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Can Animals Show Emotions?

- Suhas

Kumar,2007

From beasts we scorn as soulless,In forest, field and den,The cry goes up to witnessThe soullessness of men.

~M. Frida Hartley

A friend of mine once commented on a write-up by me wherein I had depicted wildanimals showing emotions as we humans show. He believed that people often tendto attribute human emotions to animals and err. In his view animals are inferior tohumans with only instincts helping them to survive. I was appalled by thisopinionated statement and wrote back to him saying this:

My dear Friend, you know that the wild animals of Sariska gather near the artificialwaterhole as soon as they hear the clink-clank of a water tanker approaching- they

put two and two together and intelligently discern that water is on way. Suchintelligent reaction doesnt come from instinct.

I find obliged to also say something about how animals behave if they are subjectedto continuous and irritating human presence. A tourist friendly tiger- or in your words

an 'instinct driven tiger In Bandhavgarh suddenly leaps into a tourist jeep andpunishes some tiger hungry and annoying tourists. As anyone would say this type ofpunishing behaviour is quite unbecoming of wild animals (who are a slave of theirinstinct incapable showing anger). Unfortunately the most vicious animal on earth-Man- has coerced them to imitate human traits that make them angry sometimes.

I think all animals that the Almighty has bestowed with a brain cavity and someamount of grey cells, have feelings and emotions. Some people, including me, evenbelieve that plants, without apparently possessing anything similar to a brain, too,show emotional response to music (tomatoes have been found to grow abnormallybigger in size when subjected to melodious music) . This planet is a strange placeand we humans have limited abilities (we can hear only within a range of a wave

lengths - beyond which we call them ultra or infra Sonics not audible to humanears, we see up to a certain distance and only in day light or artificially created light.Till recently no body knew that elephants communicate with each other withinfrasonic waves that travel several miles. An acacia species that grows in South

Africa sends 'scent alarm' signals to other trees down hill whenever someone attacksthem with an axe.

My dog throws tantrums if I punish him without any solid reason - he would sulk and

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refuse to eat even his most favourite food. My neighbors cat purrs whenever she isfondled and caressed. A dog travels a thousand mile to reach his separated master.Dear friend, we human tend to think that nothing living or dead is superior tohumans and therefore we tend to believe that "thinking, feelings and emotions" are

prized assets of humans only while other living things are mere 'creature' withinstincts. it is quite romantic and poetic (as well as prize winning) to depict animals

as unemotional , instinct driven robots created by God but some of us also mustremind ourselves to mend our ways and show some respect to wild brethrens for wetoo were roaming in the woods naked not very far back in time.