In 2018, millions of people around the world watched as an orca carried her dead calf on her nose for 17 days, covering over 1,000 miles. The calf had been born off the coast of British Columbia. She lived for only half an hour, but her 20-year-old mother, known as J35, didn't want to let her go. Observers said that whenever J35 let go of the calf, she would sink because she lacked the blubber layer that would keep her buoyant. J35 would dive down pick her up by the flipper, bring her back to the surface. She did this for over two weeks. It was heart-wrenching to watch this act of mourning. Yes, mourning. It doesn't seem silly to describe the ritual that way. These days, we know that whales, and elephants, and other species mourn their dead. We know that dogs feel joy, fear, and other emotions. As you'll see in this lesson, not so long ago, it was considered unscientific to say that animals experience emotions. But researchers are increasingly asking not only whether animals feel emotions, but what emotions they feel, and whether a line distinguishes species that feel emotions, from those that do not. Today's interest in animals and emotions can be traced back to the work of Charles Darwin. Of course, others before Darwin had also claimed that animals feel emotions. Around 400 BC, the Pythagoreans advocated a vegetarian diet to spare animals the suffering they inevitably experienced in death. But animal emotions entered the scientific world in 1871, when Darwin wrote in "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex," that animals indeed manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. The following year in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," he famously argued that there's a continuity across species. Humans are animals. We aren't on a separate plane above other animals. Darwin argued that the differences among many animals are in-degree rather than in-kind. Darwin's interest in animal emotions was apparent over 30 years earlier. In March 1838, the 29-year-old Charles Darwin went to the London Zoo to see Jenny the orangutan. It was his first encounter with an ape. He made many other visits. In a letter to his sister, Darwin described having seen affection, passion, rage, sulkiness, "The most contented countenance imaginable. "In describing the period after Darwin, the Philosopher Bernard Rollin wrote, "At the end of the 1800s, animals lost their minds." Of course he doesn't mean that animals lost their minds, but that biological science intentionally avoided any reference to the inner state of animals, including their minds. This followed the rise of behaviorism in the early 20th century. In the pursuit of objectivity, behaviorism maintained that animals weren't conscious beings but simply responded to stimuli. Fortunately, times changed. Most people, even scientists, don't think of animals in those terms anymore. Starting around the 1970s, due to the work of Jane Goodall and others, animals regained their minds. The field of cognitive ethology, which is the study of the mental experiences of animals emerged. Researchers generated numerous studies of the cognitive and emotional capacities of animals, including Jane Goodall's research on chimpanzees. Animals have regained their minds, or more accurately, we've decided to recognize their minds again. Along with minds come emotions. But exactly what are emotions? This isn't a silly question at all because there is no consensus on how to define emotions. We know that emotions have two-dimensions. One dimension involves physiological components. If you've ever felt butterflies in your stomach, for example, or if you've felt that adrenaline rush when you have a close call while driving, you know, the physical sensations of elevated heart rate. You might feel a little shaky or jittery. Whether we define the physiological components as emotions or coming down with something, depends on the other dimension of emotions, which involves cognition. If I have a weird feeling in my stomach, and I'm feeling sweaty, and my heart's pounding, is that because I'm about to give a public presentation, or is it because I'm coming down with something? It's these cognitive components, the way we interpret emotions that influence our behavior. I'm going to act differently if I feel the jitters before giving a presentation, that if I think there's an illness coming on. Likewise, if the jitters are caused by something I look forward to, something I'm excited about happening, I'm going to act differently than if the jitters are caused by something I'm dreading. Emotions involve physiological components and cognitive components. If we agree with Darwin's continuity of species, then we have to assume that other animals also experience these two components of emotions. There's one final and important point to keep in mind when discussing animal emotions. This is anthropomorphism. When I describe animal emotions, I either have to use human language with words such as happiness, fear, love, and so on, or I have to limit myself to a mechanical account of their muscles are their cortisol levels. If I say for example that my dog seems happy, someone could ask me how I know when my dog or any dog is happy. Well the same applies to other people. I have a good sense of when another person seems happy, I have no way of knowing whether their happiness is the same as my happiness. But that doesn't mean that they aren't happy. There's a version of anthropomorphism that's known as critical or interpretive, it takes care to ground statements about animals in our knowledge of their capabilities. Although it would be ridiculous to describe a dog or a cat as a democrat or a republican, it's not a stretch to say that a dog or cat seems content, or fearful, or annoyed. Is their fear contentedness, or annoyance the same as mine, probably not. But that doesn't rule out their ability to feel those emotions and others, including those we humans may never experience.
