Are our Pets Human ?

Anthropomorphism means attributing to animals th characteristics of humans.In the 1940's Hieder and Simmel carried out an experiment where a cartoon was made with two small circles and a larger dark triangle where the triangle was shown to move towards the circles. When it was shown to people they attributed aggression to the triangle and saw it as 'bullying' the circles. this shows just how ready we are to attribute human feelings to objects.

In the case of our pets it is even more so. Our pets almost become fully human, dogs frequently have human names and develop 'human' personalities and relate to us as people do.We are,therefore, likely to attribute to our pets the same feelings and emotions as ourselves. this is my daughter Emma with our elderly dog Lucy who is a senior member of the family - but she wouldn't like me to tell you her age...