What kind of animals, if any, are capable of loving?
Paul’s One Big Question for October 14, 2018
A blog dedicated to the joy and adventure of thinking (and often spiced with humor).
A blog dedicated to the joy and adventure of thinking (and often spiced with humor).
What kind of animals, if any, are capable of loving?
To feel love requires a developed brain. Vertebrates like lions and whales and invertebrates like octopus and squid seem to me like that are capable of love since they possess an intellect.
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Probably all.
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All of them, many with a far greater capacity than most humans
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Humans are animals 😛
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all of them. love is abstract. i feel love in the wind sometimes.
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My first answer is “social animals,” since love is a bonding tool. But cats aren’t social (dare I say they’re antisocial animals?), and they seem quite capable of love.
When I think about it, there are people who have made friends with all kinds of creatures. There’s a man who saved an alligator (primal brain) and made friends with him, and there’s a woman who made friends with a wingless honeybee (bug brain, haha. This is really cute, you should look it up).
You can say this is just a positive association attachment… or you can say it’s love… aren’t those kind of the same thing anyway? Where’s the line?
In short, I don’t think anything feels love exactly the way that a human feels love, but I think life is drawn to life, and anything can take pleasure in another’s company.
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We are here to love and to be loved. Except spiders. They’re assholes.
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