Veterinary behaviorists don’t worry much about whether anxiety is a valid term for what animals experience, or how to diagnosis it. “It’s not terribly difficult,” says Katherine A. Houpt, an emeritus professor of behavioral medicine at Cornell University. Vets look at external display: Does an animal startle quickly, snap, suffer from sleeplessness? Is a cat in a fearful posture like something New Jersey behaviorist Emily Levine called “the meatloaf position” (all four legs under and hunched)? By these observable measures, anxiety exists in great quantities in the animal kingdom, both among pets and far beyond. Giving human drugs to animals isn’t just species narcissism. We know these drugs work for animals because they were originally tested on animals. Researchers rarely use the word anxiety to describe what the animals experience. Studies usually describe “anxiety-like symptoms,” focusing on the behavioral rather than the emotional, the expression of the feeling rather than the feeling itself. The fact that anti-anxiety medication soothes these symptoms in animals suggests they have something in common with the symptoms we call anxiety in humans. But are they a conditioned fear or something else entirely? And can we humans ever really know? (fb)

In the spring of 1919, enigmatic Swedish artist Hilma af Klint began documenting the flora and fauna surrounding her home on the green island of Munsö, about 24 miles west of Stockholm. She breathed loving detail into illustrations of species such the dainty Nottingham Catchfly, the white wagtail bird, and the sorbet-hued European Columbine. But these works, which were recently displayed in public for the first time, are no run-of-the-mill botanical illustrations: Af Klint imbues her watercolors with traces of the occult, decorating them with mysterious diagrams that are meant to investigate the species’ spirituality and probe the connective tissue linking humanity and greenery. By closely studying her environment, af Klint wrote that she encountered connections “between the plant world and the world of the soul.” (fb)