My regular readers will know that I’m sometimes fascinated by the extent to which mammalian body language crosses species lines — and, indeed, is so well conserved that families as far apart as felids and primates can communicate in ways that are emotionally satisfying to both parties. We take this for granted, but it’s really quite remarkable when you think about it; there’s a repertoire of mammalian gestures that must have maintained consistent social meanings since the earliest mammals in the late Triassic, 200 million years ago, all the way through dizzying changes in size, encephalization and ecological niche.
My wife Cathy reminded me of another one today: the Nose of Peace. “I thought you’d enjoy this photo of a kitten and a young deer exchanging the Nose of Peace” she wrote; our label for it comes from my attempt to describe to a friend over the phone the behavior of two cats who, after quarrelling for days, decided to get along. My friend understood what was intended by “the Nose of Peace” immediately, and that term for it has since spread to several other mutual friends.
It made sense to my friend because cats often greet each other like this to signal non-hostility, and cats will sometimes greet favored humans the same way if humans make that possible. Back when we lived in a house with three stories, one of our cats would sometimes use the ground-floor stairway to position herself at head height for a human. We noticed this, but didn’t figure out why until one of us passed by close enough one day and she offered a gentle nose-touch. After that, we made a point of allowing this to happen when she assumed the position.
That photo of a cat and young deer touching noses shows that it’s not just humans consciously imitating feline body language who produce the gesture; the deer recognizes it, too. Dogs as well as cats use it. And of course the greeting is used human-to-human, most famously among Inuit. That’s four separate mammalian lines including Cervidae; the likelihood that this is a very, very old mammalian gesture seems correspondingly high.
As body language, it’s classic Lorenzian uncompleted aggression. Faces are vulnerable places on an animal, the eyes especially so. A nose touch says “I could bite you, but I don’t want to,” which is about as definite a way as a pre-linguistic animal has of signaling friendliness. Now look at the deer/cat picture again and go “Awwww!”. This response, too, is part of the picture; the gesture is also a signal to onlookers that the participants are happy, curious, and not disposed to fight.
Humans are prone to over-sentimentalize animals a lot, probably as a side effect of their nurturant instincts towards human young. But underlying that tendency is a hard and interesting fact; there is a mammalian community of empathy, even of sociability, that is tremendously wide and two hundred megayears deep. Our lives are richer for it.