emotional intelligence in animals Quotes

Here, Gentlemen, a dog teaches us a lesson in humanity.

People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.

In the past even scientists have been led to believe that only human beings have thoughts or emotions. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth... After all, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value.

Animals do have emotion. But fear tends to be one of the most primal emotions.

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.

One of the things that I always think about is the emotional sophistication of animals and how much we're learning about the emotional sophistication of animals. If you're eating a pig, you're essentially eating the equivalent of a four-year-old human being.

Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but theyare without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.