Those of us who own pets wouldn’t deny it. Do animals have emotions?
In this TED talk, Carl Safina, who has a PhD in ecology and is the Professor for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, and the founding President of the not-for-profit, Safina Centre, provides a different perspective on animals.
Carl says humans definitely do not have the upper hand when it comes to empathy. ‘Far from being a special thing that only humans have,’ he says, ‘human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathic animals; we kill them, and we eat them.’
He also offers a new perceptive on anthropomorphism (that0 we’ve been told for years, never to practice). He says: ‘I’m here to tell you that projecting human emotions and human thoughts on other animals is the best first guess about what they are doing and why.’
With regard to the clip, we do agree with the comment by Michaela Skarbova about the eating of animals. She says: ‘One of the best TED talks I have ever seen. Learned a lot about incredible emotional intelligence of wild life. Wish he also mentioned intelligence of animals that humans use for consumption like pigs and cows etc because people don’t make the link between living, feeling animal and their steak on the plate or milk in their cereals (hence so many people laughed when Carl mentioned how we treat crayfish or octopus – boiling – I found it sad and not funny at all) 
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Watch the clip here:
