In her forthcoming book Animal Madness, Laurel Braitman, a science historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that animals experience emotions in ways that are similar to our own. Her conclusions will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen a maddened tiger pacing its cage in a zoo, or a chihuahua miserably protruding from a celebrity handbag. The curious thing is that Homo sapiens seems to treat its fellow animals in peculiarly unimaginative and selfish ways, not because they are different from us, but because we feel a kind of baffled kinship with them.