Do animals get married?
Do they fall in love and have friends? Do they laugh when they’re happy and cry when they’re sad? When you talk to your pets, can they understand you? Why can’t they speak to us? And do animals know what kind of animal they are? Alyssa Arre of the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale tackles these interesting questions.
This week we’re talking about how non-human animals think and feel and behave, and in what ways their thoughts and emotions are the same as humans or different from humans.
We’ll explore the idea of anthropomorphism, when humans assign human traits to non-human things, and talk about how that impacts scientific research into animal behavior. And we think about the concepts of love, friendship, partnership and communication.
Our guest for the show, Alyssa Arre, is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale University. She told us she’s passionate about scientific communication and, as a first-generation college student, she especially likes to explain her job and research to kids.
But Why is a show led by you, kids!
You ask the questions and we find the answers. It’s a big interesting world out there. On But Why, we tackle topics large and small, about nature, words, even the end of the world.
