Dogs can be intensely devoted, loyal, even clingy, and will howl for hours on end if their owner is out of the house. But this doesn’t seem very similar to the emotion humans call love, and is far more to do with their innate pack instincts. No other animal I can think of comes even that close, at least in their relationship to humans, though cats can certainly express affection and trust, when they feel like it.
Many birds mate for life, sharing the responsibility of nest building and chick feeding, but are they feeling what we call love? It would seem most unlikely, unless we wish to reduce human love to a mere instinctive response, not dissimilar in kind to how animals feel towards their offspring or mates. Personally, however, I think this does the human concept of love a grave injustice.
Possibly some of the higher apes may be capable of experiencing something vaguely similar, but I know of no tests that have been done on this, and find it difficult to think of how such a test could even be devised.
Animals have brain organs/hemespheres like us.
We’re very very similar.
Just because it is a simpler form of love doesn’t mean it’s not a form of love.
We evolved from the same origins.
Yeah… my fat cat definately loved the father of her children. She would jump into the window and put her paw to the glass, and he would do the same whenever he was around. She also has hate down very well… I don’t know if one can measure the magnitude of a emotion, mearly noting that it’s present should be sufficient, not it’s primitiveness or sophistication. Is Human fear as sophisticated as Cat Fear? I don’t know… we might not be as evolved as a Cat is in terms of capacity to be scared shitless. You see the fundamental issue here?
What matters is how a emotion can exist in relationship to a complex of other capacities of thought and experience. Does that emotion have the capacity to coexist with various forms of thought, or does it need to juxtaposition very fast between two or more mindsets to gain a illusion of a singular, complex mindset?
It’s also important to note the maturity principle in regards to emotions. We are conditioned to accepting alot- sometimes from the ways we access memory, othertimes to how we conditioned the acceptibility of thinking in certain ways. The means of accessing memory are a crucial factor here. Someone landing a mutually good and stable relationship- for whatever factors, when young will approach love differently than someone who didn’t do so good, and then becomes a cock hating femme nazis who pre-emptively assults everyone’s opinions of her by pointing out how shallow and hipocritical they are… because they don’t know her, and don’t know where she’s been… she has a complex history and people need to just lay the fuck off and understand her better, and join her in the struggle for women’s liberation, because she’s not getting payed as well as the rest of the office because they think in thier heads that she is a messed up slut who is slowly turning dyke… which is mean, and cruel… even though they won’t say it to her, she KNOWS that’s what she’s thinking. And they are all just in denial, following a Judeo-Christian norm of some bullshit religion started by accident by some guy when he was executed 2000 years ago. If they can all just backoff, and treat her right, and vote her way, and listen more attentively to her in office meetings… and if that jerk in Accounting will stop staring at her, then maybe she would feel comfortable enough to finally know real love… which she doesn’t believe in… and be happy like everyone else. But she can’t, so fuck capitalism, and fuck you and everyone else. Time for the black makeup and angry music, and sneering at the men who hit on her in her life.
Yeah… love is simple, simple enough for a cat. Everything else is complicated.