When it comes to animal anxiety, I always feel bad about very small dogs in public. It seems like 90% of the chihuahas I've ever seen were incredibly nervous around strangers, some to the point of visibly shaking if too close to a crowd - and I can't blame them, given the size difference.
Probably has more to do with the socialization of the dog than anything. You've probably seen more small dogs that are vocal and aggressive than large dogs. This is because the owners of a large dog is less likely to tolerate aggression, would put more training in, etc.
We have a dog that's part pit bull, and she's the best behaved dog I've ever had because we can't allow her to act out at all. She just doesn't get the benefit of the doubt from others that a smaller dog or a breed with a better reputation would get.
I've had both a Pekingese and a Rottweiler at the same time and me and my wife raised both with the same affection and attention. We were very relaxed about the Rottweiler, because she was always listening to command when outdoors and we never had to give her special training, whereas we had to keep the Pekingese on a short leash. Can you imagine somebody walking with a free Rottweiler and a leashed Pekingese? That was us.
It had nothing to do with socialization or training. The Pekingese was simply more aggressive and was never listening to our command, when outdoors at least. And at some point we simply have up on trying to educate him, because that was a losing battle. The Rottweiler on the other hand knew what we wanted at all times. She even knew when we wanted her to become aggressive without any special words spoken. Obviously she was never aggressive towards the Pekingese or she would have killed him. A hard thing to do, since this kindness wasn't returned by the Pekingese.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved both. But the Rottweiler was clearly much smarter and more adapted to live as part of a family ;-)
PS: Broke my heart when she died, hence why I'll never adopt a dog again. They live much shorter lives, hence you get to be a parent of sorts, then watch them die, sometimes horribly.
I don't know about Pekingese specifically, but some races of small dogs were intentionally breed to arouse larger dogs in a hunting party. Others were breed to fend off vermin.
It is not unusual to see ill-tempered small dogs at all.
Some of the shaking can also be because they are cold very easily. But yes, I would also be nervous being around people who could break my bones with a small misstep.
This is something that in hindsight would seem to be obvious, but really isn't. If you've spent almost your whole life weighing 100+ pounds, it's really hard to imagine the rapid heat loss that is experienced if you weight 1/10th of that. This applies to pets, but also babies and small children.
I always looked down at people whose dogs wore sweaters. I thought they are just wimps. Now we have a chihuahua and she is wearing sweaters when it's below 75.
absolutely the same story here, 76 in our case :) - very thin coat. I remember reading story about a small dog where "having outfit for each season" was mentioned as a kind of outrageous pumpering of the dog, and how i'd had agreed with that before having our chihuahua. Now we have sweaters, light and heavy, jackets, jackets with hood - the hood goes on when windy, still trying to find good convenient pants, tried boots - shakes them off, it is ok, anyway we aren't going in the rain :)
I think it depends a lot on the density of the crowd. Chihuahuas have become quite popular in the town where I work; Drammen, Norway, about 65k people. And they always seem to me to be quite oblivious to the difference in size between themselves and other dogs and humans. Of course, we don't have crowds in the same way that, say, London or New York has crowds so the risk of being stepped on is rather small (except during the World Cup Ski Sprint of course).
Depends on the dog, I guess. Again I remind all that my wife and I volunteer at an animal shelter, and we see tons of chihuahuas (thanks, Hollywood!). Some can be pretty anxious (you would be, too, if I stuck you in the equivalent of doggie county jail), some have a big dog attitude in a little body. Granted, a shelter is not much of a control environment, but I'd say it's 50/50 on the "shaky, nervous little dog"/"6lb. dog thinks he's a pit bull" ratio. Some are what you've seen, others are as confident as any 120lb. Rottweiler, strutting down the street on their walk.
Without a proper control, I put it down to environment and how they're treated. Many small dogs are "purse dogs" that are treated like accessories instead of dogs, and I hypothesize that has something to do with it. I mean, people get a small dog because it fits a certain lifestyle, and that lifestyle may not include treating your pet such that he gains confidence in all situations. But that's just me talking out my butt, I have nothing that isn't anecdote or SWAG to prove my point.
It's interesting that scientists talk about animals displaying "anxious behavior," rather than "being anxious," because we don't "know" what's actually going on in their minds. But we're perfectly willing to believe that none of our fellow humans are philosophical zombies[0], even though we don't know other people's true state of mind, or if they even have a state of mind, anymore than we know about rats' or cats'.
Isn't that just because that's not a useful or testable hypothesis? It's technically possible that I'm the only conscious being on Earth, but there's no evidence for that and it would be impossible to ever know, so it's not really worth thinking about.
The point is that the hypothesis that animals are philosophical zombies is just as untestable, but we're married to the opposite conclusion for no good reason.
I don't think that's true. We have lots of evidence that other humans are not philosophical zombies, we just technically can't rule it out. We can look for similar evidence that animals feel emotion, even though it's always possible that we're just seeing convincing imitations.
I don't agree that we have any evidence that other humans aren't p-zombies. The whole point of the exercise is that it's logically impossible for such evidence to exist. If you're aware of any, I'd love to hear it.
(FWIW I don't personally believe that people are p-zombies, but I believe that purely on faith, and because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.)
It's logically impossible for proof to exist, but I think observation and comparison count as evidence. For example, if I see your signature on a document, that's evidence that you signed it, even though I can't prove that it's not forged. Similarly, if I see you act distressed after touching a hot stove, that's evidence that you felt pain, even though I can't prove it.
The only thing you need to take on faith is that your perception of the world is not simulated. Assuming that your experiences are real, every comparison of yourself to other people is evidence that you work the same. You can compare behavior, MRIs, xrays, whatever.
Ah, I think I understand what you're saying now. I think where we're parting ways is that when I say "evidence" I mean unambiguous evidence. There's definitely evidence that people aren't p-zombies, like your example (other people react to certain things the same way I do and it's reasonable to assume those reactions are accompanied by similar experience). There's just not unequivocal evidence. Have I understood your view correctly?
Yes, definitely. But from a certain point of view, almost nothing is unambiguously true, right? You have to set a bar, and accept anything below that bar as a fundamental assumption that you take on faith. And if your bar is so low that other people might not be conscious, then you know, maybe nothing is real. You definitely can't believe in the existence of anything you haven't seen with your own eyes.
I know nobody here actually believes in p-zombies, I'm just making a point in response to the original comment that it's totally reasonable to be sure that other humans are conscious, and not sure that animals are. Those positions are consistent if you're operating with a usable definition of evidence and truth. It's philosophically possible that other people are zombies, but it's practically possible that some animals are zombies.
Observing may not require insight into the mind, but classifying it as anxious does. "Anxious" makes a claim about the state of mind of whatever is being described. One would need to rename the classification, perhaps to something actually descriptive of the observations.
I see what you're getting at, but in this case it's not really describing the state of mind. My behavior could be anxious without actually being anxious. For example shaking your leg is an anxious behavior, being jumpy or twitchy as well, but they don't necessarily mean that the person behaving that way is anxious.
Anxious is describing the behavior itself, not the cause of it. You would be correct if it had said the behavior was due to being anxious, because that's describing the mind state of who's performing the behavior and the cause of it.
There must be a relationship between those behaviors described as anxious and those caused by being anxious, otherwise a different label would have been used to classify the behaviors.
Why is twitching labeled anxious? Perhaps it is part of a workout routine, in which case it would be more accurate to label the same observed behavior as exercise.
Until we have a deep theory of how minds work and how conscious, subjective experience relates to that, the lines we draw in interpreting the experiences of other entities are bound to be somewhat arbitrary.
Colloquially, we don't describe behavior as 'anxious behavior' because people tend to react with 'annoyed behavior' when you describe their actions using distancing terminology like that.
But in fields like behaviorology, and psychology you can regularly see people talking about "X behavior" as generalization for "short ticks, flinching, quicker speech, pacing, etc." which will be given a fuller treatment elsewhere.
Our evidence is much, much, much better in the case of people. We talk to them, dance with them, have sex with them, have a lifetime of interpreting subtleties of their tone and body language and power politics. We are the same species as they are.
It makes sense to talk about not knowing the mind of a cat or dog in a way that it does not make sense to say the same of a person, even if you grant that "you never really know someone else," and even if you grant the technical possibility that everyone else is just a sophisticated automaton (though it's unclear what that would even mean, or how that would change anything).
>We talk to them, dance with them, have sex with them, have a lifetime of interpreting subtleties of their tone and body language and power politics. We are the same species as they are.
I would say these are all different ways to know somebody. We do after all speak of knowing somebody intimately as opposed to a passing acquaintance. There's a wide gap between the two.
Let's make it more complicated than history and personal experiences. How do you know that you are not a Boltzmann brain? It's highly improbable, I'm not claiming it to be true. There is the smallest possible probability that I am the only one that has qualia and sentience. It's a philosophical zombie for a reason: it's a source of creative thought, not necessarily truth.
Yeah there is a certain dissonance in conducting research to create psychoactive drugs based on "anxiety-like symptoms", then giving that drug to humans and seeing that it does in fact cure anxiety, and the refuse to attribute that emotion to animals. How do they think that the research worked then, sheer coincidence ?
A difference is that humans can report their subjective experiences directly (i.e. "I feel anxious") whereas animals cannot. It's not dispositive, of course, (would a p-zombie report that they feel anxious?) but it makes a big difference.
Speaking elegantly to available observations is different from rejecting the inner world of animals, but a lot of people view the non-acceptance of their view as the rejection of their view. It's just disciplined conservatism, as opposed to the affirmative belief of nothingness inside an animal.
That's pretty interesting. I think most people feel that animals only have a simple subset of human emotions they can feel but maybe there are emotions they have that we do not. I imagine dogs, with a strong sense of social belonging to a pack, experience emotions related to social structure that are difficult for us to understand.
Vernor Vinge, in Fire Upon The Deep, explored that idea in pretty interesting ways. I didn't love the book (I like him as an author, and this one is considered a classic, but it didn't really grab me), but the Tines (dog-like pack animals) were an interesting thought experiment. In it, a single Tine is roughly akin to a smart dog, but when combined into a pack (linked via some sort of sound-based communication), they're of roughly human intelligence (or better) and able to perform advanced tasks, allowing them to build complex machines. Their individual pack members act as limbs in a whole "person". When one member dies, it is more like an amputation than a death...and a new pack member can be added, while mostly keeping the character and memories of the whole person. Thus Tines are potentially very long-lived (like great grandfather's ax).
There is discussion of emotions that members and packs experience that humans find foreign. Belonging to a pack being one of them; a lone Tine member that can't merge into a new pack is considered a tragic case.
Anyway, probably worth a read just for those novel ideas about other lifeforms.
I agree with jotux that pack-related emotions are probably something we'd have a hard time with. We have tribe-related emotions but they are probably not the same thing.
Further, humans have evolved at least one emotion that appears to have virtually no analog anywhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust If you don't think that's an "emotion", read that page and follow some of the references; I have found it to be a very interesting topic. If humans have this one, it would seem to defy imagination that there aren't other lines that have other emotions that we don't. In fact I've seen it suggested that it's actually amazing how much similarity there is in the entire mammal line between emotional states and the expressions of those states. To a certain extent, mammals are capable of very basic emotional communication across the entire line. We take it for granted, but compare with, for instance, reptiles.
I've seen animals behave in a way that suggests disgust. For instance, cats don't like strong smells on themselves. My cats are much more reluctant to be petted after I've just washed my hands with fragrant soap. They often sniff at my hand and back away. On occasion they'll even threaten to swat at my hand.
I assume they evolved (what I'm suggesting is) the disgust behavior because it makes them easy for other animals to smell, which makes it hard for them to hunt, and easier for larger animals to hunt them.
In fact, the Wikipedia article you linked to has a section about an acquired disgust response in mice. I agree that there's a difference between acquired disgust and innate disgust, but it's an indication that animals are capable of feeling something akin to disgust.
Watching a cat track a bird through a window definitely gives the impression that there's a sort of focus and attention there that we might not have an equivalent of.
I'm embarrassed that I never thought of this, but now that you mention it, it seems obvious there would be subsets of emotions other animals feel that we do not. Even if our capacity for emotion is greater, it seems unlikely that the VENN diagram of our emotions and their emotions would show their circle completely contained within ours.
One thing I do think about a lot is what mental capacity other animals have that we do not. An elephant's brain is way bigger than ours. Considering that other large animals have proportionately smaller brains, it must be that size for a reason. I wonder what mental things are easy for an elephant but hard for a human?
Yes, and probably lots of spatial-intelligence in general. Memory is also attributed to them by folk lore, but that's debatable.
Due to their body size, elephants need to move around a lot for forraging and, in the African Savahna at least, find water. The survival of the pack often depends on the matriarch ability to navigate through land they have not visited in many years, and finding all the scarse watersprings without the benefit of navigation instruments.
In the documentary Blackfish, they note that an area of the brain which plays a big role in emotions is much larger in killer whales than it is in humans. They speculate that the social/emotional lives of whales in a pod could be far richer and more complex than what we experience.
This article reminds an always missing in the startup "change the world" culture: animals and wild life. There is almost no investment, innovations, startups etc in this direction. The poor animals can't blog.
My partner's cat had a urinary blockage that caused him to pee everywhere for several months before it was figured out that it was a physical issue (it coincided with moving to a new place, so it was assumed to be stress). They pee everywhere because it's painful to urinate, so they hold it until they can't anymore. It can be a life-threatening condition. But, it's also thought to be exacerbated by stress, so maybe taking Prozac reduces the stress and prevents the blockage from progressing.
My sister and her husband had two dogs for a long time, when one of them died, the other got very depressed. So they put her on anti-depressants for a few months after that.
My last dog was blind for a few years before she died and eventually seemed to be in a fair amount of pain, all of which resulted in very anxious behavior. The vet prescribed alprazolam (Xanax), which was quite effective.
Don't know about cats, but I've had a dog that we fed doggie Prozac in an attempt to help with behavioral issues. Seemed to have a positive effect (unfortunately, not positive enough; had to eventually put him down). We volunteer at an animal shelter, and there are occasionally particularly anxious dogs that get a prescription. Works well for a lot of them, it seems, or at least takes enough of the edge off that they can be worked with and trained.
Not sure of the colloquial meaning of "barmy" (and the Mac OS dictionary is no help), but if it's a negative term, I'd argue that observation says it can help in some situations.
Oh, well in that case, I can't argue much. I fed the dog canine Prozac, but not without first thinking, "I already feel that antidepressants are overprescribed, and I'm going to feed some to the dog?"
Anyone who has worked with animals knows they are far smarter than we give them credit for. Cows and octopi learn how to escape from their pens, crows use tools, grey parrots can ask existential questions.
> I made an appointment, first, with a pet behavior specialist and, five months later, when her initially helpful suggestions didn’t change Lucas’s behavior, with a vet.
> When I thought about Lucas as anxious, I also began to think about his needs more than I had before. I played with him more often and gave him more, smaller meals.
This really makes me wonder what the specialist's suggestions were, because "more play and attention, like he is accustomed to" seems like the simplest #1 solution.
I've had similar good results with my cat on anti-depressants. It sounded crazy, but his panic attacks (when other cats would venture into the back yard and he's see them out the window) ceased! We eased him off of them after a while.
I feed a large group of stray cats around the neighborhood every morning for years now.
Let me tell you, they definitely have feelings.
Some cats are overjoyed to see me, they even come running down the road, purring and chirping at me. It's not because of the food because many of them don't even eat it right when I put it down, they must eat later in the day. They are just genuinely happy to get some attention, to "talk" to you and to be talked to.
What people should be asking is if all those chickens, cows and bulls that are slaughtered every year had feelings and if it is right to raise them only to kill them.
(and yes I know the irony is the cat food is made of chickens, cows, etc. - I don't know how to resolve that conflict)
It's seems pretty obvious to me that pigs and cows have feelings and are somewhat intelligent, so I'm reluctant to eat those. But I'm really wondering about dumb animals like chickens, fish and insects. Do they have feelings? Does a chicken or a fish suffer when imprisoned?
I saw a study somewhere that maybe fish do have feelings, they just don't express them in a way we can identify or relate to so we write it off. They do have very tiny brains but still.
After refusing to eat meat since I was a teenager (we're talking decades) I recently "gave in" and started eating tuna because my protein intake was so low it was doing damage. Still feel guilty as hell about it. Beans and milk just don't cut it though and greek yogurt is way way too expensive to eat regularly.
Here's a steer that was let outside after being cooped up for the winter, tell me it's not happy:
cows do that too - I've seen all sorts of scenes with cows that clearly show them expressing emotions, with music, with dogs, etc.
and pigs are VERY smart, smarter than dogs in many cases, makes completely sense to me if they have emotions, would be strange if they did not while dogs do
this is why artificial meat would be so important to our civilization - probably the most important thing to happen in the near future. It would finally allow to unblock the idea in human minds that the animals are sentient beings.
I like the idea of forcing people to consider living, feeling creature vs not but I dunno how they would ever reduce the cost of artificially grown. Maybe a technology that doesn't exist yet. It would have to be grown like plants/mold.
The livestock industry is sure going to push some nasty ads to fight artificial.
> “Do animals have mental states? We don’t know, and we can never know for sure,” he said in an interview with BrainWorld magazine in 2012. For LeDoux, observations of behavior aren’t enough to give it a label like “anxiety” when we can’t enter into the animal’s subjective experience. It might be emotion, it might also just be an automatic response to danger, and without any way of entering into the animal’s brain—the way language allows us to, at least to a certain mediated degree, with other humans—we can’t assess that.
I can't disagree more strongly with this. Sure, we can never know "for sure". But it's the same with other humans. Language, despite what is said here, doesn't solve that, even if it feels that way.
In other words a human saying "I feel happy" is not actual evidence that they are having a subjective experience like our own feeling of happiness. Or rather, it is evidence, but no stronger than smiling. Which, in turn, is the same type of evidence as a dog wagging its tail and showing other signs of happiness.
We can attribute mental states to both humans and animals to the same extent. Of course, they might be different - we may never know what it is like to experience the world through sonar, and animals may not feel some specific human emotions. But anyone that has loved a pet knows the pet can feel things, just as well as they can know that other humans feel things.
Anyone who has ever had a dog (or cat, I suppose) as a pet can tell you that animals do have mental states. And any farmer across written history (minus last 120 years, perhaps) would've agreed. The myth that animals are nothing more than "flesh machines" is quite recent in history.
Perhaps they need to change the word from "emotion" to "response". There is a great bias in science against ascribing to animals anything that is even remotely considered to be exclusively in the domain of humans.
While I get the whole anthropomorphizing trend that pet owners have, raw emotional responses like anger, anxiety, envy, and affection are pretty easy to read. What is also clear is that the animals response to those emotions may be much different than human response.
Agree with this. The resolution the author reveals at the end, that simply playing with the cat more reduced anxiety behavior, almost makes me think that it wasn't that the cat was anxious, just that the cat was under stimulated and acted out to use up excess energy.
beside being just a religious dogma of "only humans have soul" in disguise, answering "No" would mean that the one can suggest a specific plausible place in a continuous chain of living organisms from any human back to first cell (or just to say first mammals) where the "soul" ("mental states") supposedly magically appeared. I mean did Neanderthals had soul? Did Australopithecus? Did the apes 2M years ago?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadIt had nothing to do with socialization or training. The Pekingese was simply more aggressive and was never listening to our command, when outdoors at least. And at some point we simply have up on trying to educate him, because that was a losing battle. The Rottweiler on the other hand knew what we wanted at all times. She even knew when we wanted her to become aggressive without any special words spoken. Obviously she was never aggressive towards the Pekingese or she would have killed him. A hard thing to do, since this kindness wasn't returned by the Pekingese.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved both. But the Rottweiler was clearly much smarter and more adapted to live as part of a family ;-)
PS: Broke my heart when she died, hence why I'll never adopt a dog again. They live much shorter lives, hence you get to be a parent of sorts, then watch them die, sometimes horribly.
It is not unusual to see ill-tempered small dogs at all.
Without a proper control, I put it down to environment and how they're treated. Many small dogs are "purse dogs" that are treated like accessories instead of dogs, and I hypothesize that has something to do with it. I mean, people get a small dog because it fits a certain lifestyle, and that lifestyle may not include treating your pet such that he gains confidence in all situations. But that's just me talking out my butt, I have nothing that isn't anecdote or SWAG to prove my point.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
(FWIW I don't personally believe that people are p-zombies, but I believe that purely on faith, and because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.)
The only thing you need to take on faith is that your perception of the world is not simulated. Assuming that your experiences are real, every comparison of yourself to other people is evidence that you work the same. You can compare behavior, MRIs, xrays, whatever.
I know nobody here actually believes in p-zombies, I'm just making a point in response to the original comment that it's totally reasonable to be sure that other humans are conscious, and not sure that animals are. Those positions are consistent if you're operating with a usable definition of evidence and truth. It's philosophically possible that other people are zombies, but it's practically possible that some animals are zombies.
Rather than downmod, why not show how it doesn't?
Anxious is describing the behavior itself, not the cause of it. You would be correct if it had said the behavior was due to being anxious, because that's describing the mind state of who's performing the behavior and the cause of it.
Why is twitching labeled anxious? Perhaps it is part of a workout routine, in which case it would be more accurate to label the same observed behavior as exercise.
But in fields like behaviorology, and psychology you can regularly see people talking about "X behavior" as generalization for "short ticks, flinching, quicker speech, pacing, etc." which will be given a fuller treatment elsewhere.
It makes sense to talk about not knowing the mind of a cat or dog in a way that it does not make sense to say the same of a person, even if you grant that "you never really know someone else," and even if you grant the technical possibility that everyone else is just a sophisticated automaton (though it's unclear what that would even mean, or how that would change anything).
How is this any more of an evidence?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)
It's only lay persons who think there's any difference.
There is discussion of emotions that members and packs experience that humans find foreign. Belonging to a pack being one of them; a lone Tine member that can't merge into a new pack is considered a tragic case.
Anyway, probably worth a read just for those novel ideas about other lifeforms.
Further, humans have evolved at least one emotion that appears to have virtually no analog anywhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust If you don't think that's an "emotion", read that page and follow some of the references; I have found it to be a very interesting topic. If humans have this one, it would seem to defy imagination that there aren't other lines that have other emotions that we don't. In fact I've seen it suggested that it's actually amazing how much similarity there is in the entire mammal line between emotional states and the expressions of those states. To a certain extent, mammals are capable of very basic emotional communication across the entire line. We take it for granted, but compare with, for instance, reptiles.
I assume they evolved (what I'm suggesting is) the disgust behavior because it makes them easy for other animals to smell, which makes it hard for them to hunt, and easier for larger animals to hunt them.
In fact, the Wikipedia article you linked to has a section about an acquired disgust response in mice. I agree that there's a difference between acquired disgust and innate disgust, but it's an indication that animals are capable of feeling something akin to disgust.
One thing I do think about a lot is what mental capacity other animals have that we do not. An elephant's brain is way bigger than ours. Considering that other large animals have proportionately smaller brains, it must be that size for a reason. I wonder what mental things are easy for an elephant but hard for a human?
Controlling an articulated trunk with tens of thousands of muscles for one.
Due to their body size, elephants need to move around a lot for forraging and, in the African Savahna at least, find water. The survival of the pack often depends on the matriarch ability to navigate through land they have not visited in many years, and finding all the scarse watersprings without the benefit of navigation instruments.
Not sure of the colloquial meaning of "barmy" (and the Mac OS dictionary is no help), but if it's a negative term, I'd argue that observation says it can help in some situations.
> When I thought about Lucas as anxious, I also began to think about his needs more than I had before. I played with him more often and gave him more, smaller meals.
This really makes me wonder what the specialist's suggestions were, because "more play and attention, like he is accustomed to" seems like the simplest #1 solution.
Let me tell you, they definitely have feelings.
Some cats are overjoyed to see me, they even come running down the road, purring and chirping at me. It's not because of the food because many of them don't even eat it right when I put it down, they must eat later in the day. They are just genuinely happy to get some attention, to "talk" to you and to be talked to.
What people should be asking is if all those chickens, cows and bulls that are slaughtered every year had feelings and if it is right to raise them only to kill them.
(and yes I know the irony is the cat food is made of chickens, cows, etc. - I don't know how to resolve that conflict)
After refusing to eat meat since I was a teenager (we're talking decades) I recently "gave in" and started eating tuna because my protein intake was so low it was doing damage. Still feel guilty as hell about it. Beans and milk just don't cut it though and greek yogurt is way way too expensive to eat regularly.
Here's a steer that was let outside after being cooped up for the winter, tell me it's not happy:
https://imgur.com/gallery/r1picTv
cows do that too - I've seen all sorts of scenes with cows that clearly show them expressing emotions, with music, with dogs, etc.
and pigs are VERY smart, smarter than dogs in many cases, makes completely sense to me if they have emotions, would be strange if they did not while dogs do
this is why artificial meat would be so important to our civilization - probably the most important thing to happen in the near future. It would finally allow to unblock the idea in human minds that the animals are sentient beings.
The livestock industry is sure going to push some nasty ads to fight artificial.
I can't disagree more strongly with this. Sure, we can never know "for sure". But it's the same with other humans. Language, despite what is said here, doesn't solve that, even if it feels that way.
In other words a human saying "I feel happy" is not actual evidence that they are having a subjective experience like our own feeling of happiness. Or rather, it is evidence, but no stronger than smiling. Which, in turn, is the same type of evidence as a dog wagging its tail and showing other signs of happiness.
We can attribute mental states to both humans and animals to the same extent. Of course, they might be different - we may never know what it is like to experience the world through sonar, and animals may not feel some specific human emotions. But anyone that has loved a pet knows the pet can feel things, just as well as they can know that other humans feel things.
While I get the whole anthropomorphizing trend that pet owners have, raw emotional responses like anger, anxiety, envy, and affection are pretty easy to read. What is also clear is that the animals response to those emotions may be much different than human response.
beside being just a religious dogma of "only humans have soul" in disguise, answering "No" would mean that the one can suggest a specific plausible place in a continuous chain of living organisms from any human back to first cell (or just to say first mammals) where the "soul" ("mental states") supposedly magically appeared. I mean did Neanderthals had soul? Did Australopithecus? Did the apes 2M years ago?