Do Animals Feel - Research Paper Example

The scientific research in evolutionary biology, cognitive ethology and neuroscience states that diverse animals have rich and deep emotional lives. Emotions served as the instrument to bond and attach animals with one another. Emotions, empathy and distinguishing right from wrong are the essential keys for survival on this complex environment and social interactions about lifestyle of different species (Goodal & Bekoff, 18). Humans experienced different forms of pain as well as animals. Pain is a subjective sensation that every individual verbalized and feel.

According to Sneddon in 2011 people and animals almost have the same mechanisms of pain detection and have similar areas of brain involved in how the pain is processed. In addition, humans and animals are similar in terms of pain behaviors, but obviously, assessing pain in animals is more difficult to distinguish compared from human pain. Similarly, Sneddon identified the two components of pain: the physical hurt or discomfort which is caused by inflicting injury, illness or disease and the emotional hurt or suffering.

Sneddon concluded that animals, just like humans, are capable of feeling physical and emotional pain (n.p.). Humans can feel emotional pain without physical injuries or disease such as after a loss of loved one, break-up of a relationship, loss of important things in their life, etc. Contrary to Sneddon’s conclusion, some scientists stated that animals are not capable of feeling emotional pain because of the reason that animals do not have neocortex or the thinking area which are found only in mammals and primates.

Research of Sneddon showed that there is evidence that monkeys, dogs, cats, and birds demonstrate signs of emotional pain and behaviors associated with depression during painful experience, lethargy, anorexia, and unresponsiveness to other animals (Sneddon, n.p.). According to Bekoff in 2007, there was a doctoral research of student that required killing cats. As the author started the studies, the cat looks like sad and wanted to say something. After the experienced, the author decided to study different animal behavior that focus on social communication in large range of species.

In adjunct with what the other scientists stated, Mark Bekoff discovered that animals feel joy, empathy, grief, embarrassment, anger, and even love (Bekoff, n.p.). In December 2005, a female humpback whale caught in crab lines, the weight of the whale which is 50 tons and 50 ft. in size which makes it difficult for the female humpback to blow above the water. A team of divers saved the female humpback whale and James Moskito, one of the rescuers described the feeling that the female humpback like to thank the rescuers for doing such good act.

The whale stopped and pushed around a little bit and had some fun, the female humpback showed feelings of gratitude to the rescuers Bekoff, n.p.) Empathy is a feeling that is believed also to be felt by animals. An example of which is the livelier mouse. Every time the livelier mouse went over to get a drink and a piece of food and found out that the weaker mouse tried to bite the food, the livelier mouse moved the food gradually towards the water until the weaker mouse reached the food (Bekoff, n.p.).

Animals can also show feelings of anger the same way as humans can do: they share common