Do our pets think about life?
Original article by S. Veigel 08/30/2016
Reviewed for relevancy 07/07/2020
Let’s pretend it’s a beautiful day, you somehow managed to put your smart phone down and you’re sitting on the patio having a cup of coffee. You’re on vacation and a few days into it you were actually able to not think about the office or the work piling up. There’s a pleasant breeze, bugs flit by, birds are singing in the trees and there’s greenery and blue skies all around. And, oh yes, you’re not forming sentences and muttering to yourself for a moment.
What are you thinking? Thinking about life?
The brain never stops which is why you “can’t get that song out of your head”. Moments like I describe above are in effect similar to a “dream state”. Yes you’re awake and conscious but your brain is left to recall experiences and feelings, merge them with the moment and reevaluate their importance. It’s busy taking in sights and sounds, the flavor and temperature of the coffee, the degree it feels enjoyable and physiological responses to it. It catalogs the lack of any personal threats, the sensation of the breeze and how that makes you feel; so-on and so-forth.
Every image you recall in that moment of quiet meditation is what we call “thinking about life”. Some of that thinking is also strategy. Visualizing a different approach, perhaps, or how you’re going to obtain what you need. Is that really different from animals just because they haven’t developed complex speech?
We take it for granted that when our pets are sleeping they will twitch, move like they’re running and even, in the case of dogs, let out cute quiet barks. They’re dreaming of course. Everyone knows that. But we may not realize that is the same sort of brain activity we experience when we are “thinking about life”. Yes we are complex beings who tend to layer our experiences and feelings with complex sentences. But if you replace complex sentences with other forms of communication like a variety of barks – that do have different meanings – you’re still talking about the same process.
When your pet is just sitting quietly watching and listening to the world we tend to reduce them down to the basics. “They’re just watching for something to respond to”, we might say, as if they are robots simply sensing an input to react. But if you incorporate everything you know about your pet’s behavior and personality into your thinking you know that is not true. You know they are sentient beings with very similar experiences, minus the complex speech.
I’ve worked with a number of rescued dogs. Yes they tend to “live in the moment”, like we do, but it also takes them time to fully trust a situation or get over a bad experience, like us. So they don’t just “live in the moment”. They remember, they feel, they’re brains are always active and yes, they do “think about life”.