Love in nature
November 20, 2009 by Plus Pets
Emotion in animals considers the question of what emotions certain species of non-human animals feel, in the sense that humans understand it. The debate concerns primarily mammals and birds, although emotions have also been postulated for other vertebrates and even for some invertebrates.
Different answers have been suggested throughout human history, by animal lovers, scientists, philosophers, and others who interact with animals, but the core question has proven hard to answer since we can neither obtain spoken answers, nor assume anthropomorphism. As a result, on the one hand society recognizes animals can feel pain, by criminalizing animal cruelty. Often expressions of apparent pleasure are ambiguous as to whether this is emotion, or simply innate response, perhaps to approval or other hard-wired cues. The ambiguity is a source of much controversy in that there is no certainty which views, if any, are “right”. That said, extreme behaviorists would say that human “feeling” is also merely a hard-wired response to external stimuli.
In recent years, research has become available which expands prior understandings of animal language, cognition and tool use, and even sexuality. Emotions arise in the mammalian brain, or the limbic system, which human beings share in common with other mammals as well as many other species. This presents both a scientific dilemma — how can we tell? — and a potential ethical one — if true, what does it mean?
The most emotional animal I’ve ever encountered was a ferret.
Felix was a small albino house-weasel that was raised by a cat. Him and his cat-buddy were constant companions and playmates…they shared the same bed, litterbox, water dish and food dish – high grade kitten formula…the adult cat could tolerate it only because of the extreme amount of excercise the “weasel wrestling” gave him.
I brought Felix to a friend’s house. Said friend had a cat, laying asleep on the rug on his side. Felix trotted up to it and started licking the top of his head…he knew exactly where to scritch a cat.
The cat yawned, stretched, obviously knew somebody was friendly, rolled over and opened his eyes…which got wider as the shocked cat bounded to it’s feet and stared at this “intruder”. Felix bounced around at the cat’s feet in a typical “let’s play” fashion any ferret owner would recognize.
The cat then bolted from the room like he was shot out of a cannon.
Felix then went dead limp on the carpet, clearly depressed, having experienced “racial discrimination” for the first time. I gently picked him up and cuddled him, but the “play urge” had been knocked flat out of him.
On going home and seeing HIS kitty, he bounded over and jumped on the cat, and they did the usual wrestle all over the living room. Back to normal.
I can give you countless examples like that.
Science can’t even explain emotions in humans, such as Love. Science has no laboratory experiment for proving or disproving love. All it can do is measure the results of the different states of energy in motion (results, as in how these states effect the body and brain).
There are plenty of examples of love and various states of clear human-like emotion in clear operation with animals, many of which can be indisputably viewed by spending a couple of hours on YouTube.
I’m surprised people need science to prove that animals feel. It’s really quite crazy. One only needs to own a dog (and treat it like a family member, and not a “dog”) to see that the dog has a greater capacity for Love and Emotion than any human being. After all, dogs are virtually pure emotion, and feel to a much greater extend than we do (since our feeling is overshadowed by our thinking).