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Anonymous
I personally don't think it's a case of how much an animal has emotion or capacity to control it, but rather the animal's intelligence. I'd say animals feel emotions as strongly as humans do, and probably with varying degrees of complexity.
For example, if you take baby chicks away from the mother hen, the mother hen will mope for about a week or so. However, if you take away all but one, the mother hen will happily cluck about. Does that mean that the mother hen only feels sadness when all the chicks are gone? No, it just means chickens can't count.
A lot of what we call "emotion" is just expressing certain social cues. For example, a girl suffering a breakup will cry a lot. A duck that lost its mate can't cry in the human sense. Most likely, the duck shows other signs of grieving that could be seen by other ducks. On the other hand, would a tiger show signs of grief? Probably not, since tigers are solitary creatures and don't need to express grief to other tigers. I have to emphasise that this doesn't mean we should treat animals like they're humans: they can't socially interact like a human with the same cues and signals. If you try to comfort a puppy by patting and cooing at it during a thunderstorm, the puppy won't realise the owner's trying to comfort it: it will think it's being praised for showing fear of the thunderstorm.
Which comes to the final issue: does OP pic show a need for the panda to be comforted in general, and is the need satisfied by hugs, a human interaction used to provide comfort? It's probably a panda used to human contact. The panda might not think of the hug as comfortable, or even consoling, but probably knows enough that it's something you do to gain praise or make humans happy.
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