On another Thread, @thorny_locust eloquently wrote something I’ve long believed to be true.
I’d be interested in a discussion (perhaps this is a debate; I’m not sure if it’s controversial) of the notion that other animals (mammals, at the least) have the same emotions as humans .
I’d go even further. I think that our dogs and cats have thoughts, too. Does your dog or cat have preferences? Do they sometimes want to do something? I don’t think that’s possible unless they formulate the thought.
And, even more, they communicate these thoughts and feelings. Animal people aren’t exaggerating when they say that they can communicate with their pats. If you pay attention to body language, they tell you a lot. And they, in turn, learn certain words and phrases. Between those two extremes, we’re able to understand each other.
So what’s your opinion. Do animals have thoughts and feelings just like people? Or is the human mammal somebody distinct from all the rest?
Other critters have emotions, and hence they have cognitions as well. Now, what we refer to as our thoughts are generally constructs assembled out of language-represented concepts; I don’t regard that as the only form of thought, but this is important, that we do this, because for the most part we don’t have reason to think that other animals utilize a representational language as we do.
Having languaged terms to hold onto concepts lets you do amazing things. You can hold a model of something that took an hour to describe in your head and imagine it being acted upon by a force that took another hour to describe. Language lets you turn processes — verbs — into nouns and manipulate them in your head. An intelligence without a language that can do that can still think, can still recognize patterns, can draw some conclusions… but I would think it’s a real handicap to not have that. And we even have the capability of writing our language down. That’s powerful.
ETA: That, and not the absence of emotions or the absence of thought, is what sets us apart from most of the other animal species. Although there’s some limited evidence that suggests that some other species may be a bit more languaged than we realize.
In my opinion, humans are on a continuum with other animals. We think we are far more special than we are. All our stories about ourselves and about other animals are designed to prove that we’re very very unique and special, and thus we deserve to eat the world and shit it out as slag.
I have always spent more time with animals than with humans, and I’ve paid much more attention to them, as well. Animals have just as many emotions as humans. They have all the emotions humans have. We are animals, and animals have emotions. I’m speaking of mammals here. I would also say that’s true of birds, in my experience. I have spent less time with reptiles and amphibians.
If you don’t believe this, you simply have not spent enough time with other animal species, while paying attention. Even dogs – people live with them and yet don’t seem to be able to understand them at all. They make up the stupidest reasons for what they see dogs doing.
If animals have abstract thoughts, they haven’t shared them with me.
Complex animals (and not just mammals) definitely have emotions, which we know because they have similar affective responses and neural ‘circuits’ in the structure of their brains. There is a long history of affective neuroscience in animal research to back this up which is well summarized by the late Jaak Panksepp in The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions. All of the essential affective responses (SEEKING, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PLAY, et cetera) are found across the animal kingdom in virtually any species with a complex brain, and dismissing the appearance of this under the banner of “instinct” doesn’t really explain anything.
As for thoughts, many animals are clearly capable of a certain level of planning and anticipation of the future causality that would be essentially impossible without some kind of internal conceptual cognition. I also think that many animals do, in fact, have a certain degree of ‘language’ in communicating intent and emotional state through both verbal and non-verbal cues even if they lack a formal grammar or written vocabulary. I don’t think a dog is capable of constructing an elaborate scheme or understanding a sonnet, but I’ve met many dogs and a few cats which would play tricks or engage in fakery to achieve an expected result. This speaks to a significant level of cognitive analysis even if they don’t think in pure abstractions.
Knowing that (adult) cats only meow at humans, not other cats, what I imagine what cats are doing is the equivalent of an American tourist in Mexico speaking english loudly and slowly to people who only speak Spanish. Constantly, “DO… YOU… SPEAK… CAT?.. CAAAAAT?”
Except sometimes it’s clearly just a “hello”, and other times it’s a more insistent “give me what I want”. Cats are “speaking”, albeit without words, but mere sounds. But the inflection is there.
The “meow” is often an attention-getter. It means mostly “Look at me, I’m trying to tell you something!” (Some cats will use different meows for different things, others not so much; though the ‘don’t you dare do that’ meow won’t sound like a greeting chirp or an ‘open this door!’ meow – at least, not from the same cat.)
What they’re trying to tell you is indicated by ears, tail, fur, whiskers, body position, location of cat, and direction of gaze. Cat sitting next to food dish and staring at you? Feed me! Cat staring at you while you’re on the computer, then heading for the other room as soon as you look? I want something that’s in this direction, come follow me so I can show you whether it’s food, water, or an opened door! And so on.
– Years ago I acquired a grown dog who had clearly been taught, at some time in her life, that cats were dangerous. I brought her on a leash into a room with a cat in it – she determinedly went to the furthest spot in the room from the cat, while doing her best to pretend that she didn’t know there was a cat there (she looked away from the cat, she didn’t sniff the air, etc.) She really really didn’t want to be brought any closer to the cat.
After the humans who brought her left, a cat shy of humans but friendly to dogs came down and approached her. I was looking the other way and turned back instantly when I heard a very aggressive sounding “WHOOF!” – but the cat was halfway back upstairs already and the dog had made no move to chase; she’d apparently just been warning what she thought was a dangerous creature to stay away from her.
For the next week or so the assorted cats and the dog just stayed away from each other.
That cat had a sibling. The dog was kept on leash or shut up for the first couple of weeks, partly because I needed to be sure her rabies shot had taken hold. I had her tied to a post while I worked outside near her. The cat and sibling put on a wrestling game out of the reach of the dog’s tether, but well within her sight. The dog watched this with utter fascination. Eventually the male cat pinned his smaller sister and, as generally happened, she started to squeak in frustration because she couldn’t get out from under. Dog let out one sharp bark – nothing at all like the warning bark. It was a ‘you puppies cut it out’ bark; and the cats reacted accordingly, separating and going off in different directions.
Immediately after that the dog started trying to make friends with the cats; in which she soon succeeded.
She had figured out, from ten minutes or so of watching two cats play, that cats were social creatures; and deduced correctly that they might be social with her.
There are human supposed experts who claim to have been watching cats for years who haven’t figured out that domestic cats are a social species. That dog did it in ten minutes. She wouldn’t have had those words, of course; but she had the sense of it.
I was once play wrestling with my son. The dog was getting agitated and let out the same bark. We stopped to give her attention, to show we were just playing. It seemed to satisfy her, since she ran and grabbed her favorite toy.
In fact, anybody can speak to a dog. Go up to one you know and get in “play stance” : butt in the air and head down near the ground. Does the dog react as if you just said “hey, wanna play?” Do they start to run around or get a toy? Maybe they model your own play stance? I suspect it will work, because you are communicating with them in their language.
Maybe. Probably even more likely if you rub your head against him.
It’s a multipurpose behavior; it feels good, it expresses friendship, and it puts a claim in – cats will also rub those scent glands in front of their ears on assorted inanimate stuff in their territory. On a person, another cat, another dog it’s “this is part of my clowder”; on an object, it’s “this is part of my territory.” Though I don’t know whether cats separate those categories the same way we do – but I’m pretty sure they distinguish between alive and not-alive.