According to the American Physician Association, around 20 percent of people in the United States report mild cases of the winter blues, while 40 percent still feel impacted in some way by winter weather. After wondering whether or not other animals also experience lethargy during the chilly season, I did some research.

Understanding the winter blues and why we get them is essential to understanding whether animals experience them in the same way that we do. Humans feel this nearly inexplicable sadness because of the lack of natural light we’re exposed to, and of course the natural increased stress that comes with unpleasant winter weather. Something else to keep in mind is that in most cases of seasonal depression, hormones such as dopamine, cortisol, and serotonin are lacking in production. In contrast, melatonin picks up because of the darker days, making us sleepier.

For an animal to experience something like this, it would need a brain capable of receiving hormone messages and experiencing complex emotion, just like ours. With this logic, we can deduce that animals like the jellyfish and coral (yes, coral is an animal) do not feel the winter blues. This is simply due to the fact that these animals do not have complex enough brains for any emotion at all. This logic applies with any animal that you can think of that doesn’t have the mental capacity for feelings, though there aren’t really many. It’s interesting to learn more about these animals in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. 

Now, we saw that a moderate amount of animals don’t feel any winter sadness because of their lack of emotional depth. It is true that most organisms do, however, experience feelings on some level. One animal fully proven to experience emotion is none other than man’s best friend, the dog! In an article on PETMD, Sandra C. Mitchell writes about seasonal depression in canines. She explains that dogs actually can experience depression, but not in the way that we do. Dogs only feel something like depression after a major, easily identifiable, and deeply traumatic event. That type of experience really doesn’t go hand-in-hand with seasonal depression from a human perspective. Another article written by Wailani Sung says essentially the same thing about cats as the dog article mentioned. These two animals are extremely domesticated and are often the creatures we (willingly) spend the most time around. Seeing that even our pets don’t feel sadness due to the winter shows us that other animals likely won’t either.

Overall, the answer is no. It is not proven that other animals also get the winter blues. All of this however, really does pose a big question about human mental health: most animals feel stress and sadness, both of which are complex and deep emotions. But why is it that human beings face so many conditions that we don’t see many fellow intelligent animals dealing with? Is it simply a result of the many years of research we’ve done on ourselves, or is it a curse of our extremely social lifestyle? There’s really nothing we can do except try to understand what happens behind the eyes of our dear animal friends.