Animals have emotions too

When we talk about crocodile tears, dogged determination or laughing like a hyena we might not be that far off the mark, according to a visiting US biologist who says animals have emotions just like us.

Marc Bekoff, professor of biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is in Australia to give a series of public talks on the emotional lives of animals.

Dr Bekoff says scientists have moved on from the presumption that the way animals act is the result of programmed behaviour.

"It's not a question of if they have emotions but why they have evolved," he says. MORE>>