One scientist wrote that  it was possible to view the online video of the dying Chimpanzee Mama’s farewell to the Biologist Jan Van Hooff and be changed forever.

I think I was. This book now only teaches us about the emotions of animals, it teaches us about ours. It sure touches some.

The video and Mama’s story begins Primatologist Frans De Waal’s new and landmark book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.

I believe the book will go a long way towards ending the debate about whether or not animals have emotions, and will soon be the talk of the animal world.

As Frans De Waal himself says in this remarkable work (I have a lot of reading to do this Spring and Summer), we may know they have emotions, but we have little understanding or certainty about  their feelings.

Everywhere I go in the animal world, people tell me what their dogs and cats and horses are thinking. de Waal doesn’t feed that beast.

We are constantly in touch with our feelings, he says, but the tricky part is that our emotions and our feelings are not the same.   We tend to conflate them, but feelings are internal subjective states that are known only to those who have them.

We communicate about our feelings by language. Emotions, on the other hand, are bodily and mental states – anger, sexual desire, affection – that drive behavior.

Anyone who claims to know what animals feel doesn’t have science on their side, he cautions. It remains conjecture.

But science has come a long way to prove that animals do have emotions, similar to ours in many ways, different in some others.

In this regard, animals appear to be closer to us to a degree that was unimaginable even a few years ago.

The  video of Mama’s last moments is extraordinary and deeply moving. Mama was a 59 year old matriarch who had formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. They had worked together for many years.

When Mama was dying, van Hooff went to visit her in her cage for a final hug. Their goodbyes were filmed and went viral. They show Mama happy to see him, and even struggling to comfort him. She welcomed him with a huge smile while reassuring him by patting his neck.

This story and many others like it form the core of de Waal’s argument, showing that humans are not the only species with the capacity for love, hate, guilt, joy, disgust and empathy.

That does not mean, he cautions again and again, that animals think like us, understand what we understand, and reason the way we reason.

What animals are feeling he reminds us more than once, is speculation.

The idea that animals have emotions that are much more complex and familiar than we thought fact, it is science.

And feelings are clearly less accessible to scientists than emotions, because animals don’t have a language we can understand or interpret.

“One day,” de Waal writes, “we may be able to measure the private experiences of other other species, but for the moment we have to content ourselves with what is visible on the outside. In this regard, we are beginning to make progress.

de Wall predicts that the science of animal emotions will be the next frontier in the study of animal behavior.

I haven’t finished the book,  I’ve only gotten through four or five chapters. It is perhaps the most exciting book I’ve read yet about animals and their consciousness and emotions, long a favorite subject of mine. And convincing. I know so much more about this subject than I did, and I have yet to read most of the book.

Mama’s Last Hug is impressive on many levels, but the rational tone is especially striking. We don’t have to generalize about animals just because we love them so much. And we shouldn’t.

How likely is it, de Waal asks, that the immense richness of nature fits on a single dimension.

Isn’t it to be expected, he wonders, that each animal has its own mental life, its own intelligence and emotions, adapted to its own senses and natural history. Why would the mental life of a fish and a bird (or dog) be the same?

Yet many people are quick to project our own emotions and feelings onto all animals, as if they were one and the same.

This is why I rely on scientists more than the mystics and amateurs who sometimes run amok on the Internet and publishing. The good scientists have to think about what they say, they can’t simply pander to the needs of loving, but often needy people. Scientists don’t tell people what they want to hear, they tell them what they believe is the truth.

Frans de Wall is one of the world’s premier primatologists and biologists.  He knows his stuff in a way very few people who talk about animals know their stuff.

He is rational, experienced, balanced and honest. I earned more about animal emotions from reading this few chapters than I have learned in the previous score of books I’ve read on the subject.

I’ll be writing about this remarkable book as I continue to read it. My head is already buzzing with things in the book that I want to write about and talk about. I’ll be talking about it for sure on the next broadcast of “Talking To Animals” on March 20. I won’t be doing the broadcast tomorrow, Wednesday the 12th.

Mama left a rich legacy, behind her. She is the perfect story to open us up to the subject, and to re-think what we know and believed.

I was changed by her story.