 This is a prairie vole. Cute, right? Well, in addition to being adorable, these furry critters are extremely social and loyal. They usually mate for life, which is even rarer in rodents than among human beings. In addition, they share parenting responsibilities and engage in social grooming, which effectively means licking one another clean. But now it looks like they also do this as a way of comforting friends and family members, offering a rare example of empathy in the animal kingdom, at least according to a new study in science. In an experiment at Emory University, researchers separated acquainted voles and gave one of the pair a mild shock. Once reunited, the other vole licked their harried pal or relative sooner and more frequently than during control experiments without the shocks. Being licked by a rodent might not be particularly soothing to you or me, but it seems to be the vole version of a comforting pat on the back. Tellingly, this consoling behavior only tended to occur among animals already familiar with one another. Strangers were left to comfort themselves. The underlying mechanism for the behavior appears to be oxytocin, a hormone also involved in vole monogamy, adjacent laying among rats, which is to say, cuddling, and social bonding between humans, including the horizontal kind. The scientists found that when they blocked the flow of oxytocin in prairie voles, the consoling behavior stopped as well. Empathy has previously only been documented in a handful of species, including elephants, dogs, dolphins, and humans on a good day. Even some of those conclusions remain controversial, and these findings may prove so as well. The paper out of the Young Labs looks very interesting and it looks like it's very well done and I think it's a very nice piece of work that looks at physiological responses to specific environmental and social stimuli. I personally wouldn't call it empathy. Empathy is a human concept and it is a concept that is defined by the way we feel internally. It's an internal state. We don't know if what we experience as empathy is the same thing that the prairie voles experience as empathy. But the researchers say that their studies suggest that empathy is more widespread than previously believed and offers insights into the mechanisms driving related behaviors, be they hearty hugs or comforting licks.