Do you remember the term 'lab rat'?

Would rats have been able to go through psychological experiments (which were supposed to be similar to human experiments) if they did not have any emotions? Rats too get addicted, just like humans, due to the reward system (which is controlled by dopamine) and they are under the class mammalia.


Dogs and cats also belong to the class mammalia. So yes, basically, animals feel emotions too. That's considering we're talking about commonly spotted animals like tigers and lions and of course dogs and cats.

If you're still with me, here's the more scientific jargon.

1) Basically, people used to have a lot of assumptions (mostly because of religious texts and common, ignorant sayings and beliefs) back then. An example of that is Carolus Linnaeus' own "system of classification," He wrote two books in Latin describing a very large amount of both plant and animal species, but failed to understand there are microscopic as well as macroscopic organisms which do not fall under his two-kingdom classification. Basically, people at that time thought all organisms are either plants or animals, similar to ancient Greeks.


2) Fast forward to 1960's and we have a brilliant taxonomist named R.H Whittaker create the currently-accepted Five Kingdom Classification system. Now due to insight, we know that there are many organisms which aren't strictly plants or animals, but includes every form of life (excepting viruses and viroids) ranging from sponges to the complicated human beings. We studied life forms and found out that starting from arachaebacteria (the most primitive form of prokaryotic life) to us Homo sapiens sapiens, there are deviations in cellular structure and thus complexity. Whittaker considered phylogenetic relationship while creating the five kingdom system of classification.

3) All animals under the phylum chordata have a backbone. Which means a pretty complicated nervous system (as opposed to no nervous system at all) Dogs and cats belong to the class Mammalia and Mammalia is supposed to be the most genetically evolved class. So mammals have their own brain, their own nerves, their own spinal cords. In fact, they even nurture their young ones. In scientific language, female breasts of humans are said to be mammillary glands.

4) Dogs and cats are pretty evolved in a nutshell. So yes, they have emotions. I'd hate to see one being beaten to death by a sadistic person. All mammals (all our pets and common, non-vector animals around us, like horses and rats) are pretty evolved, are capable of feeling love and deserve to be loved.