Abstract
Recently, studies in the United States and European countries have shown that the degree of attachment is associated with the attribution of emotions to companion animals. These studies imply that investigating the degree of attachment to companion animals is a good way for researchers to explore animal emotions and then improve animal welfare. Although a promising area of study, in Japan, no empirical studies have examined the correlation between the degree of attachment and the attribution of emotions to companion animals. In this research, we aimed to assess companion animal owners’ attribution of six primary (anger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear and surprise) and four secondary (shame, jealousy, disappointment and compassion) emotions to their dogs and cats, as well as how the degree of attachment related to such attribution of emotions from a Japanese cultural perspective. The “Pet Bonding Scale” (PBS), which is used to determine the level of bonding between humans and animals, was introduced to measure respondents’ degree of attachment to their companion animals. The results of a questionnaire (N = 546) distributed throughout Japan showed that respondents attributed a wide range of emotions to their animals. Companion animals’ primary emotions, compared to secondary emotions, were more commonly attributed by their owners. The attribution of compassion and jealousy was reported at a high level (73.1% and 56.2%, respectively), which was surprising as compassion and jealousy are generally defined as secondary emotions. All participants were highly attached to their companion animals, and this attachment was positively associated with the attribution of emotions (9/10) to companion animals (all p < 0.05). This study is one of the first to investigate animal emotions by analyzing the bonding between companion animals and owners in Japan, and it can therefore provide knowledge to increase Japanese people’s awareness of animal welfare.
Highlights
Human attribution of companion animal emotions is commonly used in an attempt to improve animal welfare [1,2,3]
We compared our data from the two survey methods in the present study, and the results showed no significant difference in the final results except that the participants from the paper-based questionnaire (M = 77.53) had slightly higher Pet Bonding Scale” (PBS) scores than participants from the online questionnaire (M = 73.57, p = 0.01)
Our findings indicate that companion animal owners more commonly attributed primary emotions than secondary emotions to their animals
Summary
Human attribution of companion animal emotions is commonly used in an attempt to improve animal welfare [1,2,3]. An important ethical issue in animal welfare appears precisely due to the opinions held by many people that most animals have emotional experiences. How the attachment relates to the attribution of emotions to companion animals animals experience disappointment and fear due to an inability to perform their natural behavior patterns or, more directly, due to animal cruelty, this has moral importance and, in turn, may have a major influence on animal welfare [4, 5]. A direct attempt to explore animal emotions is to attribute their emotions from human perspectives. A growing number of studies have revealed that primary emotions are experienced by both humans and animals [13, 14], while secondary emotions are unique to mature humans and perhaps other primates, at least as presently understood [15, 16]
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