Anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphism. Is the making of things not human human.

So yesterday I was taking hay from the hay barn to feed the cows. Under the hay barn thrives a healthy colony of groundhogs, swornest enemy of the Ohio farmer. (I dunno, I guess they eat the crops and dig pesky holes, the dastards.) Quite unsurprisingly, the bale I lifted did reveal the lair of a young woodchuck. He was trying to sleep. He noticed it suddenly got a lot colder and a bit brighter, but he was fully intent on staying asleep.
I leapt from the tractor to find my meekest of dogs. Darwin needs to learn to kill rodents. Here was the perfect opportunity, a young, practically sedated groundhog just praying to be mauled. I found Darwin on the porch of the house.
*A note about Darwin. He likes only three places in the world: my front porch, the backseat of my car, and my aunt's garage. He will run at a dead sprint to these places. He will follow anyone about 100 feet away from any of these places and will then freeze up, sit down, and refuse to go any further unless you promise to rub his tummy.
I thought that if I was excited enough for him he would come with me and learn to love killing the things I don't like. But no. Darwin wouldn't leave his precious porch. Nor will he chase a frisbee. Or a ball. He's very undoglike and much more resembles a doormat. Anyway he didn't get to kill his first beastie. I had to take a pipe and do the honors myself.
And for that I was mad at Darwin. Which he rightly completely didn't understand. But that didn't stop him from being all sorts of extra meek today. Which led me down a path I had pondered before:

Do dogs have emotions? Do they have emotions that could be reasonably compared with human emotions? Do we understand human emotions? Do people of other languages have a different understanding of what the possible emotions are? Are there possibly only a very small number of human emotions, (like maybe, say, three?) and we take too much time parsing emotional minutiae when they're just shades of these three emotions?

Back to the first question and the title of the post. It seems like this could be important for moral vegetarians. Do animals have emotions that we can understand? Are horse whisperers gobblygook? Should we have not killed all the Natives of the lands so they could show us?

suddenly i'm empty