Marc Bekoff on animal joy, animal sorrow
(Credit: Janet Chin)
Marc Bekoff: I’ve been trying to ask the questions about whether animals feel joy, sorrow, grief, embarrassment or resentment. But the question that I entertain isn’t if they do, it’s why they do.
That’s Marc Bekoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado. He’s spent 4,000 hours observing the behavior of wild coyotes and hundreds of hours with captive wolves, coyotes and dogs.
Marc Bekoff: Watching them and then mixing the observational data with the neuroscience, really makes for a pretty tight story about the different emotions animals have and the evolution of these emotions.
Earth & Sky asked Bekoff if he thinks we humans might just be attributing our own emotions to animals.
Marc Bekoff: As a biologist, I say that’s just not so. So if you follow Charles Darwin, you see he said that ‘the differences among species are differences in degree, rather than differences in kind.’ One of the things that I think is that, because animals are just so there in the moment, that perhaps their joy is richer than human joy and their grief is deeper than human grief. And I think that is a possibility. They just don’t perhaps know what’s going to happen to relieve the grief.
Bekoff also said that he believes animals, some of the time, know right from wrong and behave that way. His new book, Wild Justice, will be on bookshelves in 2009.
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Hope you enjoy this. Send it to the grad student that says animals can’t communicate.
THANK YOU, Marc, for your work to educate humans. I am looking forward to your book. I am a registered veterinary technician (nurse) and I have known all along by my direct and constant contact with animals that they experience emotions of all kinds daily. They communicate quite clearly via subtle body language and eyes (and sometimes that insistent miaow in the middle of the night!). And I would go to any table and argue that to the win.
I believe that every animales has emotions. I think Mark’s book will prove much about it and educate humans!