Can animals be caring and compassionate

I don't think you necessarily need to be particularly intelligent to show compassion and caring, and it's wrong to think of it as seperate from instinct. We even talk in everyday langauge about people having 'the caring instinct' or 'the mothering instinct'. The latter way of putting it is important, I think. All the animals mentioned here - gorillas, dogs, crows elephants, etc. exhibit parental care; and live in social groups. If you have an animal that needs to dedicate months or years of its life to caring for a child in order to be reproductively successful, or that needs to cooperate and live together with friends and relatives constantly in order to survive, then this animal is going to need instincts and drives that will lead it to do so.It's our emotions and sense of empathy that make us do these things. Why would humans have invented a wholly new system to inspire parental care and cooperation different from that used by other animals?

I think you misunderstood me. I'm not trying to claim that animals don't have emotions. I'm saying it's wrong to treat these as somehow seperate from instinct. That's what emotions are for, in a sense. To predispose animals towards certain forms of behaviour.

You're leaping to an assumption right away here, though. Why should the natural instinct necessarily be for survival? I think you've gotten too caught up in the 'survival of the fittest' phrase. You need to remember that what's really important evolutionarily, in the sense of what will be selected for and passed on to future generations, is reproductive success, not survival.It's easy to find examples of animals acting entirely contrary to their own survival, and doing so according to instinct. If you're a male honey bee, come mating time you take off after the queen and do your damndest to mate with her. In the process of doing so, your genitals are likely to come severed and wedged inside the female, after which you fall to inglorious death. This is just bees acting as their instinct drives them, and their instinct drives them, in effect, to suicide (but what a way to go!).It makes sense to have instincts which cause you to put your own survival at risk, if doing so increases your chances of reproductive success. In a species whose young cannot survive without the care of their parents, parents unwilling to put themselves out for their offspring are unlikely to have any offspring make it to adulthood.Edited by caffeine, : typo and to insert parenthetical comment about post-coital mortality

It's true that, if you don't survive at least up until reproducing, then you can't directly pass on any genes. but surviving isn't sufficient for reproductive success. If you're a sexual animal, and your instincts lead you to survive at all costs, but not to have sex, then your survival is useless, evolutionarily speaking. You can survive as long as you want, but you'll never have any descendants.In some species, this is particularly evident, like the honey bee I mentioned above. It's not possible for a male honey bee to survive reproduction, and yet their instincts still lead them to reproduce. There are plenty of less extreme examples of animals putting their survival at risk due to their urge to mate - male hippos attacking other male hippos to try and steal their harems at serious risk of injury and death, for example, or birds making noisy or visually stunning mating displays that attract observant predators.If survival was the only concern of animals, most mating behaviour would go out the window. It's often risky and energetically costly. In a sense, a survival instinct is just a means to an end, the end being reproductive success. The evolutionary advantages for the crow and the gorilla are the same as they are for humans. All three animals care for their young, so it's essential that parents are willing to put time and effort into this. All three live in social groups, usually closely related (not so much for humans any more - but for most of our time on earth we lived in much smaller societies). This means that the people around you often share many of your genes, and it can lead to indirect reproductive success for you if they succeed at the reproducing game too. Groups that work together cohesively and care for one another are also likely to do better than groups riven by internal division and self-serving behaviour.All this means that the animals need some way to make them work together and look after their relatives. These are complex behaviours in complex environments, and involve dealing with far too many unpredictable situations. A simple, hard-wired set of strict behaviours, such as least some insects appear to possess, wouldn't suffice. What's needed is an emotional system that biases the animal towards certain behaviours over others, and the systems that get passed on are the ones that, on average, lead to the better outcomes.So, there's no reproductive benefit to the crow in looking after a kitten. It's a waste of time and resources. The drives which made it do so, however, are the same as those that led the crows parents to survive and raise a healthy chick. It's not an instinct that's been risen above; merely one that's been misdirected.