Which came first; instincts or feelings?

So I was wondering... and my mind was wandering, when we talk about human rights, we often attach feelings to it. Sort of, "Oh, look at the poor child, the poor mother, the poor family, the poor this, the poor that..." And then we have this thing called empathy where we feel the feelings of the other person. Most of us have the ability to understand the suffering of another person even if we haven't been down that road before. We also know that each human being has a right. A right to live, to breath, and to be on this earth.

Many people argue that animals have the same rights. Animal rights. But then this got me thinking; if human rights evolved from empathy which evolved from feeling something, how can animal rights have evolved?


We have no way of knowing whether or not animals have empathy. We can only know if we get inside the minds of animals. So how can there be animal rights? I'm not against animal rights but just that I think it needs more ground to prove that animals have as much right to be on this earth as we do. They are in no way inferior to us because they "seemingly" don't have feelings.

What do animals have then? Do they have feelings at all? Certainly they COULD but we don't know that. All we see are the scientific aspects of animals: instincts. Instincts, I believe, can be explained scientifically. Even human instincts.

But what about feelings? What are those? And if animal rights need to be proven with the existence of feelings, how do we find that? Also, which came first in evolution anyway; instincts or feelings?

To think about evolution, we imagine these apes that eventually become humans and then animals that we ate and stuff. How can we be one-hundred percent sure that animals didn't have feelings before we even buried the first dead body out of sympathy?

I mean, sometimes I look at a sad puppy and it really does look sad. Or sometimes I see another animal going to comfort a younger one of its kind. That's empathy or instinct? Is it instincts when protecting the young or is it feelings?

I am getting so confused.

Do you suppose feelings are all there is and instincts don't exist in mammals? I mean, there are certainly programmed somethings that make us make instant decisions like putting out our hands to catch ourselves when we trip and fall to the ground. That unconscious decision making that we do in a matter of a second. Perhaps animals do that, too. And this isn't instinct but feeling...

Ugh, what are feelings anyway?

Besides, if human rights come from humans feeling sorry for other humans, how do we know animals don't have the same thing? Maybe they have their own rights. But they call it something else because they have a different language that we can NEVER understand.

Who are we to think animals are inferior? I'm positive the animals think the same way as us. Maybe they haven't got the big brains but they have something. It's possible they think we live only on instincts and have no empathy. Maybe that's why they kill some of us sometimes. When they can get passed the big brains, that is.

I wonder if we will ever truly understand animals? Perhaps they do feel emotions. Maybe even more than we do. But since we don't, we have no way of discovering them or naming them.

Ah, the mystery of the faint line between science and psychology.