Yesterday, I sat with my friend Ed Gulley for five hours while Carol went to see her granddaughter win a ribbon for the Bejosh Farm cow Atta-tude. Among other things, I was struck by the behavior of the Gulley’s many animals – four Australian Shepherds, two rescue cats, and a 14-year-old Cockatiel named Ozzie.

I am curious to see how they react to Ed’s illness.

Ed always called him “Oz.” Until a few days ago, Ed and Oz talked back and forth all day, Ed could get Oz to dance, chirp and talk back, they have been talking to each other for a long time. This weekend Ed, who has brain cancer, stopped talking and fell into a deep sleep from which he rarely emerges.

And Oz stopped talking also.

Several times during my stay (I’m going back this afternoon) I went over to talk to Oz, he seemed quite interested in me, but had no interest in talking to me. He seemed sad to me, and I wondered again, about animal emotions.

What do these dogs and cats and this bird understand about what is happening to Ed? Are they sad? Anxious? Grieving?

It is almost an article of faith in the animal world now to believe that animals have emotions just like humans do, and they feel the same things we do. Many believe they mourn and grieve the way we do, and as we love and need our pets and animals more in our fragmented society, we also are coming to believe they are just like us.

I love animals, but in a different way. I love them because they are not like us.

They don’t kill one another for no reason (except for cats, maybe) they don’t envy each other, sue each other, tweet obnoxious and hateful things to each other. I love them because they are different, if they were just like us and have our precise emotions, I wouldn’t want to have them around me. Just watch the news.

I will be honest and say I don’t know what Ed’s dogs and other animals are feeling. It is clear they are disoriented and unsettled, they certainly have the intelligence and senses to know he is sick – he looks, smells, acts and sounds differently than the person they knew all of their lives.

I’ve  researched this subject quite a bit in my writing and talked to many scientists and biologists. Almost every one of them says pretty much the same thing, and that is also the way I feel about it:

Animals do have emotions, of course, but animals and humans feel emotions very differently.

“When we see a cat purring or a dog wagging it’s tail in joy, we shouldn’t expect that it’s feeling what we are feeling when we experience joy,” said Joseph LeDoux, a respected neuroscientist at New York University in a recent speech. “I’m not saying that other animals  don’t have feelings, just that they are different between different species of animals.”

And different, he added, from people.

Everyone knows what emotion is, I think, until they are asked to define it. There is little, if any consensus in the scientific or psychological world about what emotion is, and how it differs from instinct and other aspects of mind and behavior.

Rather than learn about what animal emotions are actually like, we tend to simply put our emotions into our head and claim we know them.

Bark Magazine  asked in a 2008 article whether animals have emotions. The subject stumps many  biologists and behaviorists, but it didn’t stump Bark:

“One of the hottest questions in the study of animal behavior is, “Do animals have emotions?” And the simple and correct answer is, “Of course they do.” Just look at them, listen to them and, if you dare, smell the odors that pour out when they interact with friends and foes. Look at their faces, tails, bodies and, most importantly, their eyes. What we see on the outside tells us a lot about what’s happening inside animals’ heads and hearts. Animal emotions aren’t all that mysterious.”

Curious. They are plenty mysterious to me.

Of course animals have emotions, but what are they and how do they differ from ours?

I have no  real concept of what animal emotions are like. When it comes to dogs, we believe what we need to believe. We get the dogs we need, we understand them in the way we need to understand them and make us feel better.

In the animal world, the rarest statement you will ever hear is “I don’t know.”

It seems everyone knows or thinks they know what animals are feeling and thinking, especially dogs and cats.

I do not know, and I am forever trying to piece it together.

People often cite the elephant for example to show that animals grieve the way humans do. But biologists caution that what we see as grieving can also be seen as instinct, the natural disorientation and obsessive behavior that occurs in almost any species when a herd animal or mother is separated from the herd or a child or when an animal in the herd dies.

On You Tube it looks like human mourning. But many neuroscientists believe the truth is more complex. They have emotions for sure, but what are they really like and how do we define them?

Animals have no idea what death is – we are the only species that does –  so while they might be deeply troubled or unmoored by the  death of another member of their species, they really can’t be mourning in the sense that we use the term, any more than  Dr. LeDoux’s cat can be feeling joy the way we do.

Is Oz grieving for Ed? Does he know that Ed is dying? His family says yes, of course he is. They are much affected by what they see as the dogs unquestioning loyalty to their human.

I am not sure I see the same thing they see.

The dogs are eating as usual, sleeping as usual, going about their daily routines, hunting for hedgehogs, rolling in much, begging for food.

Ed is lying immobile in his bed, and some of the dogs are staying with him, as Red does when I am sick and lying in bed.

Ed’s dogs are older, they love to lie around him and people in the family. When Carol sits at the kitchen table, they gather around her too, that’s where the food is.

Most of the time, they are lying around in the usual places. Often, there is one sleeping under Ed’s hospital bed. Everyone attributes this to unflagging devotion. But my dogs always like to sleep in or under any bed I am in, they are den animals, it’s a good place to sleep.

Does Red know when I am sick, or does he know that I am lying still in bed, and isn’t it in his nature to be close to me, especially when I am still? He lies next to me in my study all the time.

Often, I think, how loyal he is, he knows that I am sick. That makes me feel good.

What is the line between instinct and conscious emotion, especially in an animal without our language or understanding of sickness and death?

What I see is Oz, a bright creature of instinct and ritual, whose familiar routines have suddenly been shattered. Ed no longer comes and goes, he just stays lying in bed. Nothing about him is familiar to Oz, who seems to not know what to do.

Ed no longer calls out to Oz or answers him, as he always did. His voice is different, when he speaks at all, and it is not clear to me that Oz even recognizes him. When Ed’s son-in-law came into the room, Oz started chirping and dancing around, he knows  Tony well and often talks to him.

If I were asked to describe the Oz I see, I would first say he looks sad to me, and then think about it, and  say he is confused and disoriented. His familiar patterns and rituals have been upended, he would surely sense something is wrong and different, and is not certain how to behave.

When animals become confused, they are often still, alert, silent;  they wait to re-configure and re-learn their world, that is how they survive and adapt.

Yet when I looked at Oz yesterday, the first thing I thought was that he is sad. And I thought that was touching and beautiful that was. How easy it is to see animals in that way, it is my way of thinking. It is comforting to me.

I often think of Henry Beston’s beautiful writing about animals in Outermost House:  Animals he wrote, live by voices we shall never hear. “They are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

When we insist they are just like us, we trivialize and demean them, and lose our opportunity to understand them in a better and wiser way.

Seeing Oz only as sad is how anthropomorphizing works, of course.

They can’t talk and tell us what they feel and we can’t go inside of their heads. They don’t have our language, and we don’t have theirs,  so is simple and natural enough for us to project what we are thinking onto them.

It’s the story we need, the story we want.

Sadly for the animals, that doesn’t make it true.