Do Wild Animals Get PTSD?

We are not talking about dogs or cats here (yes, they do get PTSD). This is yet another huge step in understanding all living beings in this planet suffer, emote, and every damn thing we sapiens experience. 

It is indeed a huge step but alas, sapiens moral compass refuses to move. 

Studies of the ecology of fear started in the 1990s. Before then, scientists assumed that the impact of a predator on an individual prey animal was either deadly or fleeting. If a hare survived a coyote attack, or a zebra escaped the claws of a lion, it would move on and live its life as before.

But research shows that fear can alter the long-term behavior and physiology of wild animals, from fish to elephants, Zanette and Clinchy write in the 2020 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. “Fear is a response all animals mount to avoid being killed by predators,” says Zanette. “It’s enormously beneficial, because it keeps you alive to breed another day. But it does carry costs.”

The reasons to fear are clear. Recent studies have found that up to 32 percent of adult female giraffes in the Serengeti carry scars from lion attacks, 25 percent of harbor porpoises in the southern North Sea have claw and bite marks from gray seals and 100 percent of manta rays in some African waters bear multiple bite wounds from sharks. These survivors may carry memories of terror along with their physical scars.

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Some researchers now disagree with this human-centric view of PTSD, however. “A lot of things are shared between humans and other mammals,” says Sarah Mathew, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University. This includes learning about and responding to danger, and avoiding situations that present life-threatening risks. Mathew believes that PTSD has deep evolutionary roots, and that some of its symptoms arise from adaptations — like a heightened state of alert — that allow individuals of many species, including our own, to manage danger.

This evolutionary perspective is beginning to change minds. Clinchy and Zanette have organized conferences on the ecology of fear and PTSD that bring together ecologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. “The psychiatrists and psychologists were talking about PTSD as maladaptive,” recalls Clinchy. “We were arguing that this is an adaptive behavior, to show these extreme reactions in this particular context, because that increases your survival.”

Diamond came to agree. The brain of someone with PTSD, he says, “is not a damaged or dysfunctional brain, but an overprotective brain. You’re talking about someone that has survived an attack on his or her life. So the hypervigilance, the inability to sleep, the persistent nightmares that cause the person to relive the trauma — this is part of an adaptive response gone awry.”

“There’s a stigma involved in PTSD, frequently,” says Zanette, “so people don’t seek treatment. But if patients can understand that their symptoms are perfectly normal, that there is an evolutionary function for their symptoms, this might relieve some of the stigma around it so that people might go and seek treatment.”

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