The Importance of Understanding Animals' Emotional Language

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Jennifer says animals could have an entire emotional language that means something really different from our own. We don't know what it's like to conceive of the world as a killer whale or as a cat or a nonhuman primate, she says. "What we miss out on are the differences and the fact that they may have a concept that's so totally different from ours," Jennifer says.

A dog on its owner’s grave. A killer whale carrying around its dead calf. A goose that isolates when its mate dies. These behaviors in animals may look like human mourning, but should scientists call them "grief?"

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Jennifer Vonk's research study on pet cats reactions to the death of companion animals can be found here.

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