Lee Charles Kelley is a dog trainer and has written articles
about empathy in dogs. He writes a blog in Psychologytoday.com called My
Puppy, My Self: How dogs make us human.
Lee and I talked about the nature of empathy in dogs from Lee's
perspective of working with dogs as a trainer and having been an actor.
We also reviewed the study, 'Empathic-like responding by domestic dogs
to distress in humans', by
Debbie Custance,
and the related articles by
Stanley Coren
and Kevin Behan. We talked about the
definitions of empathy and how dogs don't have the higher self-awareness
based empathy that human have.
(Video
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Dogs are the world's most adaptable animal not because of their mental
capacities, but because of their capacity to be in-synch emotionally
with one another and with us
Each small moment of emotional connection (i.e. “empathy”) between a dog
and its owner may very well encapsulate the overarching mechanisms of
evolution itself
