Before Panksepp: what the Torah knew about animal grief
When the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp began tickling laboratory rats in the late 1990s and discovered they produced ultrasonic chirps functionally analogous to laughter, the scientific establishment recoiled. For three centuries, Western science had followed Descartes in treating animals as elaborate clockwork, their cries no more significant than the squeak of an ungreased hinge. The suggestion that a rat could experience something like joy was not merely surprising. It was, by the standards of Cartesian orthodoxy, incoherent.
Judaism shrugged. It had known this all along.
The principle of tza’ar ba’alei chayim, the prohibition against causing unnecessary suffering to animals, is not a modern ethical addition to Jewish thought. It is woven into the fabric of Torah legislation with a specificity that reads, in retrospect, like a protocol for affective neuroscience. Deuteronomy 22:10 prohibits yoking an ox and donkey together, a ruling understood by the commentators as recognising that differential physical capacity produces differential distress. Deuteronomy 22:6-7 mandates sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs, acknowledging that attachment bonds in animals are real and that their rupture constitutes genuine suffering. Exodus 23:12 extends Shabbat rest to working animals, presupposing that fatigue and the relief from it are experienced states, not mechanical outputs. In Numbers, the Torah went further still, giving a beaten donkey a voice to reproach its owner, as though to say that the animal’s protest required only a medium, not an invention. These are not sentimental gestures. They are legislative recognitions of interior life.
Panksepp’s revolution, conducted over decades at Bowling Green State University and later Washington State University, dismantled the Cartesian edifice empirically. Working with rats, cats, and other mammals, he identified seven primary process emotional systems: SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, and PLAY. These are not metaphors projected onto animal behaviour. They are electrochemically identifiable circuits in subcortical brain regions, the brainstem and limbic structures that mammals share with remarkable fidelity. Stimulate PANIC/GRIEF in a rat and it produces distress vocalisations. Stimulate PLAY and it seeks social engagement. Elephants circle and revisit the bones of dead family members. Whales carry deceased calves for days. The architecture of grief is conserved.
The Torah’s mother bird was not a philosophical abstraction. She was a creature whose PANIC/GRIEF circuit would fire upon the loss of her offspring. The rabbis legislated around a neurobiological reality they could not name but evidently perceived.
Israel’s contribution to this territory extends beyond the textual. Amotz Zahavi, the Tel Aviv University evolutionary biologist who died in 2017, spent over four decades studying Arabian babblers at his field station in the Arava Valley. These group living birds compete to perform costly altruistic acts: serving as exposed sentinels against predators, feeding subordinate group members, mobbing threats to the flock. Zahavi’s handicap principle, first proposed in 1975, explained these behaviours as honest signals. A bird that can afford to stand exposed or give away food is credibly advertising its quality, because the signal costs too much to fake. Applied to emotional expression more broadly, the principle means that visible distress, attachment, or joy in animals is not noise. It is reliable information, shaped by selection because honesty pays. If Panksepp showed that animals genuinely feel, Zahavi explained why we can trust what their behaviour tells us.
The Talmud, at Bava Metzia 32b, debates whether tza’ar ba’alei chayim is a Torah level obligation or a rabbinic one. The debate is revealing not for its conclusion, which most later authorities resolved in favour of biblical status, but for its premise. No one in the discussion questions whether animals suffer. That is taken as given. The argument concerns the juridical weight of that suffering. Compare this with Western philosophy, which spent centuries arguing about whether animal suffering existed at all, and the sophistication of the rabbinic starting point becomes striking.
But the deepest resonance between Jewish thought and modern neuroscience lies in an older argument. Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, insisted that the commandment to send away the mother bird exists because animal pain is real. There is no difference, he wrote, between the pain of humans and the pain of other animals, because maternal love is produced not by reason but by the imaginative faculty, which exists in most living beings just as it does in humans. Nachmanides disagreed. The commandment’s purpose, he maintained, is not about the bird at all. It is about refining human character, teaching us the habit of compassion so that we do not become cruel. This debate has animated Jewish ethics for eight centuries.
Panksepp’s work suggests it was never a genuine disagreement. If the subcortical circuits that generate grief are conserved across species, then recognising the bird’s pain and cultivating human compassion are not competing explanations but two descriptions of the same neural bridge. Our capacity to feel for the bird depends on the same emotional architecture that produces the bird’s suffering. What Maimonides called the “imaginative faculty,” Panksepp mapped as the PANIC/GRIEF system. What Nachmanides described as the refinement of character is, in neurobiological terms, the activation of our own conserved empathy circuits in response to distress signals we are wired to recognise. Frans de Waal’s “Russian doll” model confirms the structure: each evolutionary layer of empathy builds upon a shared core without replacing it. Maimonides and Nachmanides were standing at opposite ends of a single bridge and describing what they saw from where they stood.
Panksepp titled his foundational 1998 work Affective Neuroscience. He might, with equal justice, have called it commentary.
[https://www.abebooks.com/Affective-Neuroscience-Foundations-Human-Animal-Emotions/32088262525/bd]