Do chimpanzees really enjoy eating bananas?

Perhaps you mistyped the URL for the "Ask Chimpanzees" website? Chimps do have brains very similar to ours, and it's likely that when they eat the food that they pursue, they are in states that are physiologically like ours when we eat what we enjoy. Plus their brain states play similar roles to our enjoyments: they lead the chimps to keep eating (and not to discard the food and look elsewhere), they reinforce the chimps' preference for the food item, and so on. I think most people familiar with chimps would say, obviously they enjoy bananas. Ah, you say, so they have pleasure analogues when they eat bananas, but do they literally experience pleasure? And how could we ever answer this? What is pleasure--what constitutes feeling pleasure? Is it a physiological sort of state that requires having brains like ours? Maybe so--maybe what we're confronted with when we notice our pleasure is in fact some physiological state, and it's this that we call "pleasure". Or is pleasure...

I have a 12 year old dog. She's no longer in great health, doesn't qualify as cute or attractive, and has rightfully been accused of stinking up any room she remains in for more than a few minutes. Still, she's my dog and I love her. Unfortunately, I am in a situation that requires that I move to a place that won't allow me to bring her. I can't find anyone to take her and am pretty sure that if I take her to the animal shelter she will spend a terrible 2 weeks there, not be adopted and then be euthanized. I've been thinking of taking her to a veterinarian who will put her to sleep with a painless injection while I'm there with her. I know this will break my heart, but is it the right thing to do?

You have what is known in the industry as a Hard Problem. You apparently have already weighed the interests and responsibilities that favor (or as you say, require) your moving without your dog against any prospects of your staying put or moving with her. Presumably also you have exhausted every avenue in searching for a new owner or a rescue operation that might take her. So let's assume that you really have no alternatives besides immediate euthanasia and a two-week shelter stay probably followed by euthanasia. As far as "in principle" considerations go, the latter course has the advantage that you would not be killing your pet while there is any way of not doing so, while the former has the benefit of avoiding preventable misery. But to my mind this is a "weighing" situation, where those aspects of your options need to be assessed in conjuntion with any number of other things: the odds (such as they are) that she would find a new home in those two weeks, the value of the life she'd...