Comments on: … and vice-versa?

By: mandarine

mandarine — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 02:47:48 +0000

Thank goodness there are. I would so hate to have all these feelings but not the words and the conscience that can be really helpful in dealing with them. Just like when we go to the doctor’s and are relieved to know we just have an ordinary cold (even though it still hurts), it is much more comfortable to be able to identify frustration, jealousy, bitterness or euphoria in addition to feeling them.

By: litlove

litlove — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 20:22:32 +0000

Certainly fear and aggression are animal instincts in us - the fight or flight responses works from what we might call our lizard brain, and it’s relatively immune to being calmed down by words. We’ve got to get out of the situation before it’s happy. But I’m not so sure about animals having the range and the nuance in emotions that humans do. And I don’t believe they can alter their emotions the way we can, and deal with them. So yes, I agree that animals have emotions, but I still think there are degrees of possession that differentiate us.

By: mandarine

mandarine — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 18:05:33 +0000

You mean, in comparison to Nietzsche?

By: Emily

Emily — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 17:46:23 +0000

Well, with all those great thinkers, you almost always have to throw out the dirty bathwater and keep the baby, hoping he’ll grow into something that changes the world. Some of them have dirtier water than others. Descartes’s was really pretty clean.

By: mandarine

mandarine — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:27:18 +0000

Healingmagichands: being capable of unbiased observation is a quality that few humans are endowed with.

Emily: for all the respect I have for his ‘discours de la mÃ©thode’, I am deeply dissatisfied with Descartes. It is as if he wrote the ‘discours’, and then forgot everything in it (about e.g. doubting absolutely anything before making one’s mind) and fell into the usual pitfalls of his century.

By: Emily

Emily — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 13:43:43 +0000

Of course, DesCartes told us all that animals feel no physical pain, a ludicrous idea. I can’t imagine how people can believe animals have no feelings (or even thoughts, for that matter), but I’ve definitley known people who will argue this point.

I remember going to the Bronx Zoo years ago and stopping by the chimpanzee “exhibit.” So many of the chimps were sitting around in what we has humans could immediately identify as “depressive postures.” It made me wonder how we can possibly believe these animals are happy to be in zoos. It also made me think, “Well, I recognize a depressive posture in a chimp, because they’re so similar to humans genetically. But who’s to say the giraffe and the elephant weren’t also displaying depressive postures?” I can’t go to zoos now, even though I know a lot of them (including the Bronx Zoo) are actually doing all kinds of wonderful things to save animal species, as well as to educate us stupid humans, so that we’ll care more about other species.

By: healingmagichands

healingmagichands — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:03:57 +0000

I believe our mistake lies in thinking that the only way to communicate is through words. Emotions, being such primal things (as you point out so correctly, they were there first, before us, before words) are extremely difficult to talk about. And much communication occurs through body language. I find it hard to believe that there are actually people who argue that animals have no feelings, when it is so patently obvious that Ruby is expressing unalloyed joy at my return when she leaps repeatedly into the air on the other side of the back door. The cat that gives you the long cold stare and then turns his back on you pointedly is feeling anger at some trespass you have committed. And anyone who thinks the cow doesn’t care about being separated from her calf has never gone through the period of nearly deafening absolute chaotic distress caused by weaning the calves.

Nice essay, Mandarine.

By: mandarine

mandarine — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 18:37:00 +0000

Thank you.

By: Katie

Katie — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 17:22:51 +0000

What a lovely essay on feelings. My mother, who is a Sufi, has an acquaintance in her community who is an ER nurse by day and an animal communicator in her free time–or she provides the service when requested, anyway. When Fiona was very sick and nothing we tried made her better, I called her. What she said about Fiona was true in my experience and so I began to trust what she would say about her illness. Much of what was said had to do with the way Fiona felt about things and what she knew about why she was sick…and she knew quite profound things. But there’s no doubt in my mind that animals experience emotion. What cracks me up is when we talk to them (or each other, for that matter) about it. As if speech, which we know is in fact lodged in a sector of the brain uninvolved with emotion, would somehow access feelings. And then I think, ‘but babies are not taught to cry when sick or upset; so vocalization is in fact, instinctive in some species…” ah. So it’s the words that are the issue.

Anyway. Lovely essay.

By: mandarine

mandarine — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 06:08:42 +0000

Now if we are to go into paleopsychology, there is a lot of work to be done to distinguish and classify feelings between those that have a crocodilian origin, those that came with our mammalian branch of the family, those that go with our being primates, etc. I suspect it is much more complicated than that actually.