Do animals have feelings and or emotions??

Answer 1

have you ever seen a cat/dog thats around another animal its whole life, and then one of them passes away?

hopefully you never need to see it happen, but it certainly takes a toll on the animal, and they definitely have emotions for each other and their families. if my girlfriend is out late her cat starts to meow at me like crazy right around the time i go to bed, and it takes him a long time to calm him down, but he gets very very happy as soon as she's home.

Answer 2

Intelligent question. I bet you do not own "a pet". I do, I have a dog. Yes, yes and yes are three times answers to your one question. Feelings yes, they do -- they come next to you and physically approach you "for love" -- they want to be caressed and feel that you love them in return. Emotions, yes again -- many times when the owner feels sick or depressed the animal (in this case the dog) will feel the same way. That is no coincidence. There is a mis-conception out there that animals do not have such feelings, I beg to differ. Hope this answer will strengthen the record.

Answer 3

Yes they absolutely do. They exhibit fear by howling, screaching, running away, biting, scratching...etc.

They exhibit hunger by looking for food, they exhibit happiness by purring, licking, rubbing on the object of their affection, wagging tails and stealing socks or shoes and bringing them back faithfully.

Scientists say these are just reflex and stimulous and response but if that is true for animals, then it is equally true for humans. If humans have emotion, then animals do too. If animals don't, then humans don't...depends on your definition of emotion.

Animals are the same as humans and as such, humans are not treating them very respectfully. (On the other hand, we don't treat humans respectfully either. Have you noticed that people often treat their animals better than their children? We put a dog who is in pain to sleep but force a human to suffer through to the end despite the pain and mental anguish and fruitless inevitable end.)

Yes, animals have feelings and to deny them that right would be the same as denying women, children, people of other races and even ourselves that right. We like to think that they don't so that we can feel justified in treating them badly...but as I said before If we have what we define as feelings and not just stimulus/response, then so do animals. They may communicate differently but their differences of communication does not deny them feelings.

Answer 4

I think so. I don't think they have them like humans do, but I do believe we have a right to take care of them whether they have emotions or not. I do think they feel some emotion though. Anyone who's every had an adorable kitten come purring to you without being called and come up and snuggle in your lap, lick your face, rub his nose on yours, and knead your leg knows they must show some emotion.

Answer 5

some of the ones with the "smaller" brains do not really show as much but animals like dogs and cats sure do! i mean if you abuse ur dog it will whine or get anrgry.if you dont pay attenion to ur cat it might feel left out and do bad things.

Answer 6

Of course! Have u not seen them sad ur happy nor angry? And If u don't have emotion...how r u alive?

Answer 7

Most ordinary people who have direct contact with animals freely concede the reality of animal emotions. Their belief arises from the evidence of their senses and logical deduction. A person who hears birds attacking a cat near their nest usually experiences them as angry. When we see a squirrel flee from us, we think that it is afraid. We see a cat licking its kittens and feel it loves them. We see a bird throbbing with song and suppose it to be happy. Even those with only indirect experience of animals often recognize what they see to be an emotional state, a feeling, which they correlate to a similar human feeling. In this respect the layperson's description of animal life may be more accurate and is certainly richer than the standard behaviorist's description, which shows no effort to investigate animal emotions systematically or in depth.

Despite the lack of sustained scholarly work on animal emotions, there is today a greater interest in the realities of the lives of animals than ever before. Practitioners in a wide range of disciplines share an increasing awareness of the complexity of animal actions -- cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral, individual and social -- and correspondingly greater humility in the face of questions of animal capacities. Humans are no longer as prepared to pronounce upon what an animal can and cannot be and do. We are starting to be clear that we do not know and are only beginning to learn.

While the study of emotion is a respectable field, those who work in it are usually academic psychologists who confine their studies to human emotions. The standard reference work, The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, advises animal behaviorists that "One is well advised to study the behaviour, rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion." Why! They may be elusive or difficult to measure, but this does not mean animal feelings do not exist and are not important.

Human beings are not always aware of what they are feeling. Like animals, they may not be able to put their feelings into words. This does not mean they have no feelings. Sigmund Freud once speculated that a man could be in love with a woman for six years and not know it until many years later. Such a man, with all the goodwill in the world, could not have verbalized what he did not know. He had the feelings, but he did not know about them. It may sound like a paradox -- paradoxical because when we think of a feeling, we think of something that we are consciously aware of feeling. As Freud put it in his 1915 article "The Unconscious": "It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it." Yet it is beyond question that we can "have" feelings that we do not know about.

Psychiatric lexicons contain the term alexithymia for the condition of certain people who cannot describe or recognize emotions, who are able to define them "only in terms of somatic sensations or of behavioral reaction rather than relating them to accompanying thoughts." Such people are handicapped by their inability to understand what feelings are. It is curious that the study of animal behavior should demand that its practitioners turn themselves into alelrithymics.


Hope this answers your question^.^

Answer 8

Of course they do. Have you never seen an animal scared, hurt, sad, or excited???

Answer 9

of course they do u never saw a dog dry or give birth of p on the floor because it's mad

Answer 10

YES! y do u think we buy them toys? duhhh lol jk :) thats why i dont eat meat... its like eating ur pet- they hav emotions and experience fear, anger, and lots more.