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'.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
> “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.
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] crystalmeph|10 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[+] [-] jonahx|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] true_religion|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DavidSJ|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burkaman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajnin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threatofrain|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeyo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|10 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)
It's only lay persons who think there's any difference.
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
Rather than downmod, why not show how it doesn't?
[+] [-] azakai|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] crpatino|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChrisDutrow|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] jotux|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filoeleven|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyxley|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coralreef|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arprocter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|10 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] DodgyEggplant|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] needz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikestew|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ChrisDutrow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awesomerobot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|10 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] trhway|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jensen123|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yolesaber|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VonGuard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xlm1717|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alva|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] linux_girl|10 years ago|reply