomes small. I think if we provide such fish with thought out tanks, they can live very well. It may be self serving, but I think if a fish is in a tank where it can display a wide range of behaviours that aren't pacing along the glass and such, it has adapted to life in a tank that in some cases is close to the size of some natural habitats.

We're driven by instinct as much as they are, but we do have added elements of thought and creativity I don't see in fish. And I think as a member of a really destructive species, I'd like to see more of us use our intelligence to take on the breeding and maintenance of fish species whose habitats we are destroying. I like to think we can act more intelligently than we do now and maybe treasure biodiversity more. Watching the the daily lives of species we've driven to extinction in nature might somehow make us more aware, and less likely to support or participate in the carnage.

Or not. It's worth a try.