Happiness is hard enough to define in people, let alone in an animals. You can’t just ask them how they are feeling. Instead, we tend to qualify happiness in animals as a lack of chronic stress. Stress, unlike happiness, is very easy to measure. You can look for decreases in overall health in just about any kind of creature. You can keep an eye out for neurotic behaviors, and measurements of hormone levels of cortisol, norepinephrine, adrenaline and other "stress" hormones provide a quantified means of measuring stress. Though lack of stress doesn’t guarantee "happiness", it’s the closest we can get.
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