This Time Magazine Article referred by the Barking blog brings up issues of animal emotion, communication and ethics.
"At Bowling Green State University in Kentucky, psychologist and distinguished professor Jack Panksepp [Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions] is similarly leery of using words like morality and ethics to
describe animal behavior. He is sure that rats and other animals do
experience joy, sadness, anger and fear--because the wiring of the
brain is set up to generate those feelings. (Actually, Panksepp
discovered a few years ago that rats chirp in laughter, albeit in
response to tickling, and in a register too high for the human ear to
detect.) Nobody has yet found the neurocircuits for ethics or morality,
however, so Panskepp is reluctant to comment about those qualities. But
he does accept that some animals have strict rules of behavior.
"Cockroaches probably don't have a sense of justice," says Panskepp.
But dogs and rats, which are social animals, clearly do."
Nevada researcher
Patricia Simonet of
Sierra Nevada College believes dogs make a specific noise during play that is
distinctive from other sounds made during passive or aggressive
confrontation. Simonet describes the sound as a breathy exhalation that
sounds to a human ear like a dog's regular panting. However, when the
frequency of the "laugh" was analysed, it was found to have a far
broader range of frequencies than a regular pant.
RBP demonstrates that in addition to joy, sadness, anger and fear, he feels boredom, frustration, humor, empathy, generosity and pride. Not to mention loyalty, unconditional love, and an affinity for napping and licking one's private parts. He chuckled over that, in the way he does. Just letting you know. 