Question: To what extent are different animals conscious? And what different emotions can they experience?

Liane Hobson answered on 28 Apr 2020:

Hello and thank you for your question.

There is a lot of debate about emotions in animals, mostly because we can’t simply ask them how they feel. There a lot of different ways that we can try to look at how they might be feeling though. For example, we can see how they are acting and what noises the animals are making. If we take dogs as an example, they might run up to you, wag their tail and make high pitched barks when you have a treat for them – this all suggests that they’re happy (and excited for treats – who isnt?!). There was a recent study that suggested that mice make faces that tell you when they’re happy and sad – just like us in a way, and some of my work suggests that they make noises that suggests that they’re happy (it’s just that we can’t hear them like we can with a dog bark).

As for consciousness, we know that different animals experience the world in different ways. For example, we can recognise ourselves in a mirror. Elephants can too, but some animals can’t. We also know that some animals are more likely to get bored than others. In animal science, we try to use animals that are less likely to get bored wherever we can.