ABSTRACT
Children generally believe that animals feel emotions such as fear, hate, and love, hope that nice things will happen, fear that other events may hurt them, and try to get what they want and avoid discomfort or injury. But 20th-century science, especially behavioristic psychology, has persuasively disparaged such notions as naive and misguided. Nonverbal signals of disapproval often convey to students an effective message that it is unscientific to wonder what animals may think or feel. Until very recently the prevailing viewpoint of scientists concerned with animal behavior could be summarized as follows: (a) Nonhuman animals very seldom if ever experience conscious, subjective thoughts; (b) if conscious thinking does rarely occur, it is inaccessible to scientific investigation because no statements about such private experiences can be objectively verified or falsified by independent observers; (c) any such thoughts of nonhuman animals are trivial, epiphenomenal side-effects that have no influence on behavior.
