
Animals are no less emotional than we are - mykowebhn
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/sunday/emotions-animals-humans.html
======
spinach
I think it's just human conceit, that which drives us to think we are special,
as an individual, as a species, as a planet in the universe, that also makes
us not want to see that animals also feel a range of deeper emotions.

You can look at ducks and see a mother making sure all her little children are
following her into the lake and are safe. Is it love? Why not? We call love a
profound feeling but is it really? Isn't love a function that helps us take
care of our young and survive as a species? An alien, who had never
encountered our planet before and perhaps thinking they are the intelligent
life while the beings on Earth are just 'responding to stimuli' wouldn't see
the emotions humans feel. As ducks to humans, humans to these aliens. Ducks
and humans alike would appear just to be going through the motions.

~~~
drak0n1c
Isn't it also "human conceit" to think that other species should always be
thought of as having emotions and consciousness? No other animal engages in
such.

Perhaps it's the other way around from how you put it. All animals by default
share the conceit you describe. It is not unique to humanity, and does not
deserve the label of "human". The bear does not lament its catch, the whale
does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows. The
uniquely human conceit that we engage in is the one we are both engaging in
right now. The exercise of putting oneself in another's shoes.

By the definition of the word, doesn't that make our species special?

~~~
koboll
>The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner
life of a fish it accidentally swallows.

Neither do humans, of course. Do you stop and grieve for the chicken you just
grilled and ate?

Obviously animals are capable of recognizing that other creatures have
emotions, too--any dog or cat owner can tell you that. But clearly, like us,
they don't always choose empathy.

~~~
ozim
I have to see vegan bears and vegan whales, I only know humans who are able to
decide not to eat other animals based on their beliefs.

~~~
kakarot
It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown
to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit
but not another cat.

~~~
tmh88j
>It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown
to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Occam's razor says that most wild animals exhibit preference of what species
they'll eat based on taste and availability of food, not because of ethics. I
said most because I'm not a wildlife biologist and there always seems to be
strange outliers, but I have a hard time believing an omnivore/carnivore, such
as a bear, would willingly choose vegetation 100% of the time because of
ethics when there's plenty of game of its preference to eat.

>Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit
but not another cat.

Most domesticated dogs that were raised alongside cats won't eat them because
they've learned that they're not allowed to. The ones that do attack children
and other pets are frequently euthanized.

~~~
nearbuy
Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't
need to teach them it's not allowed. There must be another explanation.

~~~
tmh88j
>Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You
don't need to teach them it's not allowed.

That's an absurd statement. While tempers of dogs vary from one to the next
just like humans, I vehemently disagree to the extent that I'm hesitant to
believe you've ever raised a puppy, or even have been exposed to many dogs for
that matter. Plenty of pet dogs behave more like their wolf ancestors than
others.

~~~
kakarot
I've raised dozens of dogs, and like humans, some need some coaching about
good behavior and some get along just fine without ever needing discipline.

That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display
species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals
this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

~~~
tmh88j
>animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that
for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and
availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit
from. Wolves aren't going to stop hunting deer unless the deer somehow provide
additional sources of food that the wolves realize only exists because of the
deer's help.

~~~
selune
I've read about wolves that they eat only the meat they are taught to eat (and
different pack of wolves in different places hunt different animals.) So a
wolf may literally starve to death while sitting near a corpse of some animal
if it doesn't know it can eat it. May happen to pups if their pack dies or to
wolves who were brought up in captivity.

The source is in Russian from a zoologist who studied wolves:
[https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-
semy...](https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-semya)

Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of
emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

~~~
tmh88j
>Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of
emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

You agree with me.

~~~
kakarot
Cannibal cults disintegrate whatever wishy-washy point you were trying to make
here.

------
ocdtrekkie
It's strange to me that this is still considered controversial. Even long-
duration emotional effects like depression is very obvious in pets after the
loss of other/companion pets in a home.

~~~
telchar
It's hard to get a man to understand something if his accustomed lifestyle
depends on his not understanding it (to paraphrase Upton Sinclair). It's
harder to justify eating meat and supporting factory farming if you believe
animals have emotions. I'm not a vegetarian myself but I think that is more
uncomfortable for me than for someone who doesn't believe animals have
emotions.

~~~
hjek
> I'm not a vegetarian myself but I think that is more uncomfortable for me
> than for someone who doesn't believe animals have emotions.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you think is making you still eat
animals, given that you are aware of their suffering?

~~~
aggie
There's a reason we call it beef and not cow. There's a reason we generally
don't serve food in a form that still looks like the animal (most common
exception being fish, which people are less likely to see as an emotional
being). Meat is delicious and nutritious, and it's easy to avoid thinking
about what goes on in the feedlot or the slaughterhouse, so the cognitive
dissonance is easy. This is one reason videos exposing inhumane practices are
so powerful, even to people who already knew such conditions exist.

How about animals we eat that are treated well? If a cow lives a happy life,
is slaughtered as humanely as possible, and wouldn't have existed if not for
our demand for meat, does that make that meat ethical? Maybe even more ethical
than not eating it? (Of course this is an incomplete picture if you want to
consider externalities such as cow farts contributing to climate change.)

~~~
hjek
> How about animals we eat that are treated well? If a cow lives a happy life,
> is slaughtered as humanely as possible, and wouldn't have existed if not for
> our demand for meat, does that make that meat ethical? Maybe even more
> ethical than not eating it?

If that's a general argument, then the same thing goes for humans, so it'd
therefore be better to have a human child and eat it (if it's slaughtered as
humanely as possible), than not having a child, right?

Whenever we argue this way about a non-human animal this way, it's worth
considering whether we'd feel the similarly of about a human being with
similar mental capacities. Otherwise it might just be our speciesism leading
us into motivated reasoning.

Of course, part of the problem with the argument is the false dilemma between
killing someone and them never having been alive. Additionally the assumption,
that it's harmful for someone non-existent to never be brought into existence,
is an odd one. If we accept it, birth control would be highly immoral, and
rape could often be justified as being in the interested of a potential unborn
child... which is actually what's happening here with farmed cows, because
they're being forcefully inseminated non-stop, and you're arguing it's for the
benefit of the unborn calf.

If we buy this premise, we'd also have to support a hypothetical cannibalistic
farming industry rearing captive human children for food, because otherwise
those children wouldn't exist.

------
skosch
I like how quickly this line of thinking leads to panpsychism.

Alright, so your dog has some level of cognition – sensations, emotion, joy,
pain. Perhaps less complex than a human, but nevertheless nonzero. Because
whatever computations happens in its brain _feel like_ something from the
inside.

How about a frog? Less, but still nonzero.

How about a worm? Less, but still nonzero. But hey: we can already model a
worm's nervous system [0]. And if consciousness is just what computation feels
like from the inside, then torturing the model worm creates real pain (or the
worm-equivalent of pain, whatever that emotion is).

Something interesting to think about.

[0] [http://openworm.org](http://openworm.org)

~~~
koboll
We can, without lapsing into full panpsychism, state some ethical paradoxes
about the way we can observe animal emotion, versus the way we actually treat
animals.

For example, it's widely accepted that pigs are extremely intelligent animals,
capable of feeling pain and suffering to a degree more sophisticated even than
young children.

And yet treating young children with the same level of disregard-for-suffering
that we routinely, banally treat pigs with is considered a capital crime.

At a certain point, we'll have to resolve this societal cognitive dissonance.
I strongly suspect it will end up being resolved with animals being granted a
far greater degree of legal protection from pain and suffering than they have
now.

~~~
chr1
Another way for resolving the dissonance, is to assume that torturing young
children is worse than torturing pigs because young children can become more
sophisticated than pigs.

But i agree with you that eventually we'll stop treating animals the way we
treat them now, because growing meat in a lab will be cheaper, making majority
of the people indifferent, and allowing the minority of the people who care to
pass stricter laws (though i am not sure if that would work for fish, and for
abolishing all the hunting).

~~~
theonemind
I don't really think that it just comes down to can-become-more-sophisticated.
Assume we had children that never grow up, and we can tell which ones. Assume
even that they just mysteriously from the forest, so they don't have
parents/owners. I really can't see the legal system changing to permit us to
treat them in the same manner we treat pigs.

~~~
chr1
I can't see the legal system changing either, but thousands of years ago after
a hungry winter i can't believe people feeding the non-growing children, or
letting the real children to die because they don't want to kill and eat the
'broken' children from the forest.

Many hunter gatherer societies were ok with killing ill or unwanted children,
because those who didn't do that didn't survive.

~~~
parksy
I don't think anyone was making an argument based on human behaviours
thousands of years ago, or how an argument based on primitive cultures is
relevant. Unless your point is that if these hypothetical forest-children
existed, modern society would be okay with farming them en-mass in cages for
their meat?

I don't know any vegans or vegetarians who refuse to acknowledge the reality
of eating for survival - the issue is based on choice, and if you have the
luxury of choice why would you decide to eat another sentient being.

~~~
chr1
My argument is that eating them would become an accepted thing, and then at
some point society would be having debates about replacing their meat with
some other kind of food, very similar to what our society does about animals
now. And my guess is that in that situation again the course of action would
be mostly determined by economics of farming.

> and if you have the luxury of choice why would you decide to eat another
> sentient being

It's not a completely equivalent choice, but also a little bit of
inconvenience in the form of not eating the favorite types of foods or often
having to take supplements (e.g. B12), and most people seem to have a healthy
dose of selfishness. I personally am not convinced that farm animals are
intelligent enough to justify the urgent action, instead of waiting until
artificially grown meat becomes cheaper and resolves the issue in a natural
way.

------
morningmoon
Just one of the many reasons I am vegan.

You can eat a healthy, fulfilling diet that meets all your nutrition
requirements without consuming meat or dairy and contributing to animal
suffering.

We have the choice to avoid imprisoning, mutilating, and killing animals to
survive, by eating a plant-based diet.

I’ve been vegan for many years and have never felt better or happier. You can
too.

[https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go-
vegan](https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/how-go-vegan)

[https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/want-go-
vegan-h...](https://rightasrain.uwmedicine.org/body/food/want-go-vegan-heres-
how-do-it-healthy-way)

~~~
eMSF
>We have the choice [...]

Do you think other species have less of a choice because of their limited
emotional response? If so, can you consider the implications? (rather than
being the butt of the age old joke)

~~~
morningmoon
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. I don’t care to argue about
whether we should avoid causing emotional and physical suffering to other
beings.

Carnivorous animals kill to survive, unlike all of us living in the modern
world.

It’s not just the killing, it’s the whole process of enslaving, breeding,
raping, mutilating animals just to serve our tastes. If you think I’m being
melodramatic don’t take my word for it. You can see the terrible suffering
inflicted on animal farms and slaughterhouses only a quick google search away.

It’s not necessary. We aren’t living in the bush having to kill another animal
in order to live.

------
Erlich_Bachman
Not arguing with the contents of the article, or its applicability, but is
there a large mass of people who think that people are more emotional than
animals?

Wouldn't the logical straight-forward way of looking at it would be that
because humans have higher abstract intelligence/thinking capabilities, they
should obviously be less emotional than animals? All animals have is basically
emotion (well dolphins and monkeys probably have some simple symbolic
language, but nevertheless), while humans have both emotion, and also the
logical apparatus, the thoughts, the prefrontal cortex to inhibit (that's its
function in a nutshell - selective inhibition) the rest of the (emotional)
intelligence, thus making the general operation of an individual less emotion-
based, as compared to a generic animal?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>because humans have higher abstract intelligence/thinking capabilities, they
should obviously be less emotional than animals? //

I'd imagine that the thinking goes that emotion requires self-reflection.
Being depressed isn't really a thing if I don't even realise it's me that is
depressed because I have no conception of self.

If there is no higher function that can decide to suffer pains then pain is
irrelevant, reaction is not emotion.

~~~
selune
Lots of animals pass mirror test, so we can safely assume that they are self-
aware to some extent.

This method is believed to be highly imperfect though as not all animals rely
on visual perception as their main info channel. So some animals that do not
pass the test may be self-aware, we just don't know how to research it
properly.

------
dgudkov
One of the most interesting explanations of emotions that I've read is that
emotions are subconscious _predictions_ produced by the brain (sorry, didn't
save the link). For instance, happiness is a subconscious prediction of
safety. Depression is a subconscious prediction of death. It's like super-
scalar execution -- the event hasn't happened yet (and may never happen), but
the brain has already calculated its outcome and signals its estimation
through emotions.

A few conclusions:

A) Anything with brains has some kind of emotions. The bigger the brain the
more developed emotions are.

B) Emotions in animals has nothing to do with "soul" or anything
transcendental. It's just a way the animal brain works. Humans can feel
empathy to animal emotions because they are also technically animals.

~~~
TaupeRanger
This is one of those "non-explanations" you often get from modern neuroscience
(in this case from the cult of "predictive coding"). There is absolutely no
explanatory power here with regard to the nature of emotions. It just assumes
its conclusion. The brain should just make its prediction and the behavior
should happen in experiential void. Why is there any feeling associated with
this prediction? There's no explanation for it that doesn't engage in obvious
handwaving. And even if you accept one of the handwavy answers, it still
doesn't even remotely approach the questions that people actually care about,
like: why would the prediction give this specific quality of feeling, rather
than some other?

------
muzani
An intriguing idea brought up in the book Flow, is that perhaps animals feel
things better than us.

One of the conditions of flow is that the individual focuses on that one thing
and doesn't think about anything else.

Humans are constantly juggling several things in their heads at one time. When
we brush our teeth, we think about how we're going to be late. When we play
with our kids, we're also worrying about that problem at work or the unpaid
bills.

But the lion does not need to do this. When the lion is hunting, they focus
100% on it. When it eats, it enjoys its meal, not having to worry about the
next kill or food preservation. When it sees a sunrise, it can sit there and
enjoy the sunrise, without pondering what it has to do in the next few hours.

~~~
stackola
But maybe the DO think about the next kill while looking at the sunrise. Who
are we to tell?

------
Sharlin
The weirdest thing about the "do animals have emotions" debate is that we now
know that the emotion-handling parts of the brain (the limbic system,
particularly the amygdala) are shared by not only by all mammals but also by
reptiles and birds. The limbic system is ancient and fairly well-preserved;
there's not much special in a human amygdala compared to a mouse one.

------
jrlocke
When I took classes with Daniel Dennett, he was always amazed at the strength
of convictions people had about consciousness even without education in the
area.

This is an unpopular opinion, but the human intuition is not a good
discriminator of consciousness: "Dennett (who argues that consciousness is
unique to humans), claims that intuitive attributions of mental states are
“untrustworthy”, and points out that “it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to
induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness
(ripe with malevolence or curiosity) by exposing people to quite simple robots
made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds (1995).”"[1]

Personally, I'll be agnostic until consciousness is much better understood.

[1][https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-
animal/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/)

~~~
ergothus
I come from the opposite direction: I'm not so sure humans are all that
conscious. My personal theory goes something like:

* Consciousness is a side-effect of the brain running "what-if" scenarios that include anticipating it's own actions. Self-awareness. This definition allows for non-human consciousness, but also doesn't take a stance on it, as it also allows for a range of awareness, rather than a binary state. (that said, I'll talk in binary terms for simplicity)

* Consciousness is calorically expensive - the brain shuts it down when it isn't needed, because it stops adding value then in terms of survival.

* Side effect: The primary job of consciousness is to figure out how to turn the unexpected into the routine, which in turn shuts down consciousness.

Result: We spend a lot of time NOT self-aware, then back-fill that we must
always be self-aware when we consider that time (because we are self-aware
during that consideration). Impossible to self-measure, but my personal guess
is that we spend somewhere between a high number of minutes to low number of
hours "sentient" each day.

Note: I'm using Self-aware/consciousness rather broadly here. Even if it's
illusion, there's a state of having that illusion (or however to phrase that)
and a state of not being aware that you aren't even considering...anything.
(Dang it is hard to describe that without using language that assumes
awareness).

~~~
wozer
That would explain why spending a few hours meditating can feel like a very
long time, being more conscious than usually.

Edit: On the other hand, when meditating deeply, one does not run what-if
scenarios. Quite the opposite. Nevertheless, awareness is particularly strong
in this state.

~~~
ergothus
I have limited mediation experience, so I don't claim to be definitive at all,
but I'd equate the feeling to asking "what if..." and never finishing the
question...indeed, getting COMFORTABLE with never finishing the question, but
the question is there. Or maybe you're trying to be aware without asking the
question, and I'm still terrible at it.

Definitely an aspect I'll consider more of. Thanks for the thought!

------
linguistbreaker
I believe they are more emotional in many ways - more driven and consumed by
their emotions. Especially in social animals emotional reactions are
inescapable for them. Humans are able to overcome emotion through higher level
thinking and effort.

Also depends on one's definition of emotion. Is fear an emotion?

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
IMO fear is widely viewed as one of the simplest emotions, yes. Or at least,
it can be: the word can be used to reference different aspects of fear, one of
which is the emotion of it.

------
jphalimi
Opinion: Your Dog Feels as Guilty as She Looks

Science does not need opinions. The question is worth asking, but this article
does not seem to be backed by any kind of research or experiments.

~~~
Felz
Yea. The entire argument appears to be a single anecdote about some guy's dog
acting really upset after biting his hand.

Quoting the article:

> For the longest time, science has depicted animals as stimulus-response
> machines while declaring their inner lives barren. This has helped us
> sustain our customary “anthropodenial”: the denial that we are animals. We
> like to see ourselves as special, but whatever the difference between humans
> and animals may be, it is unlikely to be found in the emotional domain.

Isn't this just a strawman in service to an applause light?

------
mamon
What's the surprise here? If anything I would expect animals to be even more
emotional than humans. Emotions are something primal, something that came to
be before conciousnes. Animals are emotional and all they ever do is act on
their emotions, whether that is: hunger, fear, joy, lust, etc.

The human-specific part of mind is the rational part, planning, reflecting,
self-correcting, etc. Animals never come close to humans in this regard.

------
austincheney
The purpose of emotions was proven by accident. Emotions exist as a
physiological component of the brain to help make complex cognitive decisions
on the fly. It is safe to think of this as a short circuit around analysis
paralysis, but it also comes at a cost of various cognitive biases.

It should be no surprise that animals have emotions similar to humans since
the physiology of many animal brains is not incredibly different from human
brains.

The discovery: [https://www.smh.com.au/national/feeling-our-way-to-
decision-...](https://www.smh.com.au/national/feeling-our-way-to-
decision-20090227-8k8v.html)

It was hard to confirm the discovery because people with no emotion are rare,
but some of it was arguably confirmed later through interviews with John Wayne
Gacy who demonstrated much of the same behaviors but had learned to compensate
and fake it for much of his life.

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

------
hhs
This makes me think of Wittgenstein's point that words shape our reality and
also limit our perception of reality. "Emotion" is a word that's a human
construct.

Going along with this human construct, I wonder what the boundaries are among
humans and animals when it comes to "emotions". Are there certain emotions
that animals have that we can't tap into and, therefore, never experience?

And to go further, what role do sensory organs have with emotions? Does access
to certain sensory organs influence this? For instance, fishes have access to
the lateral line system to help them sense pressure gradients and their
surroundings. It could be that they have unique emotions.

------
quickthrower2
[https://outline.com/Dumckz](https://outline.com/Dumckz)

------
fogleman
We _are_ animals.

~~~
gugagore
And tomatoes are fruits.

But there are multiple actual definitions of words and very often "animal"1 =
non-human "animal"2

------
dredmorbius
_Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals_ by Darwin, Charles

Publication date 1873

[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43657/page/n3](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.43657/page/n3)

------
rland
I have some early memories from when I could barely talk. Back then, the world
was composed almost entirely of emotions. They completely dominated the scene.
Not only that, but my brain was smaller and less physically developed, so I
had reduced capacities as well.

I think animals are exactly the same. Of course, animals' brains never develop
past that stage ruled by emotion.

As a result of this, I believe anyone can do a thought experiment to see the
world as an animal sees it: just think of very early memories from right when
you first learned to talk. That is what being an animal is like.

~~~
otabdeveloper2
Don't know about you personally, but normal human babies certainly aren't at
all like animals.

The sheer, mind-boggling rational and learning capacity needed to learn highly
symbolic and abstract things like language and arithmetic means that babies
are 'smarter' than adults.

(If by 'smarter' we mean the capacity for learning, mental models and abstract
generalization.)

------
philwelch
Well, sure. I don't think anyone who's encountered an angry cat can deny that
cats are capable of anger.

Equivalently, you could say our emotions are the subjective experience of our
ancient animal instincts.

------
mbell
You can't make global claims about 'animals' based on dogs. Humans created
dogs, we extricated them from the harsh reality of evolution in order to serve
as workers and companions to us. It's no surprise we bred them to match our
emotional viewpoint. The reality of nature is _extremely_ harsh by human
standards. It's largely an emotionally cold and deadly place that is entirely
removed from most humans day to day lives.

~~~
cm2187
In fact animals don't die in a nice way. They end up either eaten alive or
left behind by the herd to die of thirst when they are too old or too sick.

------
agumonkey
I remember a documentary about octopus reproduction, the mother would spend
their final hours heating water around the nest then as a last gesture would
go die as far as possible from it, allegedly to avoid attracting predator
around "her" corpse. I have no idea if the sacrificial narrative is to be
trusted but I was nearly tearing up.

------
superkuh
The word 'animals' is far to generic to have any meaning in this context.
Obviously social mammals that we share many of our brain structures with
experience reality the same way we do. But this is far less obvious in animals
like reptiles, fish, and the like.

------
tim333
The author showing monkeys getting emotional about unfairness
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMoK48QGL8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMoK48QGL8)

------
donatj
Was this up for debate? My understanding was always emotion is just animal
survival instinct kicking in. The BIOS. The dumb part of your brain the should
fight to override.

------
peter303
The human forebrain may inhibit some emotion. Injury tonthe fore brain-
trauma, stroke, dementia plaques- sometimes results in highly emotional
people.

------
notadoc
Do we need to be reminded that humans are animals?

Humans have large egos, but aside from that we're not particularly special.

------
squirrelicus
New York Times: "Here I go overstating a vapid point again"

The easy part is pretending animals are like us, even if there's no rigorous
reason to believe they are. The hard part is trying to figure out why the
tiger isn't immoral for killing the gazelle.

~~~
nearbuy
You're going against the scientific consensus if you're suggesting animals
don't have any emotions. Do you have any reason to believe that they don't?

Whether tigers hunting for survival is immoral seems entirely tangential to
whether animals can feel.

------
kissgyorgy
I was pretty surprised when I saw this video about a dog watching Lion King
movie and getting sad:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKC958R8Z8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKC958R8Z8)

~~~
pault
Uhh, I'm skeptical. My dogs do exactly that any time they see something on the
TV that looks like something they would chase. I suspect that's what is going
on here. I doubt the doggy is aware that Mustafa is dead and Simba is now an
orphan.

~~~
ceejayoz
Yeah. They've also got tens of thousands of years worth of selective breeding
for cueing off their owners.

There are what I'd call clear examples of animals expressing emotions. I'm not
sure this one'd qualify.

------
amelius
Related question: can animals have religious thoughts?

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Religion is a philosophy, and philosophies are the models we construct of
reality in order to explain and predict. It seems undoubtable that many
animals construct models of reality, and indeed we have seen them display
behavior consistent with models we would associate with religion. Elephants,
for instance, appear to practice some form of reverence for their dead by
visiting and touching their bones.

------
vemv
Quite obviously emotions are a continuum that correlates with intelligence.

The most intelligent animals feel/express the most sophisticated emotions.

To think otherwise would be clearly contrary to science (i.e. you believe in
souls transcending to the physical world; OR you believe that a deity made an
100% equitative distribution of emotions among his creatures, from the worm to
the dolphin).

This point is defended in Hofstadter's works.

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otabdeveloper2
So what?

Since when is 'emotion' is some sort of validation of personal worth instead
of a condition you need to learn to live with?

~~~
anigbrowl
Same reason restaurants compete to provide interesting flavors instead of just
serving water and nutrient cubes. Emotions are what provide interest in life
to most people. My impression is that you have them too but their expression
has been a source of stress for you, possibly due to negative reaction from
others.

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ausjke
Please someone at YC invented meat-alike alternatives so we don't eat animals
for the sake of everything.

Not really an animal lover, just think we don't really need consume animal
meat to live longer/happier, there got be some other options.

