Pets day after day do not get tired of proving their loyalty and love to a person, they save their owners and sometimes even sacrifice their own lives. Everyone knows monogamous animal species that find a mate to whom they remain faithful for life. However, people still doubt whether animals are capable of feelings like love.
Do animals have feelings
Man, as it happened, throughout the existence of a humanistic civilization considers himself the crown of creation. Pain, love, hope, emotions and feelings are believed to be available only to humans. Rene Descartes even believed that animals were not even capable of feeling pain: he conducted experiments on the unfortunate animals, deliberately torturing them, and said that the screams and squeals of the experimental subjects who were distraught with pain were about the same as the noise of a broken mechanism.
Nevertheless, any person who constantly communicates with animals knows very well how strong and deep feelings they are capable of experiencing. Perhaps in ancient times people understood this a little better, because it is not for nothing that animals symbolize various human qualities of character.
Animals have proven many times that they are capable of experiencing true love and devotion to the owner. Everyone knows the cases when cats and dogs died without owners from melancholy, simply stopping to eat. Seeing such examples of the manifestation of genuine feelings, one can only doubt whether a person is capable of experiencing true love.
Observations of groups of animals confirm that they bond with each other in the same way as humans. This is especially noticeable in the example of monkeys, whose behavior is usually easy for humans to interpret.
Scientists were shocked by a case in a Cameroon zoo: one of the chimpanzees named Dorothy died of a heart attack. Then the rest of the monkeys hugged each other, comforting each other and showing sorrowful experiences.
Even in the life of those animals that show their feelings in a way that is not the most understandable for humans, love and affection plays an equally important role. Experiments have shown that when meeting friends, people relax and their heart rate slows down. The same thing happens with other social animals, for example, this can be especially clearly observed in cows that feel better around friends in the herd.
What neuroscience says about this
To prove that the nature of feelings in animals does not differ from human, we can cite the example of research on the "hormones of love": oxytocin and dopamine. These hormones regulate feelings and social behavior in animals in the same way as in humans. Under the influence of oxytocin, people become kinder and more attentive, but only to those whom they consider “theirs”. Research results have confirmed that the effect of this hormone in animals is absolutely similar.
To admit that animals are capable of experiencing the same love as humans, the latter is only hindered by arrogance.
But the hormone dopamine is responsible for conjugal love. In the brains of both partners, under the influence of this hormone, changes occur, after which they react to their "soul mate" in a special way, no longer interested in other individuals. The mechanism of action of dopamine, as the neurobiological basis of love, is the same for both animals and humans.
