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Comment by drak0n1c | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it also "human conceit" to think that other species should always be thought of as having emotions and consciousness? No other animal engages in such.

Perhaps it's the other way around from how you put it. All animals by default share the conceit you describe. It is not unique to humanity, and does not deserve the label of "human". The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows. The uniquely human conceit that we engage in is the one we are both engaging in right now. The exercise of putting oneself in another's shoes.

By the definition of the word, doesn't that make our species special?

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>The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows.

Neither do humans, of course. Do you stop and grieve for the chicken you just grilled and ate?

Obviously animals are capable of recognizing that other creatures have emotions, too--any dog or cat owner can tell you that. But clearly, like us, they don't always choose empathy.

Yes actually I do when it’s an animal I hunted myself, butchered and later prepared. I think you touch on the problem though, since grocery store meat does not elicit such response from me and everyone else.

That may be true in your case, but it certainly isn't necessary nor universal.

We're certainly capable of it. It remains unclear whether other animals are capable.

I have to see vegan bears and vegan whales, I only know humans who are able to decide not to eat other animals based on their beliefs.

Well, among omnivore animals it is certainly true that some individual animals would fit the literal definition of vegan. You probably wouldn't ever know about it unless it lived in a zoo, however.

You can see vegan bears in most big zoos. Panda bears. I'm not aware of any vegan whale but would ressemble manatees probably.

I think you missed the point, this is more vegans by choice or conscience, as Bruce the shark would say "Fish are friends.".

When an adult chimp kills another adult chimp and doesn’t eat them, is that not because of beliefs? There are many animals that don’t eat everything that comes their way, and it is clearly a conscious decision.

I guess it depends on the chimp's religious beliefs. These unstaged chimps from BBC PlanetEarth clearly has no compunction about eating a rival gang's carcass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al-f_WWoHI4 .

They'll gang up and murder or perhaps execute members of their own group.

They'll even kill the children of low ranking females just to emphasize the dominance hierarchy. Mother nature is a bitch.

It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.

>It's not quite what you're looking for, but animals have at least been shown to exhibit preference of what species animals they will eat.

Occam's razor says that most wild animals exhibit preference of what species they'll eat based on taste and availability of food, not because of ethics. I said most because I'm not a wildlife biologist and there always seems to be strange outliers, but I have a hard time believing an omnivore/carnivore, such as a bear, would willingly choose vegetation 100% of the time because of ethics when there's plenty of game of its preference to eat.

>Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.

Most domesticated dogs that were raised alongside cats won't eat them because they've learned that they're not allowed to. The ones that do attack children and other pets are frequently euthanized.

Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't need to teach them it's not allowed. There must be another explanation.

>Dogs raised alongside cats never even try to eat them to begin with. You don't need to teach them it's not allowed.

That's an absurd statement. While tempers of dogs vary from one to the next just like humans, I vehemently disagree to the extent that I'm hesitant to believe you've ever raised a puppy, or even have been exposed to many dogs for that matter. Plenty of pet dogs behave more like their wolf ancestors than others.

I've raised dozens of dogs, and like humans, some need some coaching about good behavior and some get along just fine without ever needing discipline.

That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

>animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.

If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from. Wolves aren't going to stop hunting deer unless the deer somehow provide additional sources of food that the wolves realize only exists because of the deer's help.

> If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from.

Isn’t that how humans operate as well? People keep pets that they get satisfaction from but we don’t eat our pets.

Then you have the debate of whether true altruism exists or whether people do even our most selfless acts because of the endorphin rush we get from helping others.

In many cases, I have observed that an emotional connection with another animal is enough to prevent hunting of either just the animal itself or in some cases the entire species. In a more extreme example I've known chickens to run amok and play with dogs like they were one of their own.

And not just dogs. I have trained cats to become friendly to individual rats (I think instinct is too strong), and I have seen some species express either preference or disdain for other species. My personal analysis is that this has more to do with social and emotional conditioning, a true recognition of another animal as "friendly" despite not offering a symbiotic relationship, rather than directly as a result of behavioral conditioning with positive/negative stimulus.

I think a better indicator of the difference between us and pets is that we keep pets, and further, that we sometimes keep pets purely for emotional benefits. Incidences of non-humans keeping other animals as pets is extremely rare and seemingly limited to primates. [0] I think that says a lot about our psychology. But it's a little pointless to debate about whether other mammals experience meaningful emotions. They do. Meaningful emotions are actionable. That's why our emotions seem meaningful.

[0] https://bioone.org/journals/Neotropical-Primates/volume-13/i...

I've read about wolves that they eat only the meat they are taught to eat (and different pack of wolves in different places hunt different animals.) So a wolf may literally starve to death while sitting near a corpse of some animal if it doesn't know it can eat it. May happen to pups if their pack dies or to wolves who were brought up in captivity.

The source is in Russian from a zoologist who studied wolves: https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-semy...

Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

>Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).

You agree with me.

Cannibal cults disintegrate whatever wishy-washy point you were trying to make here.

Erst kommt das fressen dann kommt die Moral

Hypocrisyis when your lifestyle is a full blown war on whole ecosystems and kills a dozen animals per year and you pretend to deeply care- for one animal, chosen by traits that could best be described as missguided antromorphism.

Your pet would eat you, if you had a stroke in your flat- lying helpless on the floor. All the nice moments, are just a function of the surpulus, that is provided by humanity via ecocide.

It's absurd you think puppies raised with cats would try to eat them without human intervention. That's far from the norm.

Clearly you have not lived in a city with a large stray population. Even deer eat birds and squirrels. Hunger is hunger. Avoidance is totally learned.

I would eat any living organism except for another human and close pets whom mean a whole lot to me emotionally and whom carry transitional memories that my brain wishes to keep.

Not eating another human has nothing to do with the fact that we share a species and everything to do with the conscious psychological decision to have respect for the life of all highly cognitive beings which can live complex lives, and not arrogantly place my own need for survival higher than theirs...

But nuances aside, fundamentally I don't differ from the deer, birds, or squirrels in that I'm wired to do almost anything necessary to satisfy my hunger impulse. So I'm not sure how what you're saying makes any difference.

My daughter killed a small rabbit when she was 4 year old. I was not there but the story is that mom tried to take it away from her and she got overly violent trying to snatch it back out of mom's hands. Clearly she did not have the bunny's welfare in mind in this moment or she would have been more gentle. I don't see a difference between her actions/motivations and that of an overly rambunctious puppy. In general, my daughter is a very kind, compassionate, caring person.

They distinguish among ages of things they eat within the same species too.

When that belief is one of another being in the pack, or a friend, animals do make that kind of decision.

There are plenty of indigenous cultures that show respect to their kill. And plenty of modern societies that show respect our say a prayer or give thanks before a meal.

It's possible to show empathy and respect without grief.

But it's also OK to grieve for murdered animals.

You clearly have more time than I do. I think I witness a wild kill on my property nearly daily.

Do you stop and grieve for the chicken you just grilled and ate?

I did cry the first time I butchered a chicken.

It's sad. But it's real. Its not hidden behind concrete walls.

You're doing that. Not paying 18 people away to do it for you.

And the chicken probably had a better life.

Yes but did you cry the first time to ate one?

I'll admit I did not, because I was probably six months old.

And had you not been in a position to have life explained to you, as your species did not have those kinds of descriptive ability, would you ha e ever felt the shame? The bear does not lament, as he was never told to.

First time you butchered it or first time you killed it?

I've put a road kill deer in my trunk, brought it home, strung it up under my deck and butchered it by myself in the night. I will tell you that was far more emotional for me than any shot I've ever taken with a rifle or shotgun.

The butchering can certainly be more emotional that the killing... it might 10 seconds to grab an axe and swing and then at least 30 minutes to cut the skin and pull it off of the body, to cut the body cavity open and to slice out the internal organs. It feels different than say preforming an autopsy in biology lab... you might have this moment as I have where you realize that the story you tell yourself, that you're a killer with a higher purpose, is just that -- a story. It doesn't make the animal you murdered feel any better about the fate it met at your hand. I would guess it is a significantly different feeling in cultures where a large portion of the population kill what they eat. Even here where I live, in rural Pennsylvania, people will often look at you like you're a sociopath if you tell them you killed and skinned and ate any animal other than a deer, and yet, the first day of hunting season there were often many empty chairs in school because dad wanted to take his kid out to celebrate a time honored tradition. Those kids don't often cry when they kill their deer, they often feel an overwhelming sense of pride. And then they pay a processor $50 so that they don't have to do the hard dirty work themselves.

what's missing in this discussion is a mention that humans are well capable of wiping out other species and have done so fully aware. we're also perfectly capable of wiping each other out for no reason other than status.

I keep engaging in morbid thought experiments to figure out how certain people feel when they commit certain acts and whether I would be able to do the same provided the circumstances are hard enough. A few examples:

if I could blink my eye and all the valuables and money of everyone in this room/house etc would suddenly be mine, how much would that be, and would I do it?

if I could blink my eye and everyone in that room/building would vanish from the earth would I do it?

if I could blink my eye and 2/3 of the earths human population would be wiped out by x/y/z would I do it?

if I would be forced to work in a concentration camp being tasked with horrid acts against humans ... maybe with the alternative of being killed myself or having my family etc (spin that further what if I didn't have a family and just my dog that would be sacrificed if I were to refuse) ...

...

the answers always terrify me.

"Neither do humans"

We talk about it all the time. We have industries built around it. We write books about it. Maybe bears could read our books? Whoops! They can't read! Or tie their shoes, or set the dinner table. Maybe we're special after all ...

What about the moose that spent 20 minutes rescuing a chipmunk from drowning in a barrel? Or the dog who held out a stick for another dog to grab onto and escape the rapids?

There are plenty of other examples of this, I’m sure; these two came to mind first because they were caught on video. What drives that behavior if not empathy?

Empathy is an emotion experienced by both humans and animals. I don't dispute that. But I don't believe that empathy requires intellectual awareness of the inner life of other creatures, or generalizing that to all animals as we are. Empathy is an emotional reaction, like rage at a perceived slight, and does not require thought.

> But I don't believe that empathy requires ... putting of oneself in another's shoes...

put oneself in another's shoes is basically a definition of empathy...

The whole put oneself in other shoes process is buggy as hell, even for our species. We basically draw a flat copy with mirror neurons and run it on our own hardware. If too much divergence accumulates, the other becomes a idiot or deity depending on outcome.

> It is an emotional reaction, like rage at a perceived slight, and does not require thought.

Of course, we can't know this.

It seems reasonable to speculate that other animals don't subvocalise in human languages,[1] though that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't capable of thought.[2]

1. It also seems reasonable to me to believe that dogs (some dogs?) might be capable of understanding some human language beyond simple commands. I typically have more luck with my two 2yo Border Collie cross if I explain to them why we're doing a new thing. More research is needed. Please deposit funds in my offshore bank account.

2. We could debate what is meant by thought, I believe that would be a distraction

Empathy often does require conscious thought from me, I'm curious if that makes me a sociopath. I have to intentionally imagine myself in the other person's situation to understand why they might be upset about something. For example when I heard about the student who was recently suspended for creating an N-word pass at school, I felt that those who were offended were just being overly sensitive. I only changed my mind after someone suggested imagining the same thing with a slur against my ethnicity. I just don't seem to empathize with people by default in most situations.

A kid that hurts herself and is crying requires conscious empathy?

The best clinical instrument for 'measuring' sociopathy is the Hare PCL-R, which tries to estimate both a person's tendency to engage in hostile interpersonal behavior and their attachment to social norms - you could think of it as the difference between actively murdering people vs. callously watching them die without helping. One can have a high score on one part of the scale and not on the other. Obviously this is far short of being an exact science.

As for empathy, it might be an inherent quality but I'm inclined to think that it's like most other things, you can cultivate it with practice and it manifests different ways in different people.

> What about the moose that spent 20 minutes rescuing a chipmunk from drowning in a barrel?

Maybe he was just hungry... many big herbivores like cows and deer eat small animals gladly when available.

Maybe the leopard taking care of the gazella's calf after eating their mum is thinking "I'll save this tasty snack for later" and protects it from other predators for selfish reasons.

Our interpretation of what are thinking the animals can be wrong.

>Our interpretation of what are thinking the animals can be wrong.

Of course it can, but by resorting to this sort of interpretative relativism, you're bringing the debate no further. Of course we can never tell whether animals feel anything such as emotion, but at this level, so you can't of other humans. In other words, the interpretation of emotions as authenthic rich mental states is just as valid for animals as it is for humans.

> A) Of course we can never tell whether animals feel anything such as emotion,

I could think in some exceptions to this rule, but lets ignore the "never" and assume that this is true for now.

> B) but at this level, so you can't of other humans.

False. Even if I can't communicate with a slug, I can communicate fairly well with other humans, feel empathy and understand their feelings.

> C) In other words, the interpretation of emotions as authenthic rich mental states is just as valid for animals as it is for humans.

Causal phallacy. A is true, so B is true [in fact is false], so C is equally valid for A and B.

In fact neither A (of course we can't interpretate emotions of animals), nor B (we can't interpretate emotions in humans) justify C (therefore the interpretation of emotions is valid in both animals and humans).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ_3BN0m7S8

I would bet this bear actually would have eaten the crow, had that been its intention.

I'd think the leopard taking care of a calf is more likely to think it looks "cute" for similar biological reasons we do, and take care of it for that reason. I would guess that a leopard in particular, if it wanted to store food, would be inclined to save it for later by just caching it (dead) in a tree.

I also think "instincts" manifest themselves through emotion / emotion is how we experience instinct. We feel fear, love, etc depending on the situation, and then it's these emotions that drive us to act in the manner we do.

Our actions are moderated by language-enhanced reflection, which is were we're really ahead of other animals.

The crow hits the bear in the face clearly just before the bear turns away and focus in the easier meal available. The video fades and do not show what happened later but the crow was far from being safe still.

Other possibility would be that the bear was just annoyed by the crowing sound so maybe it was not totally an altruistic conduct. Not easy to evaluate because we lack the first and last part of the scene. How the crow ended in the pool? Maybe was trow there by the bear. We don't know.

> leopard ... would be inclined to save it for later by just caching it (dead) in a tree.

That would be the best way to attract the maximum of flies and predators. Cats are know to play with their preys when satiated keeping them alive as long as possible. It seems that they have a lot of fun with it.

> Cats are know to play with their preys when satiated keeping them alive as long as possible.

When they do, it doesn't look like what the leopard was doing with the calf. They don't "play" in that sense, they just incapacitate the prey so it can't escape and "play" with it until it's dead. Definitely not what the leopard was doing.

Come on, you're just hand-waving here as much as the people you're trying to criticize. You don't like the idea that animals have empathy so you invoke delayed gratification as if that were a more common animal trait. Do you really think an animal is going to spend 20 minutes trying to get a tasty snack out of a barrel because it's hungry - and then set it aside for later once it has hold of the snack?

You're right to be cautious about interpreting animal behavior, but you're inadvertently making the same mistake from a different direction.

You are assuming that my goal is to criticize some people. This is wrong. You will not find any name or mention to anybody in my previous post.

You say also that I dislike something so this explains X. As you don't know me, you are not in the position to base your arguments on such claims. Ad-hominem fallacy

Am I "invoking" delayed gratification? where?

> Do you really think an animal is going to spend 20 minutes trying to get a tasty snack out of a barrel because it's hungry - and then set it aside for later once it has hold of the snack?

It depends on the context. If we can see the video we could discusse it properly.

Wild animals stopping what they are doing and running away when they realize there is an human around with a camera? I can see it. Yes. Definitely a very common behaviour.

You obviously dislike the idea in the sense of expending effort to refute it. Surely you can figure out why I would have drawn such an inference from your comments.

Or the guy killed by his "pet" lion this week [1].

Animals mostly follow their instinct, and it is absurd/dangerous to anthropomorphise their behavior.

[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/world/michal-prasek-czech-man-kille...

And they had to shoot the lions to get to the man. Hmmm. Ok. Man, some people are just so stupid.

Or the girl killed by her “mother” this week [1].

Humans mostly follow their instinct, and it is absurd/dangerous not to zoomorphise their behavior.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-accused-killing-14-year-dau...

>No other animal has such a conception.

Tell me your secret to understanding the inner minds of animals.

Seriously, any pet owner will tell you animals seemingly have feelings. They do things that don't make much sense outside of them showing love, hate, annoyance, etc. It's not scientific, but why would humans be so different from animals when we all came down a similar evolutionary line? You don't see great leaps in physical trait happening, usually, it's a gradual process, so I would assume that feelings gradually developed into what humans have now.

Pet owners can also tell you that most of what their pets do makes absolutely no sense

If my cats were human, they would both be in jail

One of my cats is pure breed, has never lived outside of a house, loves eating plastic, olives and chips but shows no care for fresh meat

The other one was a stray cat, she still hides food that she doesn't eat, because that's what she's been doing for the initial part of her life

In a way she adapted to live in a house, but she never learned that she's not been living in the streets for the biggest part of her life

So yes, they have their personalities, very different from each other They get bored, they enjoy snuggles (until they do not and scratch you for no reason), but can they process their feelings beyond reaction?

I'm not really sure they do in a very complex way

I believe this is a classic "finger pointing at the moon" issue where you value words more than the meaning. The question isn't whether or not they feel emotions as we have boxed them up and given names to, but as they are in experience.

Of course animals have no such conception of deeper emotions, at least in the same way that we think about them, but that doesn't mean that animals do (or don't) experience them. It just means our method of boxing up experiences into communicable terms probably doesn't match their own.

I am not disputing the fact that many animals experience emotions and consciousness just as we do. I was taking issue with the parent comment's framing of our attitudes as "just human conceit". I am saying that conceitedness is the same as the emotional and other mental phenomena that we are discussing - it is shared by all animals.

Occasionally, we can overcome the conceitedness. I think that makes us special.

Ah I misunderstood the point that you were trying to make, but it makes more sense now and is something I can agree with.

Thanks for the clarification.

> Of course animals have no such conception of deeper emotions, at least in the same way that we think about them

how can you possibly claim that?

I took it to mean it seems self evident that other animals don't have a x-thousand year history of oral and written ponderings of the mind.

I don't necessarily hold that belief, who knows what the birds and dolphins are jabbering on about.

Because "deeper emotions" is something defined by us, humans, and is probably completely meaningless without a complete understanding of how we define emotions in the first place.

I'm not saying they don't have these emotions, just that they probably don't have the same concepts surrounding them as we do. I could very well be wrong, but I'd have to find a non-human animal willing to discuss the topic with me.

> Because "deeper emotions" is something defined by us, humans, and is probably completely meaningless without a complete understanding of how we define emotions in the first place.

i am sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense. a concept has meaning beyond its human definition. it isn’t like emotions didn’t exist until humans “defined” them.

i am sure there are animals willing to discuss it with you, it’s just that you (us) can’t understand them.

it is very possible that animals feel deeper emotional connections than we do. orcas showcase some very deep emotional states.

I'm not saying that emotions don't exist, just that the meaning is completely separate from the way that we define it.

For example many languages define colors differently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg), but this doesn't mean that the different wavelengths don't exist. Cultures categorized them for the purpose of communication and it's only within the context of that categorization that you can understand the meaning.

Earlier I referenced "finger pointing at the moon" and this is exactly it. The word is the finger and the meaning is the moon, and we shouldn't mistake the finger for the moon.

> i am sure there are animals willing to discuss it with you, it’s just that you (us) can’t understand them.

I was half-joking, there are already animals that we can understand and communicate with. It's just a matter of finding them :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GorgFtCqPEs

> it is very possible that animals feel deeper emotional connections than we do. orcas showcase some very deep emotional states.

No doubt. Even visiting an animal shelter exposes some of the deep emotional state that dogs and cats can be in, and I'm sure that barely scratches the surface when considering all of the different species and circumstances.

I totally get where you're coming from, but some emotions are available to me and not to animals - for example, the feeling of meeting someone who reminds me of a character I imagined from reading a book. Likewise, my fondness for words may interfere with my ability to experience wholeness and the emotions tied up with that, which might be why religious and mystical people develop devotional/meditative practices centered on silence or solitude.

I think the simplest test would be to determine if animals had a sound or body language for that emotion.

We can clearly see or hear when most mammals are experiencing fear, joy, sadness, anger, etc.

They might not understand it intellectually, but I think we'd be hard pressed to argue that they don't feel it or understand that their emotion is in response to an event they experienced.

> The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows. The uniquely human conceit that we engage in is the one we are both engaging in right now. The exercise of putting oneself in another's shoes.

How do you know that certain animals do not do that. It is not like we can read their brains.

Here are a few I know of:

1- Several bird species maintain life-long bonds with their partners.

2- Some bird species have funerals for deceased birds.

3- Several animals (like Dolphins) can recognize themselves in the mirror.

4- My dog recognize when I'm angry.

You see the pattern. Humans are just more capable of sophisticated patterns than animals we compare to.

How about other creatures? I mean, if you want to claim supremacy, what would be your definition of supremacy? Number of humans? Mass?

> "It has been estimated by E. O. Wilson that the total number of individual ants alive in the world at any one time is between one and ten quadrillion (short scale). According to this estimate, the total biomass of all the ants in the world is approximately equal to the total biomass of the entire human race."

Ants beats us on the number scale but we are equal on the biomass front.

Isn't it also "human conceit" to think that other species should always be thought of as having emotions and consciousness? No other animal engages in such.

Obviously animals have simpler lives than we do but they have personalities, maybe equivalent to that of a 2- or 3-year old. One of my dogs is getting old and can't always find a ball that I throw for him. The younger one will sometimes find it and then bring it to him if she sees him looking; she'll drop her own ball, fetch the 'lost' one and drop it for him, then get her own and bring it back to me to me.

I didn't set out to teach that behavior, though the younger dog may well be imitating mine.

> No other animal engages in such.

This unsupported statement has been made about so many things that we later found out many animals DO engage in.

You said, "No other animal engages in such."

Which is the point of the article. You cannot make that claim. You do not know what all the other animals are thinking.

Maybe the elephant is thinking, "You have everything you need. Why do you want to kill me for my tusks?"

How do you know all the inner thinkings and feelings of these other creatures?

You interact with them and see how they respond and behave.

They're are genetically very similar to us.

Occam's Razor says the reason why your dog looks and acts guilty is that it feels guilty, rather than carrying out some sort of autonomous response that looks exactly like guilt but for whatever reason doesn't cross a certain threshold of self-awareness to deserve to be called Actual Emotion.

A simpler explanation in my opinion is that it's projection. But we each then are basically performing petitio principii.

Occam's Razor is not truth generating, it only says that you shouldn't make things more complex than is necessary, it doesn't say what is necessary; crucially the World, and humans in particular, are not logical or especially confined by necessities.

> A simpler explanation in my opinion is that it's projection.

For this to be true we would first have to invent philosophy and philosophers, psychology and psychologists.

So, I'm convinced it constitutes a simpler explanation.

Take dogs, for example, we share something like 84% same DNA. Great apes 98.8% or so.

This starts to slide in to this idea I have about how people say "everyone is different". No, no we are not. We are way more alike than the cumulative sum of our differences.

It would be way simpler, in my opinion, to assume other animals, at least some of them anyway, are capable of most of the same emotions we are. Then we can work out to what extent we care.

A simpler explanation in my opinion is that it's projection.

But that assumes facts not in evidence. Here's a fun example. One day I cooked too much food, ate some and set the other aside intending to put it in the refrigerator. Something distracted me while I was eating and I left the house, forgetting all about the leftover food.

I returned a little later and instead of my dog greeting me at the door with his tail wagging I walked in and dog is giving me his sad look. I have no idea why until I go into the kitchen and see the now-empty plate that had the leftover food on it.

Now I doubt this is guilt in the sense of moral remorse, it's likely just my dog worrying about getting caught taking my food. But he was definitely conscious of having taken something that was not given. The difference from his normal behavior when I open the door was an empirical fact, even though I can only draw inferences about what was going on in his head.

Our species is special because we can communicate our feelings directly through language, and language is also a great tool for applying your own inner feelings. A baby feels hunger and cries. An adult feels hunger too, but also has the capacity to think "I bet he is hungry", "I will be hungry later", "the last time she ate this she was still hugry after", etc.

It is entirely possible that animals have different degrees to what we call emotion/consciousness in a similar manner to what we see in humans. What may make us 'special' is the spectrum to which humans are able to move within the emotion/conscious area.

Yes, all animals share this conceit, and we expect them to. For eg, it's ok if a crab eats insects, but horrible if it eats it's own newborns.

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