Emotion In Animals

While the study of emotion is a respectable field, those who work in it are usually academic psychologists who confine their studies to human emotions. The standard reference work, The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior, advises animal behaviourists that "One is well advised to study the behaviour, rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion."
There is considerable uncertainty and difficulty related to the interpretation and ambiguity of emotion: an animal may make certain movements and sounds, and show certain brain and chemical signals when its body is damaged in a particular way. But does this mean an animal feels—is aware of—pain as we are, or does it merely mean it is programmed to act a certain way with certain stimuli? Similar questions can be asked of any activity an animal (including a human) might undertake, in principle. Many scientists regard all emotion and cognition (in humans and animals) as having a purely mechanistic basis.
Because of the philosophical questions of consciousness and mind are involved, many scientists have stayed away from examining animal and human emotion, and have studied instead, measurable brain functions, through neuroscience.
The author Marc Bekoff also provided evidence of animals having emotions in his book, The Emotional Lives of Animals. The following is an excerpt from his book: