>The ethologist and author Marc Bekoff thinks primary emotions — including fear, joy, happiness, jealousy, anger, love, pleasure, sadness and grief — are probab

>The ethologist and author Marc Bekoff thinks primary emotions — including fear, joy, happiness, jealousy, anger, love, pleasure, sadness and grief — are probably widespread and that hewing too closely to abstract description could become a form of what he calls "anthropo-denial." In humans, each of these emotion terms refers to the cognition that a situation is of a certain sort, and calls for a certain type of response. So for instance "fear" refers to the cognition that a situation is such that there is a fairly high probability that something highly contrary to one's vital interests will occur, and calls increased vigilance and possibly action to prevent the feared event. Animals make many or all of the same situational differentiations, with much the same behavioral responses, and so it seems appropriate to say they have the same emotions as humans, , or at least a good part of them. By the way, I think that the idea that animals are mere mechanisms without minds comes from philosophies such as cartesian dualism, and also some religious doctrines, and so is not scientific.