But it wasn't just the imitation that made Jack famous; it was also that she seemed to relish the suffering of a man she purportedly hated. In the video, Jack's owner even claimed that she had a favorite cough.
When a cat seems a little too happy watching a human stub their toe, or a horse seems to grin at a person stepping in poop, their owners might also interpret their behavior as schadenfreude.
A complex emotion
Animals probably do not experience schadenfreude, according to researchers who study animal behavior and intelligence. However, the question hasn't received much attention in formal research. That's partly due to limitations of animal behavior methodology, but also because the question is bound up with how we define and communicate emotion in the first place.
Silver explained that researchers can look at behavior, neurological signals or hormonal activity to make an educated guess about what an animal might be feeling. A dog that has its ears back and tail tucked, for instance, is probably experiencing a negative emotion, while one wagging its tail is feeling a positive one.
Animal behavior researchers try to avoid anthropomorphizing animals (attributing human qualities to them) without evidence. When a cat or dog comforts a grieving human, for example, it could just be that the behavior was previously reinforced by rewarding the animal with treats or pets, rather than a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Similarly, Jack the parrot could have been mimicking coughs just for attention.
When cats make trouble for their owners, they may not be experiencing schadenfreude but rather just want attention. (Image credit: Zhenny-zhenny via Shutterstock)"Dogs may have some ability to attribute mental states like emotions, thoughts, beliefs, intentions to other individuals, but this really only occurs in very select contexts and in really kind of a rudimentary way," Silver said. Because of this, "it's exceedingly unlikely that dogs would be able to experience schadenfreude in the way that we as humans do."
"There's a difference between the affect, the emotional behavior, and then the recognition of the emotional behavior in oneself," Stahlman said. If nonhuman animals were to have this capability, he suspected it would probably be found in highly social great apes, like chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus). Schadenfreude, in particular, would require animals to live in close social groups, since it requires knowledge of the individual experiencing the harm and whether it's deserved.
"The kind of Machiavellian stuff is a very human thing," he said.
Related mysteriesNevertheless, “there is a lot of data pointing in the direction that animals do have really deep capacities for emotional intelligence,” said Kaeli Swift, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Washington and author of the Corvid Research blog.
In the study of animal emotions, she said "we have barely started to scratch the surface."
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