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Emotion In Animals
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Evidence
While humans have had differing views of animal emotion, the scientific examination of animal emotion has led to little information beyond a recognition that animals have the capacity for pain and fear, and such responses as are needed for survival. Historically, prior to the rise of sciences such as ethology, interpretation of animal behaviour tended to favour a kind of minimalism known as behaviourism, in this context the refusal to ascribe to an animal a capability beyond the least demanding that would explain a behaviour; anything more than this was seen as unwarranted anthropomorphism. Put crudely, the behaviourist argument is, why should humans postulate consciousness and all its near-human implications in animals to explain some behaviour, if mere stimulus-response is a sufficient explanation to produce the same effects?
The cautious wording of Beth Dixon's 2001 paper on animal emotion exemplifies this viewpoint:
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