Soft Heart Under Her Thick Skin?

Now that Ruby the elephant is back at the Los Angeles Zoo, questions remain: Is she happy? And how can you tell?

The 43-year-old African elephant came home this weekend after 1 1/2 years at the Knoxville Zoo. Ruby’s planned transfer to Knoxville, where it was hoped she would be a good maternal role model for other elephants, prompted animal rights activist Catherine Doyle to sue to keep Ruby in Los Angeles and later for her return, claiming the elephant was sad and lonely in Tennessee.

The elephant’s return was hastened by a videotape, shot in Knoxville by Gretchen Wyler of the Hollywood office of the Humane Society of the United States and televised in July, showing Ruby standing alone and swaying, according to Wyler, like “a desperate elephant.”

But experts don’t agree on what animals feel. Naturalist Charles Darwin wrote about animal emotions, but for much of the 20th century to say an elephant was sad was to be guilty of anthropomorphism, the unscientific projection of human feelings on animals.

Today, an increasing number of scientists believe that animals have emotions.

Whether those emotions are comparable to human ones is another matter.

“Do animals have emotions? Most people are willing to say they do. Do we know much more than that? Not really,” said John Capitanio, associate director for research at the California National Primate Research Center and a professor of psychology at UC Davis.

Understanding is fairly limited even about human feelings. “There’s not much known about positive emotions in humans compared to negative emotions. We know a lot about fear and a lot about anger,” emotions that cause measurable physiological changes, Capitanio said.

In animals, said Capitanio, who has studied individual differences in rhesus macaques, “we don’t know what love looks like, in spite of what animal activists would say. When we see a chimp cuddling its infant, we don’t know if its internal feeling state is the same as what humans feel when they embrace their children.”

“It’s quite a stretch for humans to look at an animal and interpret their behavior,” said Michael Hutchins, director of conservation and science for the American Zoo and Aquarium Assn. in Silver Spring, Md.

“Animals can’t talk to us so they can’t tell us how they feel.”

The inability of animals to speak -- there’s the rub.

Everybody knows that Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn is happy that Ruby is back in L.A. He said as much.

“She’s in good spirits, and we’re glad to have her back,” Hahn told the media Sunday, as he stood outside Ruby’s temporary enclosure at the Los Angeles Zoo.

But because animals cannot describe their feelings, human attempts to link animal behavior with specific emotional states are “purely speculative,” Hutchins said. “An animal might look agitated, but it might not be. It might be playing. It might look like it’s playing, but be quite aggressive.”

In assuming they know what animals are feeling, humans may be projecting their own emotions onto them: “Animals, in some ways, are a neutral palette on which we paint our needs, feelings and view of the world,” Capitanio said.

Marc Bekoff, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said he has received roughly 50 e-mails about Ruby in the last few days.

An animal activist as well as a scientist, Bekoff said emotions such as sadness are clearly reflected in an animal’s behavior: “They mope around, they don’t eat.”

Such behavior can be read in animals much as it can be in humans, he said: “Usually when we see a person who seems to be sad, they are sad.”

Bekoff doesn’t believe Ruby belongs in any zoo, given her apparent unhappiness in Knoxville.

“Do you send an unhappy kid back home without treating them?” he asked. “They should put her in a sanctuary and see how she does. She doesn’t like zoos.”

Bekoff said that the intelligence and emotional complexity of elephants and other large mammals is what makes them such crowd pleasers: “People can look at these animals and see that they have feelings,” he said.

As for Ruby, L.A. Zoo Director John Lewis said she has been doing well since her return to Los Angeles.

In describing her, he talked more about behavior than about feelings.

“She seems to be fine,” he said. She is in an enclosure that is new to her, and yet she is very calm, alert, curious.

“She’s in a pen right next to Tara,” Lewis said, referring to another African elephant. “They’re investigating each other, touching trunks. There’s been no aggressive behavior either way, just touching, smelling and talking a little bit to each other. That’s about it.”

But, Lewis said, he went to see Ruby in Tennessee and believes she was well-adjusted there.

“She didn’t look depressed or withdrawn in any way,” said Lewis, who observed her touching trunks with the other cows and “flirting with the bull.” At one point, she plucked hay off his back and ate it.

“That’s a very trusting thing between animals,” Lewis said.

Activists have said that Ruby was sad to leave Los Angeles and her longtime elephant friend, Gita.

Ruby had left for Knoxville before Lewis became zoo director, but he has seen videotape of Ruby and Gita together and thinks reports of bonding between the two may have been exaggerated.

“Obviously, they’re compatible and get along,” said Lewis. “But I saw Ruby doing almost the same things with the elephants in Knoxville.”

Ruby and Gita “weren’t bonded to the exclusion of other animals or to the exclusion of life without each other. I don’t buy that at all.”

As to how Ruby feels, she’s not talking.