What's Really Going On Inside Animals' Heads?
About this episode
The episode explores the complex inner lives of animals and the evolving understanding of their emotions and sentience.
Do animals feel love, anger, or empathy? Researchers have long dismissed such ideas as anthropomorphism, arguing that attributing human emotions to animals was unscientific. But as we learn more about animal sentience, that’s starting to change — and, in the process, we’re learning more than ever about the complex inner lives of animals, including why we may be more alike than we once thought. On this encore episode, we explore what researchers have discovered about what’s really going on inside other species’ heads. We talk with a primatologist about why she believes baboons and other animals possess a theory of mind; investigate whether crabs, lobsters, and shrimp are capable of experiencing pain; and hear about one beagle’s journey from lab subject to pet. Host Maiken Scott and reporter Alan Yu visit the Chamounix Equestrian Center in Philadelphia to test an app that claims to detect pain in horses. When primatologist Christine Webb was in college, she was taught that it was “unscientific” to investigate animal emotions — but that attitude has started to change. We talk with Webb about what’s causing that shift, what she learned from her mentor, the famed primatologist Frans…
More episodes of The Pulse
- 'I Could Have Been Lindsay Clancy’
- The Search for Life on Mars: From Mars Mania to NASA’s Rovers
- Jon Ronson, 101 Princesses, and a World of Unraveling Men
- The Search for Wilderness
- Quitting Antidepressants: From Withdrawal to Tapering One Step at a Time
- The Science of Imagination: Transforming How We Think, Feel, and Live
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Pulse podcast page.