Stress and feelings

I was fascinated recently by a video clip of a bee being trained to play football. A fake bee was used to show a real bee how to move the ball in exchange for a drop of sugar. Once the bee had learned this rewarding move it was then able to show another bee how to move the ball, and when given a choice of ball would always go for the nearest one requiring least work even when the bee that had been observed had been forced to move one further away (Loukola et al, 2017). It is not new that bees can communicate with one another — successful honey bee foragers use waggle dances to tell nestmates the direction and distance of profitable flower patches — but this study has shown that the bee's ability to learn is more sophisticated than previously thought.

We continue to discover that animals have more complex feelings than was once thought possible. It is now widely accepted, for example, that animals feel pain even when they are hiding it from our unobserving eyes, and that they should receive pre-emptive analgesia, be regularly pain scored, and that it is likely that a procedure that is painful to you or I would also be painful to them. We have a growing understanding of the ability of animals to feel stress and the negative consequences of this — many animals live in an environment for which they are ill-prepared. Our much loved companion animals can inadvertently find themselves in a state of chronic stress predisposing them to a number of stress-related issues. In this issue we launch the start of a series on stress looking at a number of different species. The introductory article ‘Let's talk about stress’ (p86) by Claire Hargrave explains why there is a need for more conversation on the recognition and prevention of stress.