Think Animals Don’t Have Emotions? Researchers Have News for You

‘How might we discern an elephant’s or a mouse’s sense of the world? Elephants and mice might not tell us what they’re thinking. But their brains can. Brain scans show that core emotions of sadness, happiness, rage, or fear, and motivational feelings of hunger and thirst, are generated in “deep and very ancient circuits of the brain,” says the noted neurologist Jaak Panksepp.
Researchers in labs can now trigger many emotional responses by direct electrical stimulation of the brain systems of animals. Rage, for example, gets produced in the same parts of the brains of a cat and a human.
Further evidence of shared experience: Rats can become addicted to the same euphoria-producing drugs that humans get addicted to. Dogs with compulsive behaviors show the same brain abnormalities as humans with obsessive-compulsive disorder; they respond to the same medications.’
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