I’ve been exploring human-animal communications for years, but I want to say at the beginning that I don’t know what they feel, and I don’t believe many, if any, human beings do. I got a letter from a lovely person this morning telling me how much she liked my blog because I put up a lot of photos of animals. “I love how happy, they are,” she said, “they are such a happy family. In our world, this makes me feel so good in the morning.” She especially thought of Deb, the lamb in this photo, when she wrote me the note.

That is a lovely thought, I hope it is true that my animals are happy, I am glad to offer any kind of antidote to the notion of the world presented by the “news” every day. But to be truthful, I don’t believe my animals are happy. I don’t believe they are sad, either, I think both are human emotions that we project onto animals because it makes us feel good to think of them as happy, just as the nice person said.

One of the big lessons I’ve learned in my life with animals is that they exist in an emotional state that is alien to us, and is often clouded by our own needs, projections and experiences. There are a million behavioral journals out there about animals, you can find one for or against any point of view, I gave them up long ago as a reference post. No behaviorist ever got a grant for saying animals are not more complex, emotional, intelligent and mysterious than we have been led to believe.

I think we need a wiser and more mystical understanding of them than we bring to bear on our own psyches. Animals are Zen creatures to me, they define the idea of living in the moment. They form powerful attachments to people and to one another, they are almost always thinking of subsistence and if they are prey animals, protection. They are aware of shelter, and movements beyond their world, they are sensitive to weather and to anything else that affects their food and security.

Deb was always with Jake when he was alive, now she is always with Pumpkin. I saw no signs of happiness or sadness in her, before or after her twin’s death. Animals are acutely aware of one another, especially pack animals like dogs or mating animals like elephants. But emotions like “happy” or “sad” to not apply to them, in my mind, although I understand this is not what most people want to hear. They do not have words or language or narrative stories in their heads, they don’t ache for things they don’t have, they are not aware of the concept of death, they adapt and endure, their instincts are powerful beyond our imagination and we tend to diminish the importance of instincts because we want to see animals in our terms.

We use our own words for own emotions when it comes to animals all the time. Debbie sees a happy animal when she looks at Deb, I see a mystical and spiritual creature, I have no idea what she is thinking,  I rarely see a change in her mood that I would put a label on. I believe that in order to be understand, animals need to be liberated from our notions of them, this is often harmful and destructive to them.

The New York Carriage horses may be banned from the city because some people insist they look “sad” pulling the carriages they have been pulling for thousands of years. One of the leading causes of death for dogs is overfeeding, people giving their dogs too much food because they want them to be “happy.” Animals are being taken out of circuses and sent to slaughter because people insist they seem depressed in their work and their cages.

Dogs are a marvel of the anthropological world because they have, more than any other animal, learned how to adapt to humans and live with them, to show us what we need to see in them – love, enthusiasm, human and attachment. They fool us all the time, this is why they get to come to bed and sheep and raccoons don’t.

For me, the meaning of the lambs is quite the opposite. My animals are not a happy family, nor are they a sad one. They are marvelous creatures of adaptation, instincts, genetics and intuition. I have come to see that I love them because they are not like people, not because they are.