DO ANIMALS THINK & HAVE FEELINGS?

The quickest way to answer that is to turn to the person nearest to you and ask: "Do you think and have feelings?"

For, humans are animals. The concept that somehow Homo sapiens is set apart from other animals and indeed all other things in the Universe is a dangerous, unfounded religious notion.

Though it seems strange to me that people would even consider the question, scientific works abound proving that other animals beside humans feel as well as think. On the Internet, search on the question "Do animals have feelings?" Or, "Can animals think?"

One of many recent reviews of the question is an article by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic entitled What The Crow Knows. It's a little heavy on bird hospitals, Jainism and such, but still it thoughtfully addresses new scientific insights.

When I was a kid on the Kentucky farm I saw how catfish writhed with pain when I worked hooks from their mouths or guts. I knew old hens both of the self-centered and generous types, and right now, living with two dogs, every day I see impressive thinking and feeling conducted by those furry heads. How can people still be asking whether animals think and feel?

Once it's decided that, yes, other animals think and feel, where does one go from there?

A good beginning point is to reflect that a chimpanzee may be more innovative and context-aware than a human baby or an old person with Alzheimers. Think of drunks, people on drugs, schizophrenics, hypnotized people, religious and political fanatics in a world where hawk minds analyze visual stimuli gathered from a field far below, pinpoint a tiny mouse there, and react much quicker than any human. Coyotes howling beneath a full moon at the very least express some feelings. The phenomena of thinking and feeling are diffuse, overlapping states that come and go and issue from a near-infinite number of points in the multidimensional reality around us.

Knowing that humans coexist on this planet with so many other thinking, feeling animals is a beautiful experience. It's like discovering oneself to be a melody within a lush, vast symphony of many melodies, every tone in every melody providing a context for and influencing every other.

The cricket in the bush looking at us of course doesn't see a focused image or react to our image in any recognizable human way. Maybe the cricket's tiny compound eyes register us as a moving shadow, and the cricket's response is more mechanical and mathematical than anything like human curiosity or foreboding. Movement of a certain size and a certain quickness = flight response.

Such thinking and feeling is only a tiny flash of a hint of mentality and emotional response, but it's something, and something perfect for exactly where and how it is at that exact moment, and there's this oceanic symphony of brother, sister, mother, uncle, neighbor scintillating flickers of thinking and feeling all flowing along with us toward some yet undetermined finale.

I don't address the situation of the thinking, feeling human who recognizes all this in today's world where so many thinking, feeling, non-human beings are succumbing because of human behavior.

This is not a world where thinking, feeling beings can carry their thoughts and feelings very far, and survive.