"The snake was the most cunning animal that the Lord God had made." This line from GenesisOrigin or beginning. The book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and opens with one of the most famous first sentences of any literary work: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." describes a talking serpentSnake. who convinces Adam and Eve, living together in total bliss in the Garden of EdenThe biblical paradise in which the first man and woman lived, according to several religions. , to eat forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thereby casting them out into lives of suffering and guilt.

But the serpent in the Garden of Eden is not the only compelling animal character that we have in our collective rosterA list or register of people.. Aesop's fables feature deceptiveMisleading. foxes, cocky hares and precociousWhen a child shows mental development or maturity at an unusually young age. crows. Winnie-the-Pooh's friend Eeyore is a sardonicMocking. and depressive donkey. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and Lord of the Rings are just a few of the compelling stories featuring talking and feeling animals.

We have always read human emotions in the animals we see around us. We see dogs as sunny, loving, loyal and extroverted. We see cats as self-serving, conceitedToo vain or proud. , temperamentalOften changing your mind or mood. and snobby. Owls are wise. Elephants never forget. Ants are hard-working.

And they can be funny, too. We look at cat videos when we are feeling down. We find pictures of dogs we think are smiling. And, as shown in this year's Comedy Pet Photography Competition, we capture our pets' hilarious moments to feel closer to them and include them in our humour.

Our desire to make animals feel human transcends real life. People take to apps and video games to experience life through the eyes of an animal. Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario Kart and Animal Crossing all invite us to compete with or socialise with other online animals, whilst playing as one ourselves.

In fact, demand is so high that one retro pet website is making a huge comeback this week. Neopets, an online game originally launched in 1999, will make a $4m (£3.1m) return to screens, along with 50 other classic games that had been lost to modernity.

On Neopets, users adopt a series of virtual animals and have to care for them when they grow hungry or ill. Launched in 1999, it had logged one trillion views by 2011. And though it was originally marketed at children, the new version will target adult former users who want to return to check on their old virtual pets.

In some ways, the concept may strike you as strange. Do enough people really have so much emotional attachment to animals that do not even exist?

Some go even further, questioning whether we are too attached even to our real-life animals. We like to think of them as extensions of ourselves, who love us just as much as we love them. But experts say it is dangerous to attribute human emotions to animal minds.

This is called anthropomorphismActing like objects or animals have human qualities. , and many scientists believe it stops us from acquiring and retaining factual information about real biological processes. It can also dampen our instincts - if we project our own sensibilitiesFeelings or the ability to respond to emotions. onto a wild animal, it may inhibitStop. our self-preservation.

But others point out that a lot of the science does provide evidence that animals experience feelings similar to ours. We know that chimpanzees can hold grudges, monkeys eat less in order to give food to the other members of their clans, and elephants have rituals for grieving. And humanising animals, they say, is a lot better than mistreating them.

Yes: We humanise animals to make us feel less alone in the universe. In reality, our specific emotions are built on social conditioning, language and culture - none of which are the same for animals.

No: It does no real harm to think of our pets as having real and rich emotions, especially as it may encourage us to treat them better and more sensitively. Nobody is going to approach a lion or a tiger because it looks sad.

Or... The consensus that scientists have reached is that humans experience the most extreme form of emotions, but that it appears that other animals feel them on some level too. But it all depends on the species.