I am continuously amused by how humans get in a huff when people anthropmorphize animals' actions... "surely it can't be empathy!" ... "we don't know if the rat is _really_ feeling the trapped rat's pain!!"
The question is: why not? Who are we to say that rats (or dogs or cats or crows or elephants or . . . ) can't feel another's pain?
Dogs have been known to show emotion. Elephants have been known to show emotion. Chimp mothers express sorrow when their child dies. And so on.
But people will come up with contorted explanations for these phenomena: dogs must 'smell' some pheromone that triggers such behavior... chimp mothers are only grieving because it's loss of a valuable tribe resource ... or things to those effect.
You know what? Believe what you will. But I have seen more empathy coming from animals than some humans (see Dick Cheney).
I agree. Animals feeling emotions is one of those things that I believe, but can't prove. It just strikes me as another version of the "humans are the center of the univese" theory. Also, it's hard for me to believe that nature hasn't come up with emotions before humans evolved. I'm not saying I understand it very well, but the major brain structures responsible for emotion go back fairly far along the evolutionary tree.
Lastly, I just have trouble believing that what I see with my own eyes isn't emotion.
The question is: why not? Who are we to say that rats (or dogs or cats or crows or elephants or . . . ) can't feel another's pain?
Dogs have been known to show emotion. Elephants have been known to show emotion. Chimp mothers express sorrow when their child dies. And so on.
But people will come up with contorted explanations for these phenomena: dogs must 'smell' some pheromone that triggers such behavior... chimp mothers are only grieving because it's loss of a valuable tribe resource ... or things to those effect.
You know what? Believe what you will. But I have seen more empathy coming from animals than some humans (see Dick Cheney).