Image Related To: Dogs in the Quran

Dogs - do they have thoughts and feelings? Few who have lived with dogs would deny that dogs have feelings.Sigmund Freud remarked on the fact that"dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations." H. Hediger, the director of the Zoological Gardens of Zurich, writes that the dog, basically a domesticated wolf, was the first creature with which humans formed intimate bonds that were intense on both sides. According to Hediger, no other animal stands in such intimate psychological union with us; only the dog seems capable of reading our thoughts and "reacting to our faintest changes of expression or mood." German dog trainers use the term Gefuhlsinn (a feeling for feelings) to talk about the fact that a dog can sense our moods. Voltaire, who knew about the emotions of dogs, used the example of a lost dog to refute the thesis of Descartes that dogs are merely machines, incapable of any kind of suffering. He responded to Descartes in his Dictionnaire philosophique with: Judge this dog who has lost his master, who has searched for him with mournful cries in every path, who comes home agitated, restless, who runs up and down the stairs, who goes from room to room, who at last finds his beloved master in his study, and shows him his joy by the tenderness of cries, by his leaps, by his caresses. Barbarians seize this dog who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship. They nail him to a table and dissect him alive to show you the mesenteric veins. You discover in him all the same organs of feeling that you possess. Answer me, mechanist, has nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal in order that he should not feel? Does he have nerves to be impassive?