
Could Cats and Dogs Feel the Same Emotions We Do? - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/can-a-cat-have-an-existential-crisis
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crystalmeph
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'.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

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jonahx
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).

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imakesnowflakes
>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.

How is this any more of an evidence?

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jxramos
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.

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azakai
> “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.

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crpatino
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.

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rocky1138
I've actually been interested in whether they feel emotions we cannot.

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jerf
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](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.

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actsasbuffoon
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.

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zyxley
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.

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coralreef
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.

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bad_user
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.

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crpatino
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.

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pavel_lishin
> _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.

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trhway
>Do animals have mental states?

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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DodgyEggplant
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.

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orf
Is feeding cats antidepressants a usual thing in the US? I've never heard of
such a thing in Europe and to be honest I think it's a bit barmy.

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needz
Friends of mine feed their cat prozac in response to him peeing everywhere; it
seems to work.

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SwellJoe
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.

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ck2
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)

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trhway
>I don't know how to resolve that conflict

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.

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ck2
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.

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yolesaber
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.

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VonGuard
And anyone who has a cat knows that the definitely have the emotions of love,
hate, spite, fear and excitement.

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walterstucco
the fact is that they don't know what they are...

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VonGuard
Do we?

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ChuckMcM
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.

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xlm1717
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.

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jsprogrammer
The title was changed?

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alva
Im sure Schrödinger's could

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dang
We changed the title from "Can a Cat Have an Existential Crisis?" to the
(somewhat) less linkbaity doc title.

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kwhitefoot
The new title is boring. Hacker News is all about link bait so why be coy
about it?

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thevibesman
While I do like playing spot-the-link-bait before I click articles, I do like
this policy of link title revision.

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linux_girl
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.

