The book "When Elephants Weep" by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan M. McCarthy examines the concept that animals have emotions. They examine in depth the different types of emotions known to man and describe experiments and field observations that show that animals also express the same types of emotions. This area of study is somewhat controversial, and the authors point out that, while no one can deny such things as the boundless joy shown by a dog when it knows it is about to be taken for a walk, and the gentle purring of a cat when it is being stroked, many people, particularly scientists, are loathe to call these emotions.
The authors propose that the attitude of scientists may have developed with the advent of laboratory studies on animals in the 1960s. Scientists needed to believe that animals were different from humans and did not have the same emotions, particularly in response to pain, so that they could justify often painful experiments which they carried out on animals (xx). This need to keep a distance between animals and man led to not only believing animals did not feel pain as we do, but also denied them higher emotions such as love, compassion, altruism, disappointment and nostalgia (xx).
Behaviorists, zoologists and ethologists shy away from the term, and try to explain away animals emotions as "instinctive behaviors", "survival tactics" and other such phrases to avoid being accused of anthropomorphism (xviii). Even the public relations director at Sea World in San Diego told the authors bluntly that he disapproved of the notion of animal emotions and would not permit Sea World to be associated with their research because it "smacked of anthropomorphism".
Innovative work today is directed at language use, self-awareness and other cognitive abilities of animals. Most data on animal emotions comes from field work, not from the laboratory (xxi). While such noted researchers as Jane Goodall uses t...