Most Arizona animal behaviorists and a lot of people who have pets would all agree that animals definitely do have emotions, but whether they are exactly the same emotions as humans experience is another matter entirely. The idea of animals have emotions in the scientific world started when Charles Darwin wrote about the existence and nature of emotions in nonhuman animals, since then this field has been extensively studied right up until today and will probably keep being studied while ever nonhuman animals exist. The current scientific thinking believes that nonhuman animals do feel emotions and that their emotions as well as our emotions all evolved from the same mechanisms.



There is a test that scientists have applied to a few species of Tempe animals to see how they would react, this test is called a cognitive biases test, it tests feelings of optimism and of pessimism, and in every species tested so far the results have been positive, in other words the animals can feel both optimism and pessimism given the circumstances are right. So far the species tested include rats, dogs, cats, rhesus macaques, sheep, chickens, starlings, pigs and honeybees. From these tests you can see it is not only domesticated but wild animals and even social insects that can display these emotions.

One of the biggest problems with defining emotions in Arizona animals is that it is almost impossible to define emotions even in human beings, a lot of human beings cannot experience certain emotions and just how you go about testing animals successfully has been a scientific arguing point for over a century without any result being forthcoming even today. The real problem with attributing emotions to animals in particular is that we have no definitive way of attributing emotions to any species of animal and a large part of the scientific community argues that we should concentrate on defining and attributing how humans generate and react to our own emotions before we attempt to do the same to the animals.

The word emotion is derived from the French word emouvoir, which means “to stir up”, but the earliest precursors to the word dates back to the very origins of language. Emotions are basically consistent responses to internal or external events which have a significance for the animal displaying the motion. Emotions are generally very brief in duration and usually consist of a coordinated set of responses which include psychological, behavioral and neural mechanisms. It is believed across the entire scientific world that emotions are the result of evolution to help the animal solve ancient and reoccurring problems. If that is the case then of course nearly all living creatures need emotions just to help them stay alive and to prosper.

Visit our Tempe wildlife removal home page to learn more about us.