Inside the Animal Mind

In class we read many articles and and chapters that compared humans to non-human animals, but instead of being engaged with the similarities and differences, the idea of understanding how humans and animals can live the same life in a variety of ways. Humans have adapted common views on what society should be and what it demands of those apart of it; a car for transportation versus public transportation, more grocery stores and organic options versus chain restaurants and fast food. Depending on where one lives, works, or is surrounded by dictates their necessities of life. This is similar to animals, they only grow their societies to match their needs of life. Animals such as ants, have demonstrated that mating, locating food, and managing "workers" can be done by simple animals. As mentioned in the video above, ants are simple animals able to perform complex concepts. Their mating varies from what humans are used to by the females being able to store the se

Throughout this semester we have talked a lot about the different capabilities in the minds of animals. We have touched on such a variety of subjects including empathy, learning, time, etc. Across all of these we have had to step back and relook at studies because it is such an easy subject to be bias on. When we started this semester out, it was even difficult not to think of your own dogs and say "but they do know what time I come home" or "but they do know when I am sad" . It is difficult to change your entire perception on what animals, and pets, are.  For me, I had to focus on the fascinating parts of even the discouraging parts of this subject.  One of those was time. Remembering back we found that there is evidence of some animals showing time skills but the discouraging part was that our dogs could not quite tell time.  We want to think that our dogs know what time we come home and wait for us.  While this knocked our beloved dogs dow

     Our class, like many individuals are in the field of animal psychology, was divided as to whether or not the study conducted by Bartel et al. (2011) Actually measured the cognitive process it intended to support: Empathy. One of the most important aspects of an experimental design is validity: that the test conducted actually measures the aspect the researcher(s) are trying to support or reject. However, While Bartel et al. conducted an interesting study, the validity of their design was not nearly as well implemented as the study conducted by Panksepp & Lahvis (2016) .      As  you may recall, Bartel et al. (2011) conducted an experiment in which rats released a fellow cage-mate from a retainer as a test of empathy. While the video made the study appear to support the idea of empathy in rats, the article and further research conducted by Professor Manor painted a different picture in which the rats were more than likely responding to something they were conditioned to do

       Photo:   Lunja/Shutterstock.com         As hu mans we have the tendency to anthropomorphize the animals around us which we take care of. The biggest one that we expect to have similar feelings or at least understand our feelings would be dogs. We want to believe that they have empathy towards us and care about what we're feeling since we care about them so much as well.  In a UK study, two researchers looked to answer the question of if dogs show empathy towards their owners (or any person). In their experiment, they tested how dogs would react to their owner and a stranger showing some type of emotion in some sense, either humming or crying. Surprisingly even when the stranger showed distress, the dogs would seek them out. Deborah Custance, one of researchers, stated, " On the surface, it certainly seemed as if the dogs were demonstrating empathy" (Garrett, 2017). Empathy is a hard thing to identify though when you cannot ask the individual in questio

Cross Species Empathy  It is easy enough for us as humans to be able to relate to other animals because we understand how to be empathic. Take the example from the image above this comes from a nest cam that was put up online documenting the nesting habits of osprey. At first no one was really that interested in the nest. But all that changed with the two birds laid their eggs. Once the chicks had hatched the viewers went crazy with their comments on the feed. And when the chicks did not make it the site blew up like never before. It got to the point where the website had to be completely shut down because it could no longer handle the amount of visitors and comments that it was receiving! The reason this occurred is simple we as humans felt a level of empathy for the birds and that is what caused the extreme overuse of the site because we were able to relate to the birds struggles at raising a family on some levels. But even the ability to feel empathy for other species is

 As we have studied in class, studies have been conducted to test empathy in dogs and rats. Since the topic of empathy has been expanding in the animal psychology world, many other species have been tested such as chickens, elephants, chimpanzees, and orangutans. Mice have recently been tested by psychology professor Dr. Jeffery Mogil at McGill University to determine whether or not pain stimulus causes an empathetic reaction. This study was highly controversial and questioned the ethical components of experiments. This experiment actually came out of an accidental discovery of a pattern concerning a mouse's pain sensitivity to a pain test that was dependent on whether or not the mouse observed another mouse in the test. Sometimes, both mice who were cagemates were subject to the pain test at the same time. This prompted Dr. Mogil and colleagues to explore this behavior in mice by either injecting one mouse with acetic acid (found in vinegar) while the other one watches or inje