Do animals have emotions?

Anyone who ever had a pet has wondered, "Does Spot feel pain, happiness, love, anger?" Do our animals feel like we do, or is that rampant anthropomorphist nonsense? As I was feeding my cat this morning, listening to her cry while I popped open a can of Whiskas, I began to wonder if she was actually experiencing impatience as a hungry person might, or should I just chalk it up to the physiological process of hunger pangs and her reaction as a domesticated house cat to signal human for food.

What scientists have to say

I looked around for any publications on the topic and found a couple of interesting articles suggesting that in fact, animals do experience some person-like emotions. Take this article for example, "Do animals have emotions?", by a scientist from the Earthfire Institute, an Idaho-based non-profit that offers a home for native wildlife that can never be released into the wild. That discussion cites a 2003 Newsweek article, "Animal Emotions", by Mary Carmichael et al. (cited on a Dalmatian Adoption and Rescue website). She gives evidence of animal emotions, including one researcher who says that the behavior of animals toward their humans cannot just be attributed to pets looking to owners only as a source of food, or mere hormonal rushes in response to "outside stimuli".

And dogs get depressed like we do

Edward Willett, in his discussion on "Animal Emotions", claims that psychotropic medications such as Prozac work on the same parts of the brain in animals as they do in humans, and a brand of "Doggy Prozac" is prescribed by veterinarians for depressed dogs. He writes that these drugs work to alter emotions through changing neurochemistry, the same brain chemistry as humans. Therefore, similar emotions must exist in animals.

Could this concept be taken too far?

Carmichael warns against taking animal's feelings too far, to assume that a dog or cat can experience a depth of relationship equal to a human relationship. It may be that pets can stand in as friends (or even children in some cases) and return our affection, but they cannot fully replace person-to-person friendships in complete depth. She feels that new phenomena such as "doga", dog yoga, or owners believing that their pets are actually psychic, have taken the idea of "feeling" pets a bit too far.

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