Animal Behavior
The Emotional Lives of Animals and Why They Matter
Studies clearly show diverse animals are sentient and have rich emotional lives.
Updated April 26, 2024 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Key points
- The real question at hand is why animal emotions have evolved, not if they have.
- We are well beyond making such vacuous claims as that other animals merely act "as if" they have feelings.
- Animal emotions and sentience must matter to us as they matter to the animals themselves.
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. — Frans de Waal, “Your Dog Feels as Guilty as She Looks”
I have learned that anthropomorphism is a deeply suspect word, used to defend cruelty to creatures unable to speak and defend themselves against human exploitation. — Sir Brian May, founding member of Queen and the Save Me Trust
In the past two decades there has been an explosion of comparative studies centering on the emotional lives and sentience of a wide array of nonhuman animals (animals). Much of this research is summarized in the new edition of my book, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter to which approximately 300 new references have been added since the first edition was published in 2007.1 In the first edition I wrote, “Twenty years from now, our understandings and explanations will be richer, more accurate, and possibly different.” I had no idea I’d ever be writing a second edition, but 17 years later, my prediction is accurate. The real question at hand is why animal emotions have evolved, not if they have. We are well beyond making vacuous claims such as that other animals are merely acting "as if" they have feelings.1
Prairie dog and grizzly bear mothers grieve for their dead children
Family-living prairie dogs, who many people write off as “merely rodents,” also grieve. A few years ago while riding my bike north of Boulder, I observed a moving interaction between an adult black-tailed prairie dog, who looked to be a female, and a youngster, most likely her child, who had been killed by a car. It looked like the accident had occurred a few minutes before I happened on the sorrowful scene, and I stopped and dictated some notes into my phone to document what I saw: Five times, the adult prairie dog tried to retrieve the carcass of the smaller prairie dog off the road. She clearly was trying to remove the carcass from the road, and eventually, the cars stopped and allowed her to finish. She dragged the carcass about ten feet away, looked at me and looked at the carcass, and then went back to the carcass and touched it lightly with her forepaws. After this, she walked away emitting a very high-pitched vocalization. I waited a few minutes to see what else she would do, and as she moved back toward the carcass again, she looked at me and stopped, so I left because I didn’t want to disrupt her saying goodbye, if that was what she was doing. Prairie dog expert Dr. Con Slobodchikoff told me he was not at all surprised by what I saw. It's also important to share what we learn with a broad audience.2
![Thomas D. Mangelsen/with permission. Thomas D. Mangelsen/with permission.](https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/styles/article_inline_half_caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/2024-04/BA3C5233-6A78-496C-B45E-02E29A4D3FE1-2048x1363.jpeg.jpg?itok=uFSUVx3t)
Another vivid example comes from world-renowned photographer Thomas D. Mangelsen who has studied a wild grizzly bear mother, "399," for more than 20 years. In response to one of her children, Snowy, being hit by a car, Mangelsen noted that 399 dragged her mortally wounded cub from the middle of the highway with her mouth and paced back and forth, bawling and panting. He's been quoted as saying, “If that isn’t an example of sentience, of grief and pain in a mother, then what is? .... How can anyone not empathize?”
The biodiversity of sentience is rapidly expanding
For years I’ve argued that these “educated guesses”—actually, highly educated guesses — about animal emotions were not anthropomorphic projections but reflected as-yet-unproven facts that would one day be strongly supported by comparative scientific research. That day has come, and you’ll find many examples in the updated book. The biodiversity of sentience is rapidly growing. As the research and stories in my book show, mice are empathetic and fun-loving, and there are stories of pleasure-seeking iguanas, humorous horses, amorous whales, grieving otters, bereaved donkeys, pissed-off baboons, sentient fish, and elephants suffering from what mirrors post-traumatic stress disorder. Recent research has shown that elephants may remember their relatives for around 12 years by smelling their dung. If that’s so, there is no reason they couldn’t also remember traumatic experiences for long periods of time. Animals also clearly recognize feelings in other animals—that is, they possess what psychologists call emotional intelligence, or the ability to understand one’s own emotions and those of others.
Compassionate Conservation and the Importance of Individuals
Of course, protecting animals requires us to understand and respect their emotional lives and the importance of each and every individual. This has sparked the growing field of compassionate conservation, which regards the life of every individual animal as a valued gift—and this paradigm shift can benefit all animals.3 Compassionate conservation asks us to consider what's best for each individual animal, whether in captivity, in our homes, or in the wild. All individuals have intrinsic or inherent value and must be able to live the lives they are meant to live—to express their natural behaviors and proclivities, to be who they are, and to get what they need. Animals are not here for us to do whatever we want with them.
Would you do it to your dog?
Recognizing that animals have emotions is important because their feelings matter. Animals are sentient beings who experience the ups and downs of daily life, and we must respect this when we interact with them. This includes not only the animals we live with, care for, and love — those we consider our “companions”—but also the billions of other domesticated animals who live on farms and die in slaughterhouses and provide us with food and clothing. And it includes wild animals who must continually struggle to share our ever-crowded world. Needless to say, our relationships with other animals are complex, ambiguous, challenging, and frustrating, and we must continually reassess how we should interact with our nonhuman kin. Part of this reassessment involves asking difficult questions and making sure our actions match our understandings and beliefs. Thus, I often ask researchers who conduct invasive studies with animals, or I ask people who work on factory farms: “Would you do that to your dog?” Some are startled by this question, but it’s a very important one to ask. If we wouldn’t do something to our companion animals that we do daily to mice, rats, monkeys, pigs, cows, elephants, chimpanzees, or even noncompanion cats and dogs, we need to ask ourselves why.
![New World Library/with permission. New World Library/with permission.](https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/styles/article_inline_half_caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/2024-04/ELOA%20COVER.jpg?itok=C9iZGlif)
Animal emotions and sentience must matter to us as they matter to the animals themselves
What should we do with what we know? What sorts of choices should we make? We must use what we know on behalf of all animals. I will admit that I get cranky and irritable now and again. I’m tired of reading studies and essays about animal behavior, animal cognition, animal emotions, and animal sentience that trumpet new discoveries and then end by saying something like, “We need to treat other animals better—with more respect, compassion, kindness, and dignity.” Of course we do.
These banal platitudes of pain don’t do anything for me. Why does the U.S. Federal Animal Welfare Act still write off lab rats and mice as not being animals, and why, as of 2022, can more pigs be killed per hour in slaughterhouses than previously allowed? We need a breakthrough paradigm shift in how we treat other animals and a call for heartfelt action on their behalf, one that leads to changes in our laws, regulations, and animal-human interactions. That’s what I hope the new edition of my book will help achieve.
References
1. Excerpts from a highly revised and updated edition of The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy―and Why They Matter. Since the first edition was published in 2007, the field of cognitive ethology— the study of animal minds—has exploded, and now hardly a day goes by without there being some exciting new information about the cognitive, emotional, and moral lives of animals. I’m pleased and excited to have had the opportunity to update this book and share this information with a wide audience. I also wrote, “When it comes to the emotional lives of animals, science is just trying to catch up to what people experience every day.” Science still is. When I first began my studies some 50 years ago, researchers were almost all skeptics who spent their time wondering if dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and other animals—mostly mammals—felt anything. Since feelings don’t fit under a microscope, these scientists usually didn’t find any; as I like to say, I’m glad I wasn’t their dog! But thankfully, today, the burden of proof now falls most often on anyone who still argues that animals don’t experience emotions. When writing about the inner lives of animals, my colleagues and I no longer have to put scare quotes around such words as happy, sad, jealous, guilty, compassionate, or empathetic. Scientific journals and the popular press regularly publish reports on joy in rats and grief in elephants, and no one blinks. And more scientific outlets are allowing researchers to refer to animals by name rather than by anonymous and distance-making numbers, a practice that Jane Goodall pioneered in her groundbreaking and ongoing research on wild chimpanzees.
2. I love sharing my observations with the general public so, I was especially pleased to receive an email in July 2023 from Anet Barnhill, who wrote: "Today I witnessed the same thing you wrote about while driving the Alpine Loop here in Alpine, Utah. A small prairie dog had been hit in the road and a bit larger prairie dog was trying with all its might to pull it off the road. I wondered what was going on, so I’ve been searching the web and found your story. Clearly I was very moved by what I saw...so sad for these two friends or family. I hope they were able to get off the side of the road before anyone else drove past after me. It’s stayed in my mind since this morning, and I wanted to know what the behavior meant. Thank you for sharing your story."
3. For more information on compassionate conservation, click here.
Bekoff, Marc and Koen Margodt (editors). Jane Goodall at 90: Celebrating an Astonishing Lifetime of Science, Advocacy, Humanitarianism, Hope, and Peace. Salt Water Media, 2024.
Jane Goodall at 90: An Iconic and Indefatigable Woman.
Wilkinson, Todd. Jackson Hole Grizzly 399 Is Back As A 28-Year-Old Mother. Yellowstonian, April 25, 2024.