Analyzing Your Pet’s Emotions ?

1. Analyzing Your Pet’s Emotions Analyzing Your Pet’s Emotions Today, we all know for a fact that our pets do have emotions like we do. Their range of emotions may not be as large as we humans have but they do show the basic emotions like anger, fear, joy, love, jealousy and many more. Since more than 100 years this has been an interesting topic of research for scientists and they have made great progress over the years. Read on to know more about pet emotions and various facts related to it. History It was in the year 1872 that scientist Charles Darwin published a book named The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. This was the first book that tried to explain the similarities between human and animal emotions. In those days only poets and novelists used to write about emotions and so this book piqued the interest of many people. Back in those days, there was wrong belief that only humans had emotions. This belief was supported by many people because they had a theory which stated that

2. emotions are a reflection of the events occurring in our soul. And as per the church doctrine, only humans had souls. Facts About Pet Emotions •As a vast majority of scientists, today believe that pets have emotion the more important question that arises today is which specific emotions they show. Research has shown that dog’s show six basic emotions of happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger. These are the range of emotions that are seen in babies that are two and a half years of age. It is also believed that cats show the same range of emotions. While scientists are certain that pets show these emotions the real controversy is if dogs show more complex emotions like jealousy, guilt, disappointment, shame, pride, and compassion. •Over the past two decades, there has been extensive research in the range of emotions pet’s show. Scientists also made a study which believed that the pet owners who experience all the behaviors of their pets on a daily basis might have the best knowledge of the actual range of emotions a pet shows. The findings of their study are filed in a report in the journal Anthrozoos. •A fairly large research that was conducted on 1,023 Dutch speaking pet owners revealed that pets show all of the basic six emotions. Whereas out of the 4 complex emotions that pets show, jealousy was the most commonly seen emotion while compassion, shame, and disappointment were seen in rare cases. •Some other differences were also seen in dog and cat emotions. While dogs were found to be joyful, cats showed emotions of anger and disgust more frequently. •The range of emotions also differs if we consider the gender or age of pets. For example, emotions of sadness, jealousy, and disappointment were seen more frequently in female dogs when compared to male dogs. While disgust was more commonly seen in female cats as compared to male cats. According to the pet owners, aged dogs and cats tend to show emotions like anger, sadness, and disappointment as compared to younger cats and dogs. The emotion a pet show has been a controversial topic of research for many years. There is also a strong belief of many pet owners that their pets tend to reciprocate to their own emotional state which makes this study even more complex and hard to understand. Let’s hope that our future provides us with more advanced technologies and research that can reveal the exact emotion our dogs or cats are feeling.Get a behavioral treatment for your dog today.