Part 3 of 3: Do Animals feel Empathy?
- Teju Vishwamitra
- Dec 14, 2025
- 3 min read
Welcome back! This is the last blog in the 3-part series in which we explore various types of emotional senses that wild animals especially may possess.
Do wild animals have empathy as we humans do?
Yes, indeed, wild animals also possess empathy. But the way empathy appears in wild animals needs a bit of explaining.
First, what is empathy? Experts define empathy in humans as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person by imagining what it's like to be in their situation. It involves sensing another's emotions and seeing the world from their perspective, which can lead to compassionate responses and stronger relationships.
Empathy is different from sympathy, which is feeling sorry for someone. Empathy is feeling with them. Empathy is crucial for building strong relationships, fostering compassion, and making moral decisions. Empathy can be an innate ability that develops throughout life, particularly in supportive environments. It can also be developed through practice.
Many wild animals exhibit empathy, showing they can understand and react to the emotions of others. They express it through actions like comforting distressed individuals, sharing resources, or engaging in consoling behaviors. Examples include chimpanzees comforting a victim after an attack, elephants mourning their dead, and rats helping a trapped companion even at a cost to themselves.
Here are other examples of how wild animals express empathy
• Consoling behavior: After witnessing an aggressive interaction, a bystander wild animal may comfort the victim through physical contact like embracing or gently touching them. Elephants do this.
• Concern for the distressed:o Chimpanzees have been seen building a nest for a wounded or dying comrade. Prairie voles will groom and nurture a mate that is showing signs of stress. Rats will investigate and approach a distressed fellow rat.
• Resource sharing: Some animals will act against their own immediate self-interest to help another. In one experiment, a rat freed another rat from a water tank and forgone a food treat that was to drop if the lever was pulled.
• Mourning and grave visits: Elephants show complex social behaviors around death, which are interpreted as empathy and grief. They have been observed visiting the sites of deceased elephants and even showing interest in the bones of other elephants.
• Cross-species empathy: In some rare cases, empathy has been observed across species. Elephants once surrounded a lost elderly woman to protect her from predators.
• Understanding pain: Studies show that animals like mice and rats can feel the pain of other individuals. When a mouse sees another mouse receive a painful foot shock, the observing mouse will also freeze, indicating an empathic response to the other's pain.As can be expected, animals, birds, and reptiles who live in groups such as packs, clans, pods, and such show more empathy than those who live by themselves. Elephants, lions on land, dolphins in the sea, and birds like ravens are prime examples.
Did You Know?
1. There are different types of empathy. For instance, cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another's perspective and emotions without necessarily sharing them while affective (or emotional) empathy is the ability to actually feel what another person is feeling. Compassionate empathy is an understanding of another's situation coupled with a desire to help. All wild animals exhibit these qualities albeit in different ways. Compassionate empathy is, perhaps, widely exhibited emotion in wild animals.
2. Few creatures capture the imagination like dolphins. They’re playful, clever, and endlessly social – and often, astonishingly kind. Divers and swimmers have long told stories of dolphins steering them to safety or forming protective circles when danger lurks. Scientists have also seen dolphins helping injured pod members stay afloat, supporting them for hours or even days. And dolphins aren’t alone in their protective nature. Humpback whales have also been seen shielding both seals and dolphins from harm.
High above the ground, kindness still finds its way. Birds may be free-spirited and independent, yet many show surprising generosity. A 2019 study found that African grey parrots willingly shared tokens with partners so they could trade them for treats, even when they gained nothing in return. When the setup changed and the partner could no longer exchange the tokens, the parrots stopped sharing, suggesting they understood when help was actually needed. However, not all feathered friends acted in this way. Blue-headed macaws in the same experiment showed little interest in helping their peers.
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