love Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

To Love Or Not To Love? That Is The Question In The Animal Kingdom

With Valentine’s Day coming up, love is on a lot of people’s minds…but what about animals?

If you have ever watched animals interact, it seems like they feel love. Penguins mate for life. Elephants form a bond through wrapping their trunks together before they mate. Some types of wolves mate for life and help raise the wolf pups. So, do animals actually feel love?

Our Inside Appalachia team stumbled into this idea after producer Roxy Todd remembered a single, lonely otter she had once seen at the West Virginia State Wildlife Center.

“She looked really sad, all by herself on the rocks, not playing and not swimming,” Todd said.

She had expected to see not one otter, but lots of otters, doing what otters typically do.

“You know, when you picture otters, what do you picture? They’re having fun,” Todd said. “I had this expectation they would be frolicking doing tricks in the water.”

But she said this otter seemed despondent.

“I just kept wondering, what happened, and what was going through her head,” Todd said. “Could she feel loneliness?”

And if she could feel loneliness, Todd wondered, could the otter also feel other emotions? Like, could she feel love?

Well, this question is up for debate.

Most biologists will say that animals cannot feel love.

“Love? No, there’s no such thing in the animal kingdom,” said Rich Rogers, the furbearer biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. Rogers is helping study the regional otter population. “[Love is] an emotional term. There’s a fidelity to that family unit until those young disperse, and then no, there’s nothing there.”

So Rogers said love is an emotional term, but animals have emotions, right?

“Since Darwin, scientists have thought that there are some basic emotions that animals can feel,” said Cynthia Willett, a professor of philosophy at Emory University.

Willett published a book called ‘Interspecies Ethics’ in 2014, which explores animals’ wide variety of emotions. She said some of the obvious ones are happiness and sadness.

“But Darwin did not include love among those basic emotions. And so there’s been this prejudice or this bias, at least since that time, that animals could not experience love,” Willett said. “And yet we see it all the time with animals. So why is it that we tend to not believe what we see?”

There are a few different types of animal love Willett has studied — the mother to offspring love, which she said is clearly established. But also friendship love. Willett said in 2006 at a zoo in Japan, a snake became friends with a hamster — its prey! They even cuddled together.

And the third type of animal relationship?

“The most surprising kind of love at all is romantic love,” Willett said.

Like, love love — not just friendship love.

A good example of this behavior is with birds, Willett said. Similar to humans, birds have courtship rituals — basically, they date. They bring food to one another, do dances, clean one another, etc.

Animals generally are social creatures, Willett said, adding that they need companionship, which in a way is a form of love.

“And without it, they start to lose that ‘joie de vivre’, that sense of being alive.”

‘Joy de vivre’ is a French phrase that describes the sense of life that gives us purpose, that makes life fuller and richer — something we often find through relationships and love. And Willett said animals feel it too.

“And when they don’t have that, they shrink. They diminish. They have less energy. Life goes dull,” she said.

Although Willett has not studied otters specifically, anecdotally she said she has seen them play and bond with each other and humans. They kind of remind her of how dogs love, Willett said.

So yes, Willett said she believes otters do feel love. She added that it is not that the science or biologists are wrong, there just might be more nuance.

And for the solitary otter at West Virginia Wildlife Center? Well, Trevor Moore — the biologist at the center — said he cannot definitively rule one way or another on love, loneliness or any human-like emotion.

“Animals definitely have personalities. There are definitely individual personalities,” Moore said. “You can see that, that’s very well documented throughout science and in captivity and in the wild. But how much we project our own emotions and our own view of them? I don’t know.”

After 67 Years Of Marriage Couple Shares Advice On Love

Here at West Virginia Public Broadcasting, there is a man who works at our station who has become something of a legend. Frank Stowers is a part time host of our classical music programming. Roxy Todd sat down with Frank and his wife of 67 years, Emita Stowers, to hear their story.

***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

FRANK STOWERS: Our having met and married is almost like a fairy tale. Emita came to the states for a couple of years to study, and then had just gone back to Mexico and started working as an English-Spanish secretary, when I appeared on the scene to participate in a work camp, somewhat like the Peace Corps, run by the Methodist Church, in the mountains of Puebla. And at the end of that summer, I was so taken with the experience that I decided to remain in Mexico and do graduate work in Latin American studies. And so it turns out she spent two years in the states, and I spent two years in Mexico.

We met in the Methodist Church in Mexico City, in the choir.

EMITA STOWERS: I was always singing in the choir. And their rehearsal was every Wednesday or Thursday, and I was sitting there in the rows, and all of a sudden, somebody was touching my hair. I had long hair. And I turn around and there was Frank (laughs). And I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything. But then, after rehearsal, the whole group went out and had some coffee in some of these coffee shops around the church. So that’s how we met then. We started talking.

Q: How many years ago was this? How long have you two been married?

ES: It is 67 years ago.

Q: Wow.

FS: People wonder how a relationship like that could last for 67 years. It’s been easy. She’s a great wife, a wonderful mother, and she’s my best friend. And besides, we are thoroughly married. When you marry in Mexico, no first thing you discover is that there is complete separation of church and state. And so we were married in a government office. And then a month later we married in the church. Of course, the reason for the time lapse is she had to have time to have her papers fixed in order to be able to come to the states. But it was rather cute because during that month’s time, she didn’t know whether to call herself Mrs. Stowers or if she was still in Miss Sanchez. But that was really an interesting experience because things are just reversed down there. The man holds is the rehearsal ceremony. And no mom just shows up. Our relationship I think is unique. It mean to spend enough time in the states, and she came to love Americans and things in this country, the language, the literature, all the things that represent the United States. I in turn, I fell deeply in love with everything related to Mexico. I love the language, the literature, the history, the music, the customs, I could have remained there and been perfectly happy. So we had an awful lot in common from the very beginning that I think we just created, glued and stuck us together, we enjoyed too much of the same things.

There was one other thing, since we’re talking about Valentine’s Day and romance. It was the custom while I was there, and it probably still exists, that if a fella has a girlfriend that he really cares about, he will take a group of friends or maybe a professional band and you serenade under her window at night. And there were several guys in the church choir that were dating at that time. And we all went out and sang under our girls’ windows. Now the interesting thing is that if for some reason, the girl is not too pleased with this, she could follow up by dumping water on the guys from her window. Fortunately, that never happened to me (laughs).

Q: Was there a song in particular you remember singing beneath Emita’s window?

FS: Well, there’s one in particular Roxy. Imagine, on a moonlight night. You’re standing in your window, and your sweetheart is down below with his friends. And they’re singing this song. It’s one that folks in this country know pretty well. It’s called “Estrellita”, or “Little Star”.

The words to this song are:

Little star, come down and tell me that you love me a little

Because I can’t live without your love

You are Little star, my beacon of love.

Come down, and tell me that you love me just a little

Because I can’t live without your love

That’s typical of love songs in Mexico. And that is a very romantic experience.

Q: And Emita, do you have any advice on how to keep a relationship like this going, after all these years?

ES: Well, in the first place we love each other, and that’s very important. And you just have to trust each one as we, as the time goes by, and adjust to the living. Because, you know, neither of us had been married before, and it was new for both of us. But then it was not difficult. It was easy because we trust each other, and we love each other. And we wanted to have a nice marriage. Sometimes when we are in different places and they know that I am from Mexico and Frank is American, they want to know how come we have lasted so long. And if you trust somebody and love somebody, you don’t have any problems at all.

FS: I think the important thing is that you have to think of the other person. As long as you’re wrapped up in your own interests and your own concerns and your own activities and shut the other person out—that can almost guarantee problems. But if you live with the other person always in your mind, and you are concerned about making life better for that person, no matter how many years go by, that’s almost a guarantee of a successful marriage. She’s a great gal, and I do it over again.

Q: Frank, you do classical music here at West Virginia Public Broadcasting. Is there a song that you can think of that symbolizes your relationship with your wife, or the romance that you guys have had?

FS: Yes, right. He had to have to say that he took a piece called “Lisboa Antigua”, or “In Old Lisbon”. It was quite popular in Mexico in the 50s. And was played frequently in places where we would go dancing, and it soon became our song.

Love Letters From Thomas, W.Va., Addressed: "Dear Fellow Human"

Valentine’s day isn’t a favorite holiday for all people- especially not people who aren’t in a romantic relationship. But what about a bundle of unexpected letters, written by strangers from a little town far away? Well a town in West Virginia is about to receive about 700 love letters. These letters express well wishes- even for those who claim to be left out of Valentine’s Day.

Last year, folks in Thomas, W.Va. hand-wrote hundreds of letters to send to another small town that was chosen, basically, at random. The idea was to remind people that someone out there, someone they’ve never even met, really, and genuinely cares.

Gail Snyder lives in Madrid, New Mexico. Last winter, she was one of the people who received one of these love letters. “It was this total surprise, and everyone had their own private experience of going to their mailbox and finding this mysterious thing in the mailbox. It was addressed to fellow human being,” Gail recalled.

The front of one of the cards. Courtesy of Carol Carpenter.

Back of a card. Courtesy of Carol Carpenter.

These whimsical letters were part of a community art project, organized by Art Spring. Audrey Stephenson is an AmeriCorps volunteer who helped organize the project. “Well I thought it was an amazing idea right off the bat. Just what a sweet thing to do,” she said.

Seth Pitt first had the idea. He’s an artist who co-owns and operates The White Room Art Gallery in Thomas.

“I used to write letters to strangers. And I thought it would even be a little more impactful if everyone was sitting around in a room together, all trying to send out good will to their fellow humans on this earth. I do think that a large part of this project, its goal is to not feel so isolated from one another,” said Seth.

"It gave us all hope I think. You know, hope that we aren't just these isolated communities struggling."-Gail Snyder, Madrid, NM.

People who live in the towns of Thomas and Madrid learned that they do share some similarities- they’re both former coal mining towns, which have had to find other ways to survive when the coal mines in their towns shut down.

One town in the desert and another in the Appalachian mountains, somehow connected by these little pages of art.

“It gave us all hope I think. You know, hope that we aren’t just these isolated communities struggling,” said Gail Snyder.

So last year, the residents in Madrid were inspired to start their own project, and they sent similar letters to a small town in Arizona. So far, Gail says, they haven’t heard back.

The back of the Christmas tree drawing. Courtesy of Jane Cassidy.

But some of the people in Madrid have actually formed pen-pal relationships with people in Thomas.

“One of the coolest stories was one of the kids around here she sent a little piece of her art. And it landed in the mailbox of an artist who lived out there. And the lady replied to her and kind of critiqued her art and told her what she liked about it. And that prompted the girl who lived here to send her another piece of art. And they’re still exchanging letters to this day,” said Seth.

The last few weeks, Seth, Audrey, and other folks in Thomas have begun another letter writing campaign- this time for residents of a small town in West Virginia. “I don’t know if I want to tell you the town because then they’ll all know that they’re coming. And we’d kind of like it to be a surprise,” said Seth.

So for now, we’ll leave it a mystery for you to ponder. But I will say this, all you cynics out there, watch out. Because a stranger could disarm all of your objections to Valentine’s Day with a singular, unexpected love letter, reminding you that someone out there, someone who doesn’t even know your name, sends their love.

We’ll find out where Thomas sends their letters this year in a few weeks, when they receive their letters. interviews the recipients. If you want to try this in your town, Audrey Stephenson and the people in Thomas strongly recommend that you first contact your local postmaster for assistance. Mass mailings can be very complicated, especially those that are being sent to rural route box holders.