Animals and us: Getting inside their heads

04 June 2005

Simon Blackburn

IT IS almost impossible to look into the eyes of a dog without

wondering what it is thinking. And if you take it for a walk, there will
be more to wonder at: what the bizarre things it sniffs actually smell
like, or how the dog hears or sees the world.

But perhaps you can never know. Our sense of being shut out of the
animal's mind was brilliantly expressed by the philosopher Thomas
Nagel, in his famous 1974 essay "What is it like to be a bat?" Nagel
was a pessimist; he believed that a kind of cognitive curtain lay
between our minds and animal minds. Furthermore, he thought
increasing scientific knowledge of the neurophysiology or behavioural
repertoire of bats, or dogs, would not raise that curtain but leave us
wondering what it was that the neurophysiology gave rise to, or what
thoughts or sensations the behaviour expressed. Other pessimists
have speculated that we are not evolutionarily adapted to penetrate
the minds of other species: it is knowledge reserved for God and
angels, and, in their own case, dogs and bats.

The trouble is that such ignorance leaves us not knowing how to treat
animals either. If their minds are empty, so they perceive nothing,
know nothing and feel nothing, then it doesn't matter very much how
we treat them. But if their minds are not empty, then we ought to
adjust our behaviour around the actual way they think, feel and
suffer. At the furthest limit, if some of them have minds very like ours,
then elementary decency requires that we treat them very much like
one of us, and the fact that we do not becomes a scandal.

We tend to interpret animal life by using our imaginations, and that

way lies the fantasy of anthropomorphism. How would you like it if
you were hunted, imprisoned, experimented upon, battery-farmed or
led to an abattoir? This is the thought that has empathetic children
and adults weeping when Bambi loses its mother, and it is the
question, often aggressively posed and repeated, that enlists and
inflames animal rights activists.

But if there is no reason for attributing minds substantially like ours to

animals, the question may be as inappropriate as trying to deter the
woodcutter by asking how he would like to be sawn in half.
Anthropomorphism can even be dangerous, as optimists find when
their faithful, grateful, friendly snakes, tigers or alligators punish their
hubris by trying to attack them.

Neurophysiology does help. But neurophysiological information needs

interpretation, and there's the rub. If we use it to find out about an
aspect of consciousness in another species, we need to be confident

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that the neurophysiological mechanism that subserves a conscious
process in us does the same in the other species. Similarly, to deny a
conscious process, we need equal confidence that other
neurophysiological mechanisms might not be subserving it.

Neither inference is beyond question, for as the philosopher Ludwig

Wittgenstein asked in a similar context: how can we generalise the
one case so irresponsibly? Here the case is the human one, and
generalising to the rest of the animal world seems at best uncertain.

Animal worlds

Unbridled anthropomorphism is wrong, but so, surely, is total

scepticism. Perhaps we can best understand animal consciousness,
and also that of other people and even ourselves, not by thinking in
terms of a hidden, glassy, theatre somewhere inside the head, but by
looking at the animal's world: its responses, its activities, what is
salient to it and what has no effect.

After all, it is not introspection that tells us who or what we are, but
the ability to locate ourselves properly in our own Lebenswelt, or lived
world. This is the import of Jean-Paul Sartre's dictum that
consciousness is empty. It is not, as behaviourism would have it, that
consciousness does not exist, but neither is it the kind of "thing" we
naively think it to be.

To know what it is like to be a bat, then, is to know enough about

echolocation and other features of bat life to build up a convincing
picture of what perceptions, discriminations and "saliences" this way
of life would involve, and what not. This approach may make some
thinkers nervous, for it suggests that the observant shepherd knows
more of what it is like to be a sheepdog than the laboratory scientist
does.

However, that may be right, and it may do something to reconcile us

to the feeling Nagel voiced, that we cannot imagine an animal's life
"from the inside". For the inability to imagine something does not
imply ignorance. Imagination is just the wrong instrument to bring to
bear.

Animal perception has been extensively studied, but other functions

of consciousness remain elusive. These include "higher-order
thought", such as awareness of one's own states, self-consciousness
in general, and especially the capacity to plan, remember the past,
and to feel more than the simplest emotions. The observant
ploughman and poet Robert Burns said of the mouse whose nest he
disturbed that, despite the disruption, it was blessed compared to
him, since "the present only toucheth thee".

Perhaps he was right, and in so far as he was, this should curb our
sentimentality: Bambi's situation is bad, but not as bad as if it had a
rich store of memories and a head full of new fears, or dashed hopes

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and expectations. There can only be so much distress in animals
whose lives are confined to a succession of present-tense snapshots
of the world. But that is not much of an excuse, given that some
animals can both remember and anticipate, and in any event, sheer
pain seems bad enough without either. Burns remains compassionate,
if not sentimental: we would do well to follow him, both for the sake of
animals and of ourselves.

Animals and us: It's a dog's life

From New Scientist, 04 June 2005 , by Ian Duncan (Ian Duncan is

professor of applied ethology and chair of animal welfare at the
department of animal and poultry science, University of Guelph,
Ontario, Canada)

A PAINTING tells a thousand tales. Pieter Bruegel's hunting dogs, for

example, look as dejected as their owners in his painting Hunters in
the Snow. But it tells us something really important: that from the
Renaissance on, art and literature seem to have been way ahead of
science in granting animals - or at any rate, mammals - some
acceptance of sentience. The secular intellectual world of Leonardo da
Vinci, Michel de Montaigne, Erasmus, Shakespeare and Francis Bacon
took animal sentience for granted.

Philosophers were the big nay-sayers. There is a clear line of

argument for non-sentience running from Aristotle to St Thomas
Aquinas and René Descartes to Immanuel Kant. They tended to draw
a thick dividing line between non-human animals and humans,
allowing the latter to use the former for whatever purpose they liked.
Descartes is usually singled out for special blame for introducing the
idea of animals as "automata".

The Enlightenment brought fresh philosophical challenges over the

question of animal sentience. Scottish philosopher David Hume, in
particular, wrote: "Is it not experience, which renders a dog
apprehensive of pain, when you menace him or lift up the whip to
beat him?" And in the wake of the studies of Charles Darwin less than
a century later, feelings came to be viewed as "adaptations" to
pressures of natural selection.

About 120 years ago, then, scientists and non-scientists alike began
to accept some degree of animal sentience. But through much of the
20th century this acceptance seems to have gone into reverse,

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largely because of behaviourism, which eschewed any study of animal
feelings.

One of the leading exponents of this theory, B. F. Skinner, laid it out

clearly as late as 1975: "We seem to have a kind of inside information
about our behaviour, we have feelings about it. And what a diversion
they have proved to be. Feelings have proved to be one of the most
fascinating attractions along the path of dalliance." In other words,
studying feelings was meaningless. Skinner and others with similar
viewpoints exerted a powerful influence on the way that European
ethologists were thinking at that time.

The pattern was eventually broken by Donald Griffin with his key
paper presented at the International Ethology Conference in Parma,
Italy, in 1975, and followed by his book, The Question of Animal
Awareness (Rockefeller, 1976), in which he made a powerful case for
animal feelings.

But if animals had feelings, where did that leave animal welfare?
Around the early 1980s, Marian Stamp Dawkins and I concluded that
it was impossible to give animal welfare a precise scientific definition.
The best we could manage was a broad, working description, much of
which centred on feelings.

There is now a gradual acceptance that feelings govern welfare, and

therefore feelings should be measured when assessing welfare. So
animal welfare science has been largely concerned with developing
methods by which we can "ask" animals what they feel about the
conditions under which we keep them and the procedures we subject
them to.

The biggest obvious problem with feelings is that they are subjective,
and therefore not available for direct investigation. But we don't need
to know exactly what animals are feeling: an indication of how
positive or negative a feeling is is a good start. We can investigate
this by using indirect methods, such as by looking at preference
testing, motivational testing and understanding animal
communication.

Preference testing was pioneered by Stamp Dawkins and Barry

Hughes, both of whom were working with poultry. In their tests
animals were given a choice over certain aspects of their
environment, and it was assumed by the researchers that they would
choose in the best interests of their own welfare. There have now
been many studies of preference strength, and they tell us a lot about
fear, for example, by seeing how far an animal will work to avoid it.

In one experiment a hen had to learn to avoid a scary inflatable

balloon in its box. It was shown a warning light 20 seconds before the
balloon was inflated, so the hen would have time to move. Some of
the hens took a long time to learn how to avoid the balloon - but they
all got there in the end. Interestingly, some of the hens gave alarm
calls during the experiment, but the number of alarm calls decreased

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as the birds learned what was happening and became less afraid.

These techniques are now coming of age - which is good news for
scientists and animals alike. But there are three areas where we will
have to concentrate our future efforts. The first is understanding the
role that pleasure plays in welfare; the second is deciding just where
on the phylogenetic scale sentience begins; and the third is working
out where in development sentience begins. Watch this space!

Animals and us: Suspicious minds

From New Scientist, 04 June 2005 by Frans de Waal

DO YOU think of animals and humans as "them" and "us"? Do you

believe humans are unique in the animal kingdom? If so, you are
probably in "anthropodenial", a word I coined to describe blindness to
the human-like characteristics of other animals and to our own
animal-like characteristics. Or perhaps you attribute emotions to
animals they may not have, seeing guilt in dogs and pride in horses. I
do not say these emotions are impossible, but such interpretations
often rest on anthropomorphism, the projection of human feelings
onto animals.

For years, scientists considered anthropomorphism deeply suspect

while taking anthropodenial for granted. In fact, anthropomorphism is
a problem largely because of our tendency to set ourselves apart.
Critics of anthropomorphism tell us that animals are not people, which
is true, but forget that people are animals. An easy way to explain this
is through a story about Georgia, a chimpanzee.

Georgia lives at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in

Atlanta, Georgia. When she sees visitors approaching, she hurries to
the tap to collect a mouthful of water. She then mingles with the
other chimps, and not even the best observer will spot anything
unusual. Georgia can wait for minutes with closed lips until the
visitors come near, then there are shrieks and laughs as she sprays
them.

Once, having seen Georgia go to the tap and sneak up on me, I

looked her in the eyes, pointed at her, and warned in Dutch: "I have
seen you!" Straight away she moved off. She dropped some of the
water and swallowed the rest. Of course, I am not claiming she
understands Dutch, but she did sense I understood her game, and
that I was no easy target.

Those of us who work with these creatures find ourselves in a curious

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situation: we cannot help but interpret their actions in human terms,
which automatically provokes the wrath of philosophers and
scientists, many of whom work with domestic rats, or pigeons, or no
animals at all.

The critics' message is something like this: "Georgia has no plan;

Georgia does not know that she is tricking people; Georgia just learns
things faster than a rat." Instead of seeking the origin of her actions
within her, and attributing intention to her, they seek the origin in the
environment and the way it shapes behaviour. Georgia had merely
found that such behaviour offered her the irresistible reward of
annoying and surprising humans.

But why let her off? If a human acted this way, they would be held
accountable, so why should an animal that resembles us so closely be
considered a passive instrument of stimulus-response contingencies?

We face a choice not just between anthropomorphism and

anthropodenial, but between two aspects of that cherished scientific
concept: parsimony. Cognitive parsimony tells us not to explain things
in terms of higher mental capacities if we can explain them with
"lower" ones. Thus you end up favouring a simple explanation, such
as a conditioned response, over a more complex one, such as
deception.

Evolutionary parsimony, on the other hand, considers shared

phylogeny: it argues that if closely related species act the same then
the underlying mental processes are probably the same. The
alternative would be to assume the evolution of divergent processes
that produce similar behaviour - a wildly uneconomic assumption for
organisms with only a few million years of separate evolution. If we do
not propose different causes for the same behaviour in, say, dogs and
wolves, why should we do so for humans and chimpanzees, which are
genetically as close, or closer?

In short, we face a dilemma. We are supposed to choose low-level

over high-level cognitive explanations, but that means creating a
double standard according to which shared human and ape behaviour
is explained differently.

Perhaps we need new questions. Should we risk underestimating an

animal's mental life? Or should we risk overestimating it? There is a
symmetry between anthropomorphism and anthropodenial, and since
each has its strengths and weaknesses, there is no simple answer.
From an evolutionary perspective, however, it is only fair to ask
whether anthropodenial is beginning to look suspect. It seems to me
that a complex and familiar inner life is the most parsimonious
explanation of Georgia's mischief.

Animals and us: Practical passions

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NewScientist.com 04 June 2005 by Alison George

Temple Grandin read psychology, then switched to animal

science. She is now associate professor of animal science at
Colorado State University. Grandin researches cattle
handling, restraint and welfare, and has designed handling
systems that spare millions of cattle distress in US
slaughterhouses. Her two books about autism are Thinking in
Pictures (1996) and Animals in Translation (2005)

Why would being autistic help someone work with animals?

Autistic people can think the way that animals think. Autism is a way
station on the road that links humans to other animals. I can tell
people why animals do the things they do. I am against
anthropomorphising animals, but you have to think: if I was a cow,
how would I react? I find that really easy to figure out. I am paid to
see all the stuff that normal people cannot see.

What sort of stuff is that?

In order to understand animals, you need to get away from language.

Animals don't think in language. As an autistic person, I don't think in
language either. I'm a visual thinker. My mind works like Google for
images. That has to be closer to how an animal's mind works - there is
no other way that animals could possibly think. The problem with
people is that they are too cerebral. An autistic person's brain works
more like a child's brain, or an animal's. They don't have complex
emotions such as shame or guilt.

Isn't that anthropomorphism?

I'm a hard-brained scientist first and foremost. Not everything about

an animal is like an autistic person. But the big similarity is that both
of them can think without language.

So have you used your autism in a "hard-brained" way in your

career?

Yes. When I was a teenager I had terrible anxiety attacks. It felt like
constant stage fright. Then I went out to my aunt's ranch and I
noticed that when the cattle went into a restraining device called a
squeeze chute, they relaxed. So I got into a squeeze chute, and it
helped me calm down too. Many people with autism and Asperger's
syndrome find pressure calming. This got me interested in cattle - I
went to feed yards to see how the squeeze chutes worked, but I didn't
like the way many of the places treated the cattle. They were way too
rough, and that bothered me. This led me to start designing cattle-
handling equipment.

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You love animals, but your job involves slaughtering them...

When I designed my first cattle-handling system for a meat-packing

plant, I looked out over the cattle yard and got to thinking about what
I had done. I started to cry. I thought that these cattle wouldn't be
here if we hadn't raised them. But since we have brought them into
existence, we owe them a decent life.

What about animal rights?

I'm not interested in talking about the philosophy of animal rights. An

animal doesn't understand what rights are. As far as I'm concerned, if
someone beats a donkey, it hurts the donkey. I don't really care why
they did it. It still hurts the donkey whether you hit it because you're
sadistic or because it wouldn't walk. Don't beat the donkey. It's that
simple.

Is that why you can bear working at the blood-and-guts end of

animal welfare?

I'm not into theory. I get satisfaction out of concrete

accomplishments. Sometimes activists get legislation passed, but it
doesn't make change happen. Half the plants in the US are using
equipment I designed that makes the welfare of cattle better. The
auditing system I designed assesses five things: the percentage of
animals stunned on first attempt, the percentage insensible before
being hoisted, the percentage vocalising, the percentage that fall
down and the percentage moved with an electric prod. Each one is
scored simple yes or no. It is used around the world. I get really
turned on by that.

Can you work with big corporations?

Absolutely. There is an anti-corporation movement at the moment

that thinks big is always bad. But corporations can bring about huge
change. I'm a big believer in the power of the purse. For 25 years I
thought about humane slaughter: if I could only design the perfect
system, everything would be OK. But I found that a quarter of my
clients still mistreated animals in the facilities I designed. I got so
frustrated. But I saw more improvement in 1999, when I started
working with McDonald's, than in my whole career.

McDonald's?

Yes. I was employed to audit all the plants they were buying meat
from. I used a critical-control-point approach, which measures a few
really key things, such as whether animals moo or whether electric
prods are used. I know about prods - I've used one on myself. There
are many reasons why animals cry out, but instead of trying to
measure all the reasons, you want to measure the important
outcomes that tell you about animal distress.

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What did companies do before your system?

Inspectors measured a huge number of things around the plant

without actually making a difference to animal welfare. I've found that
there are some really simple ways to improve how animals move
through the plant. Most slaughterhouses can greatly improve welfare
by installing non-slip flooring and making simple changes such as
removing distractions that cause the animals to baulk, or installing
shields to prevent animals seeing any people ahead of them. So cows
and bulls can be out on the pasture, then go into a well-run
slaughterhouse, and it is no more stressful than being restrained for
veterinary treatment. Being autistic makes these changes really easy
to figure out.

What do other scientists make of your ideas about animals

and autistic minds?

The trouble is that these are two parallel disciplines, but the people
who study autism and the people who study animal behaviour are
different individuals.

There is evidence that new abilities emerge when language skills are
switched off. The best work comes from Bruce Miller, a neurology
professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who showed
that when frontal-temporal lobe dementia destroys the language part
of the brain, art and music talents come out. But most people don't
make the connection between animals and autism.

What about the future?

The more we learn about the brain, the more we find there is no black
and white divide between us and animals. It is a continuum. But as
you go down the phylogenetic scale, there is a point where pain
perception ceases. I'm not sure where that point is. I think also we're
going to look back on the way we behaved towards animals and
realise we treated them really badly.

What's the goal of your work?

If the aeroplane I'm on goes down, I hope that my knowledge will

survive, because I think some of my ideas are valuable to improve life
for animals and also for people with autism.

Animals and us: Our hypocrisy

04 June 2005

NewScientist.com news service

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Gary L. Francione

Gary L. Francione is professor of law and Nicholas deB.

Katzenbach Distinguished Scholar of Law and Philosophy at
Rutgers University School of Law in New Jersey. His books
include Introduction to Animal Rights: Your child or the dog?
(2000), Rain Without Thunder: The ideology of the animal
rights movement (1996) and Animals, Property, and the Law
(1995), all published by Temple University Press. Francione
has been teaching animal rights and the law for more than 20
years

DO GREAT apes, dolphins, parrots, and perhaps even "food" animals

have certain cognitive characteristics that entitle them to be accorded
greater moral consideration and legal protection?

A considerable literature has so argued in recent times. The central

idea behind this enterprise is the notion that we must rethink our
relationship with non-humans if we find they are intelligent, self-
aware, or have emotions. To the extent that non-humans have minds
like ours, runs the argument, they have similar interests, and they are
entitled to greater protection because of those interests. This "similar-
minds" approach has spawned an industry of cognitive ethologists
eager to investigate - ironically often through various sorts of animal
experiments - the extent to which they are like us.

It is astonishing that 150 years after Darwin, we are still so surprised

that other animals may have some of the characteristics thought to
be uniquely human. The proposition that humans have mental
characteristics wholly absent in non-humans is inconsistent with the
theory of evolution. Darwin maintained that there are no uniquely
human characteristics, and that there were only quantitative and not
qualitative differences between human and non-human minds. He
argued that non-humans can think and reason, and possess many of
the same emotional attributes as humans.

What is more troubling about the similar-minds approach is its

implications for moral theory. Although it appears to be progressive,
to indicate that we really are evolving in our moral relationship with
other species, the similar-minds approach actually reinforces the very
paradigm that has resulted in our excluding non-humans from the
moral community. We have historically justified our exploitation of
non-humans on the ground that there is a qualitative distinction
between humans and other animals: the latter may be sentient, but
they are not intelligent, rational, emotional or self-conscious.

Although the similar-minds approach claims that, empirically, we may

have been wrong in the past and at least some non-humans may

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have some of these characteristics, it does not question the
underlying assumption that a characteristic other than sentience - the
ability to feel pain - is necessary for moral significance.

Arbitrary lines

Any attempt to justify our exploitation of non-humans based on their

lack of "human" characteristics begs the moral question by assuming
that certain characteristics are special and justify differential
treatment. Even if, for instance, humans are the only animals who can
recognise themselves in mirrors or can communicate through
symbolic language, no human is capable of flying, or breathing under
water without assistance. What makes the ability to recognise oneself
in a mirror or use symbolic language better in a moral sense than the
ability to fly or breathe under water? The answer, of course, is that we
say so and it is in our interest to say so.

Aside from self-interest, there is no reason to conclude that

characteristics thought to be uniquely human have any value that
allows us to use them as a non-arbitrary justification for exploiting
non-humans. Moreover, even if all animals other than humans were to
lack a particular characteristic beyond sentience, or to possess that
characteristic to a lesser degree than humans, such a difference
cannot justify human exploitation of non-humans.

Differences between humans and other animals may be relevant for

other purposes. No sensible person argues that non-human animals
should drive cars, vote or attend universities, but such differences
have no bearing on whether we should eat non-humans or use them
in experiments. We recognise this conclusion when it comes to
humans. Whatever characteristic we identify as uniquely human will
be seen to a lesser degree in some humans and not at all in others.
Some humans will have the same deficiency that we attribute to non-
humans, and although the deficiency may be relevant for some
purposes, it is not relevant to whether we exploit such humans.

Consider, for instance, self-consciousness. Any sentient being must

have some level of self-awareness. To be sentient means to be the
sort of being who recognises that it is that being, and not some other,
who is experiencing pain or distress. Even if we arbitrarily define self-
consciousness in an exclusively human way as, say, being able to
think about thinking, many humans, including those who are severely
mentally disabled, lack that type of consciousness. Again, this
"deficiency" may be relevant for some purposes, but it has no bearing
on whether we should use such humans in painful biomedical
experiments or as forced organ donors. In the end, the only difference
between humans and non-humans is species, and species is no more
a justification for exploitation than race, sex or sexual orientation.

This is why the similar-minds approach is misguided, and will only

create new speciesist hierarchies, in which we move some non-
humans, such as the great apes or dolphins, into a preferred group,
and continue to treat all others as things lacking morally significant

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interests.

If, however, we want to think seriously about the human/non-human

relationship, we need to focus on one, and only one, characteristic:
sentience. What is ironic is that we claim to take the suffering of non-
humans seriously. As a matter of social morality, we are virtually
unanimous in agreeing that it is morally wrong to inflict "unnecessary"
suffering or death on non-humans. For such a prohibition to have any
meaning, it must preclude inflicting suffering on non-humans merely
for our pleasure, amusement or convenience.

The problem is that although we express disapproval of the

unnecessary suffering of non-humans, most of their suffering and
death can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement or
convenience, and cannot by any stretch be plausibly characterised as
"necessary". We kill billions of animals annually for food. It is not
"necessary" in any sense to eat meat or animal products. Indeed, an
increasing number of healthcare professionals maintain that these
foods may be detrimental to human health. Moreover, environmental
scientists have pointed out the tremendous inefficiencies and costs to
our planet of animal agriculture. In any event, our justification for the
pain, suffering and death inflicted on these farmed non-humans is
nothing more than our enjoyment of the taste of their flesh.

And it is certainly not necessary to use non-humans for sport, hunting,

entertainment or product testing, and there is considerable evidence
that reliance on animal models in experiments or drug testing may
even be counterproductive.

In sum, when it comes to non-humans, we exhibit what can best be

described as moral schizophrenia. We say one thing about how non-
humans should be treated, and do quite another. We are, of course,
aware that we lack a satisfactory approach to the matter of our
relationship to other animals, and we have for some time now been
trying to find one.

If we took seriously the principle that it was wrong to inflict

unnecessary suffering on non-humans, we would stop altogether
bringing domestic animals into existence for human use, and our
recognition of the moral status of animals would not depend on
whether a parrot can understand mathematics or a dog recognise
herself in a mirror. We would take seriously what Jeremy Bentham
said over 200 years ago: "The question is not, can they reason, nor
can they talk, but can they suffer?"

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