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Asked by Lehlis993 to Carrie, Cedric, Ellen, Ines, Rupert on 8 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by tiarnak2017.
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Carrie Ijichi answered on 8 Mar 2017:
That’s the big questions. They can’t talk to us and tell us so it’s hard. Scientists used to think it wasn’t ok to talk about animal feelings or say that you could find out about them but that’s all changed now. We measure there behaviour and their physiology (chemicals in their bodies) because these change quite like the way they change in a person. That helps us get an idea of whether they feel good or bad about something but we can’t know exactly how they feel. Maybe that’s the future for science and you’ll be part of it?
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Ellen Williams answered on 9 Mar 2017:
I am not sure we can or ever will know exactly what is going on inside an animals head but there is lots of research on this. We can conduct studies to try and work out what might be going on. I was recently involved in a project which monitored behaviour of animals to look for changes in welfare. So rather than saying this animal is happy or this animal is sad we could say oh well this behaviour has increased/decreased so that could be a sign of improved/reduced welfare etc.
There is also a new technology that has been brought out to assess welfare called Qualitative Behavioural Analysis (QBA) – and that uses facial expressions and things to assess an animals emotional state – so in theory how it is feeling! Interesting stuff!
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Rupert Marshall answered on 9 Mar 2017:
We don’t really know how they feel. All we can do is see how they respond in particular situations. With lots of observations and seeing how they react in lots of different situations we can get a better understanding of their lives.
Humans are animals too. If I ask you how you feel, you can tell me but sometimes you might find it difficult to explain exactly how you feel. And if we have difficulty saying exactly what we mean to each other, it’s even more difficult trying to understand why animals are doing what they do.
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Ines Goncalves answered on 11 Mar 2017:
Excellent question!
We don’t exactly know animals’ feelings as much as we know about their emotions. Think of yourself for example, when you feel nervous, like when a teacher tells you to get up and go to the board to give an answer o something you’re not sure you know. Your heart starts racing, the blood flows down from your head so that you may look a bit pale, you may tremble a bit and the pitch of your voice goes up a bit. This s a stressful situation for you and this is how your body reacts to it. Animals respond in pretty much the same way: their heart rate goes up, as do their vocalisations, they become more alert. This is how we “know” or rather, how we understand animal emotions, because we measure their symptoms the same way we measure them in ourselves. The fact that we can do this, helps us to monitor animal welfare and to make sure animals remain healthy.
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Cedric Tan answered on 14 Mar 2017:
Interesting question! We still don’t know that very well because they cannot directly communicate with us. Further, our tools for investigating feelings are often catered to humans.
It is easy to anthropomorphise, meaning attribute human feelings to animals. For example, when a dog wags its tail we might think its happy. However, until we understand what is going on in their brains with proper tools, it would be difficult to understand how animals feel.
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