When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals

Voltaire responded that, on the contrary, vivisection showed that the dog has the same organes de sentiment that a human has. "Answer me, you who believes that animals are only machines," he wrote. "Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?

A lion is not a lion if it is only free to eat, to sleep and to copulate. It deserves to be free to hunt and to choose its own prey; to look for and find its own mate; to fight for and hold its own territory; and to die where it was born—in the wild. It should have the same rights as we have.

When we do it, it is for art. When they [animals] do it, it is for competition. Both may be true. What is disturbing and irrational is the decision to explain human behavior in spiritual terms of a sense of beauty, and animal behavior in mechanistic terms of demonstrating fitness. The object, yet again, seems to be to define humans as higher and unique.

...the illusion of differences is maintained out of fear that seeing similarity will create an obligation to accord respect and perhaps even equality.

De Waal complains that anthropoid apes are so good at reading human body language as to leave people who work with them feeling transparent.

Surely we can train ourselves to an empathic imaginative sympathy for another species. Taught what to look for in facial features, gestures, postures, behavior, we could learn to be more open and more sensitive.

Donald Griffin’s The Question of Animal Awareness.

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin

If animals are to be excused for cruel acts like eating the baby in front of the anguished mother, on the grounds that they simply cannot understand the feelings of the other, can we then believe that they are ever kind, compassionate, or empathic, which also requires understanding the feelings of another?