Do Animals Have Feelings? The Answer Is Complex
Do animals have feelings? This question has accompanied the human being since the dawn of time. Today we try to answer.
Any person who cares for a dog or cat would have no doubt that their pet possesses feelings. Each animal (birds and mammals, at least) has its own personality ; this is a fact confirmed by science on numerous occasions.
Things get a little more complicated when we ask nature for an answer regarding emotions and feelings, because these are attributes that are difficult to quantify.
As philosophical as the topic may sound, researchers around the world don’t seem to tire of looking for an answer to this question. Do you want to know what we know about feelings in the animal world? We talk about it in this article.
Feelings and emotions: they are not the same
By “feeling” we refer both to the state of mind and to the conceptualized emotion that determines it. Emotions are faster, because they are psychophysiological reactions produced by certain stimuli that follow the perception of an important object, person, place or event. There are further differences between the two terms:
- Emotions are rapid and transient, while feelings persist over time.
- Emotions are unconscious emotional alterations, because they do not require logical thinking first.
- It is not possible to conceive of a feeling without first having an emotion present. For example, the same emotion can lead to the birth of different feelings.
Emotions appear to be, in part, an evolutionary mechanism, because they can prove very useful in addressing the challenges posed by nature. Some are fundamental, such as, for example, fear, anger, repulsion, joy, sadness and surprise.
These basic emotions have a clear innate component. Other emotions are complex and may have more difficult purposes to decipher.
Do animals have feelings?
Once the meaning of both terms has been clarified, we can understand how it is more correct to associate the soul states of animals with emotions and not with feelings.
Nonetheless, these emotions remain difficult to identify, because what we see is their expression which manifests itself through the actions of the animal and not the emotion itself.
In any case, some ethological studies have tried to demonstrate the presence of both simple and complex emotions in different animals:
- In one study, the possible cognitive manifestations of emotion in a sample of bees were monitored after they were subjected to a state of anxiety.
- Some have been subjected to agitation inside their honeycomb before being exposed to a sequence of smells, both new and already known.
- Other bees remained quiet in their cells and were subsequently exposed to such smells.
- It was observed that bees that had been subjected to a state of anxiety ventured much less when it came to approaching sources of unknown odors.
This fact can be explained by a fundamental emotion such as fear. After a traumatic experience, these animals may possess greater emotional prudence towards new stimuli.
Animals have feelings: the emotions of mammals
Things get even more complicated when we delve a little deeper into the brain complexity of the study subjects, since the presence of several complex emotions has been recorded in mammals. In the following lines we present some examples:
- Several studies have shown that primates are capable of showing empathy. For example, on numerous occasions macaques have refused in the laboratory to obtain food by pulling a lever, if this action involved administering an electric shock to their mate.
- Many theories claim that dogs are able to perceive negative emotions much like we humans do. We know that dogs can be affected by some psychological conditions, such as chronic depression and neurosis.
- Elephants possess cognitive memory and show empathy in the face of suffering experienced by other members of their species.
As we can see, the development of ethology in recent decades seems to suggest that we humans are not the only ones capable of hearing in the animal world. In addition to the presence of basic emotions, these facts show that concepts such as empathy or complex emotional disorders are also present in animals.
Do animals have feelings? A still open debate
Despite this scientific evidence, there are detractors who reject the concept of emotions in the animal world, arguing that studies and their interpretations are always formulated from a distorted anthropomorphic point of view.
Most of these debates have their roots in the distinction of very complex concepts, such as those of “emotion” and “feeling”. Can animals hear? Why shouldn’t they, if the presence of emotional manifestations was observed in them?
Are the cognitive abilities of a mammal comparable to ours? All these questions have different answers, which depend on the level of understanding we attribute to animals.
