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When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals

This research discusses the book, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, which presents anecdotal evidence for the existence of feelings in animals. This research also draws on several other sources to supplement the discussion.

Human emotions are often hard to describe. If people are unable to describe how they are feeling, are the people unable to feel emotion? Or perhaps they are of limited verbal ability and have difficulty expressing any thought. The argument that an emotion does not exist until a person is able to describe and verbalize the feeling is frequently used to discount and discredit the belief that animals have emotional lives. Animals can and do experience emotions. They express them through their actions and behaviors instead of words.

Masson and McCarthy believe that all animals are sentient beings and have feelings. The two authors lay out a logical argument for their belief. They are clearly sympathetic to the view that all animals have emotional lives and can suffer because of their emotions: any animal that suffers from pain, either physical or emotional, should have the right to exist without pain when humans can save the animal from suffering. They give three reasons for the lack of research into animal emotions: anthropocentrism, the belief that humans are at the "center of all interpretation, observation, and concern" (41); anthropomorphism, the assigning of human qualities, emotions, thought, consciousness, and motivation to nonhuman beings and objects (30); and the difficulty in knowing what an animal is feeling as. They claim that understanding what an animal is feeling emotionally is essential in order to understand the animal (23). Only by understanding animals completely will humans be able to reach across the species barrier and make a deeper emotional connection to them and to themselves. This will enable humans t...

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When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:12, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708249.html