Emotional experiences are integral to the relationship between humans and animals. Strong bonds can form between people and their pets. We can also learn about our own emotions through our observations of our pets.

Pets are unlikely to experience emotions that involve moral judgments, but there are suggestions that they are able to evaluate the fairness of situations and their emotional reactions are tempered by such evaluations. For example, when one dog gets a highly valued treat when the other doesn’t, there is a basic sense of this not being ‘fair’.

There are numerous models of emotion in psychology and neuroscience. Some point to distinct emotions such as joy, anger and sadness. Others frame emotions as a complex array of factors that point to how emotions can change (from love and grief), and sometimes, emotions that appear to be opposites are highly related (crying for joy). Others have suggested that many discrete emotions in themselves involve a complex interplay of factors to evoke different experiential phenomena. An emotion like anger might elicit outrage and attack or it might incur seething resentment and withdrawal.

Obviously, non-human animals aren’t able to self-report their emotions, but they can enact behaviours and vocalizations that express what they’re feeling. They also engage in strategies to moderate their own emotions as well as monitor the emotions of those around them. All this to say, that human and non-human animals share sentience.