WIKIMEDIA, CHAD MILLERDo you love your dog? Does your dog love you?
How do you know? Who can prove it doesn’t?
Virtually every human emotion has been attributed to animals, and assertions that nonhuman animals have emotions “just like people” are frequent. Evidence to suggest animals have emotions comes from two sources: observations of animal behavior and inference from evolutionary theory.
Observation
The most compelling observations are those made on wild animals, either in the field or in captivity, usually by researchers who have long interacted with the species. A researcher observes an animal behaving in a way similar to the way humans might behave under similar circumstances and posits they must be experiencing the same emotions. If a female chimpanzee cradles her dead offspring and exhibits facial expressions similar to a human mother who recently lost ...
