Animal emotions v. anthropomorphism

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Do animals emote like humans? Do they experience love, joy, jealousy, heartbreak, etc. like humans? Or are they just being plain old animals, while we humans like to be anthropomorphic about them? This video from youtube—

—brings such questions to mind.

 

I have had plenty of good reasons over the years to think that we underestimate the raw intelligence and perception of many animals. (I had a Black Lab once who was so intelligent and perceptive that I sometimes had to resort to spelled-out conversations with other people so he couldn't understand me, and he still knew what was going on.)

[Mokele]

It's a mix. IME, animals can be smarter than we give them credit for in some respects, but still quite dumb in others. The same for emotion - some animals clearly display emotions, others less so, and not all animals seem to have all emotions.

 

Unfortunately, it's a very difficult field, because a lot of these terms are very hard to define and even harder to test in a consistent yet meaningful way.

[Abdul-Aziz]

I believe that, to a certain degree, mammalian species of animal and human beings share very similar emotions. For example, all of the more primitive emotions that we as human beings feel, such as pain, pleasure, loss, anger, animal attachment, fear, lust etc, are almost certainly experienced by animals, particularly by those belonging to mammalian species. However, more complex emotions such as empathy, compassion, sorrow, guilt, love, conscientiousness etc, seem to be found only in humans. Although a controversial field of inquiry, there is some evidence that certain species of animal, such as canines and even chimpanzees, are capable of such emotions as learned helplessness and mournful behaviour. The primatologist Jane Goodall observed that chimpanzees formed strong attachments with their young and were capable of exhibiting certain signs that resembled the emotion of sadness.

 

Unfortunately, one difficulty with postulating the existence of animal emotionality is being able to differentiate between an emotive response that is really a genetically pre-programmed, physiological response to external stimuli and one that is based on genuine individual self-awareness (is the creature actually conscious of the pain it suffers?).

[Sayonara]

However, more complex emotions such as empathy, compassion, sorrow, guilt, love, conscientiousness etc, seem to found only in humans.

Have you never seen a dog that's eaten tomorrow's ham?

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However, more complex emotions such as empathy, compassion, sorrow, guilt, love, conscientiousness etc, seem to be found only in humans.

So you think the elephant in the video did not love the dog in the way a human would love a dog?

[Abdul-Aziz]

Have you never seen a dog that's eaten tomorrow's ham?

 

Well, there is some scientific research which suggests that canines can experience learned helplessness, which is a rudimentary form of depression.

[Mokele]

It's hard to say. Maybe it did, but for elephants "love" means something different than for humans? Emotions are basically instinctive programs/reactions that exist because of natural selections, so it would only be logical the evolutionarily and ecologically different organisms would have different emotions. Can the love humans, as social primates, feel be the same as the love felt by solitary predators like big cats?

 

And of course, the further away you get from humans, the more dicey it gets - can fish love? What about an octopus? Beetles?

[Abdul-Aziz]

So you think the elephant in the video did not love the dog in the way a human would love a dog?

 

Animals, particularly mammalian species, are capable of forming close attachment bonds, however I don't think elephants and humans have the same capacity to love. Humans can provide, rear, and nurture dogs to maturity through the capacity of selfless love, whereas I'm not so sure elephants are capable of doing the same thing.

[Sisyphus]

I would say there's probably nothing (or at least very little) unique about human emotion. It just seems to me that if you're going to claim that the basic experiences of humans are so radically different from those of their closest relatives (like chimps), the burden of proof is definitely on you. They would have emotions for the same reasons we do. Other animals, though, are trickier. For example, do dogs have emotions? I'm sure they do - they're intelligent, social mammals, just like us, and their behaviors obviously indicate something. The question for me is not whether they have emotions, but how closely analogous their emotions are to ours. My guess, based on little more than vast anecdotal evidence, is that they have a lot of similarities but that most dog owners are still guilty of a lot of excessive anthropomorphism. Of course, dogs are also usually guilty of canimorphism of their owners, so I guess in a way it's a mutual relationship...