What was it Teddy Roosevelt called mountain lions, "cowardly?" Cougars do avoid humans, but identifying that behavior as an emotion--a human kind of emotion--might be a mistake.
Science cannot say definitively that animals feel emotions the way we do. For that matter, there's still plenty of debate over whether emotions are strictly psychological or more complicated actions within our nervous systems.
New tools are helping to fill in the large gaps in the picture, and neuroscientist David Anderson explains the workings of those tools in his book The Nature of the Beast: How Emotions Guide Us.
We get the goods in an interview with the author.