Animal Rights and Wrongs - Britannica.com 8/2000

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Britannica.com

August 2000

 

Animal Rights and Wrongs

By Steven Best, special to Britannica.com

 

Books discussed in this essay:

Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think by Marc Hauser

Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals by Steven M. Wise

Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Toward Speciesism by Richard Ryder

Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence

by George Page

 

Koko the gorilla has a sign vocabulary of 500 words and does Internet

chats. Alex the parrot knows the names of more than 100 different objects,

7 colors, and 5 shapes; he can count objects up to 6 and speaks in

meaningful sentences. Michael the gorilla loved Luciano Pavarotti and

refused to go outside when he was on TV. Hoku the dolphin grieved when his

companion, Kiko, died. Flint the chimp died of a broken heart after the

death of his mother.

 

While this account of the emotional and intellectual range of animals may

touch the layperson, it tends not to resonate with hard-nosed scientists.

From a traditional scientific point of view, animal emotions and minds

were unobservable and therefore inconceivable. It is anthropomorphic to

ascribe humanlike characteristics to animals. It is unscientific to name

them as if they were people. And, at best, such stories are merely anecdotal.

 

Beginning in the 17th century, modern science constructed a mechanistic

paradigm that viewed animals as automata or machines. From Descartes to

behaviorism to sociobiology, the modern scientific tradition has cast

animals in the role of brutes or machines who can neither feel nor think.

Students trained in this paradigm quickly learn to avoid references to the

subjective life of animals—unless they wish to invite ridicule. From their

mechanistic perspective scientists redescribe the love a chimpanzee might

experience as " attachment formation, " the anger of an elephant as

" aggression exhibition, " and the aptitude of a bird as a " conditioned

reflex. " Journals typically refuse to publish papers that allude to animal

thoughts or emotions. Jane Goodall reports how extreme the mechanistic

outlook can be: " [in] the first paper I wrote for Nature, the scientific

periodical, they actually crossed out where I put 'he and she and who,' and

put 'it.' "

 

Paradigms Lost

 

Today this situation is changing decisively as science undertakes an

exciting paradigm shift that embraces the study of animal emotions and

minds. Until the last few decades, human beings have known relatively

little about animal intelligence and emotions. As evidenced in a spate of

recent books and the new discipline of " cognitive ethology, " which studies

animal intelligence, scientists are finally beginning to fathom the depth

of animal complexity. Only in the 1960s, for instance, when Jane Goodall

went to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, did human beings learn that

chimpanzees make and use tools. Not until 1983 did researchers discover

that elephants communicate with ultrasound. New studies suggest that rats

dream when they sleep and that the " great apes " (chimpanzees, bonobos,

orangutans, and gorillas) have " self-awareness neurons " responsible for

self-consciousness.

 

Having misled us for so long about animals, science is now initiating a

revolution in our understanding. Through evolutionary theory, genetics,

neurophysiology, and experimental procedures, many scientists are providing

strong evidence that animals feel and think in ways akin to humans. The

changes began with Charles Darwin. His theory of natural selection informed

us that human beings are in fact animals, and, as such, evolve according to

the same evolutionary dynamics as nonhuman animals. Darwin argued that the

difference between nonhuman and human animals was one of degree, not form.

Although evolution became the dominant paradigm in biology, scientists

failed to appreciate its implications for evolutionary continuity. While

Darwin sketched our similarities with animals in The Expression of the

Emotions in Man and Animals, scientists found his argument repugnant. In a

profession not known for its kindness to animals, the mechanistic worldview

has all too often proved to be a most convenient one, allowing animal

experimenters to sleep at night.Today we know that human DNA is more than

98 percent identical to that of chimpanzees and that chimps are closer to

us genetically than they are to orangutans. Mammals possess a limbic system

and a neocortex, the same features that enable human beings to experience

emotions and have abstract thoughts. Through neuroscience we have learned

that all mammals possess oxytocin, a hormone involved in the experience of

pleasure during sex, that also plays a key role in mother-infant bonding.

If the emotions and thoughts of human beings have a chemical and

physiological basis, and animals have a similar makeup, it is likely they

too feel complex emotions like love and can think in creative ways.In his

books Good Natured and Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal argues that the

great apes laid the evolutionary foundation for many human behavioral and

familial dynamics. Both he and Jane Goodall conclude that chimpanzee

societies demand complex social skills—far beyond what the mechanistic

model allows. Their world is governed not only by instincts and chemicals

but also through rules and norms. Like us, it seems they live in a culture

of shared communication and learning passed down from generation to

generation. In books such as Animal Minds and Listening in the Dark, Donald

Griffin has dealt powerful blows to the behaviorist tradition of John

Watson and B.F. Skinner. Considered the father of cognitive ethology, and

famous for discovering that bats use echolocation to map their terrain,

Griffin took seriously the notion that animals can think. Since Griffin's

work was published, a rich scientific literature has been assembled

demonstrating the sophistication and flexibility of animal minds. Through

myriad instances of observation and experimentation, a solid case for

animal intelligence has been established that is changing not only our view

of animals but also of ourselves.

 

Communication Skills

 

Given the tools of American Sign Language and lexigram symbols, great apes

are communicating their needs, desires, and thoughts to human beings and

one another. Dolphins understand and follow simple commands like " Put the

ball in the hoop. " In a famous experiment, birds, who also are toolmakers

and users, have solved the problem of how to eat food dangling from a line

by looping the string up onto the line and holding it with their feet.

Beavers exhibit great flexibility in building their dams and solve problems

posed to them on a case-by-case basis. Various tests with mirrors and

hidden objects suggest that chimpanzees might have self-consciousness and

awareness of other minds. Thousands of experiments in the field and

laboratory have demonstrated that animals such as prairie dogs, squirrels,

and even chickens convey not only emotion but also information in their

complexly differentiated alarm cries indicating the presence of predators.

Recent studies suggest that birds, primates, and whales may use a

grammarlike structure in their communication.

 

In his book Inside the Animal Mind, George Page cites experiments where

adult chimps use analogical reasoning better than children and some adults.

One researcher found cases where pigeons performed better on categorization

tests than his own undergraduates. In Wild Minds, Marc Hauser adopts the

stance of a " healthy skeptic " toward many claims about animal emotions and

intelligence. From an evolutionary perspective, he argues that all animal

brains have to cope with similar problems, and therefore each species has

its own special " mental tool kits " for processing information about

objects, numbers, and space. Variations lead to differences among species,

with Homo sapiens evolving toward an unprecedented complexity. Still, he

concludes, " We share the planet with thinking animals.... Although the

human mind leaves a characteristically different imprint on the planet, we

are certainly not alone in this process.

 

" In a review of Griffin's Animal Thinking, E.A. Wasserman concluded, " No

statement concerning consciousness in animals is open to verification and

experimentation. " This is simply false, for the ethological literature

abounds with examples of ingenious experiments that have been designed to

test the emotional sensitivities and intelligence of animals. Hauser's book

in particular discusses experimental designs where hypotheses about animal

emotions and minds are confirmed, refuted, or left uncertain.Clearly,

results can be interpreted in different ways....

 

Clearly, results can be interpreted in different ways, and staunch

defenders of behaviorism remain unconvinced. In 1984 C. Lloyd Morgan

formulated the " law of parsimony, " a variation on Ockham's razor, which

states that one should not appeal to a " higher " function (intelligence) of

organisms when a " lower " function (instinct) will adequately explain a

behavior. Behaviorists used his principle in an aggressively reductionist

manner, subsuming all behaviors to crude instincts and learning mechanisms.

Although his principle would tend to support such behaviorist conclusions,

Morgan himself acknowledged the existence of animal intelligence. In the

face of the overwhelming evidence of animal intelligence, the lower

functions do not explain the behaviors; rather, they make sense only

through appeal to higher level principles. In other words, the simplest

explanation, the one not saddled with ad hoc qualifications, is an appeal

to the flexible and thinking qualities of animal minds.

 

Wrongs and Rights

In Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, Harvard law

professor and attorney Steven M. Wise shows that animal intelligence varies

according to the degree we nurture it with proper social environments.

Acknowledging only one model of intelligence and communication—that of Homo

sapiens—scientists have argued that since animals don't speak or reason

like we do, they don't have minds at all. In holding animals up to human

criteria of language and intelligence, scientists have, in a sense,

succumbed to the dreaded sin of anthropomorphism. But anthropomorphism need

not be a scientific crime. Clearly we don't want to project onto animals

characteristics they don't have. But if there are core commonalities

between nonhuman and human animals, then what Griffin calls " critical

anthropomorphism " might be our best access to understanding animals and

" objective detachment " could actually block insight.

 

The argument of cognitive ethology is not that animal emotions and

consciousness are as complex as ours but that they exist in remarkably rich

forms. Human beings are unique in the degree to which we possess

intelligence; no other species has produced sonnets or sonatas, solved

algebraic equations, or meditated on the structure of the universe. But

humans are not unique in our possession of a neocortex; of complex emotions

like love, loneliness, empathy, and shame; of sophisticated languages,

behaviors, and communities; and perhaps even of aesthetic and moral

sensibilities.

 

The paradigm shift from seeing animals as subjects of their lives, rather

than as mere objects of our gaze, has important implications. The genetic,

behavioral, and emotional continuities between humans and great apes, for

example, form the philosophical basis of The Great Ape Project cofounded by

Peter Singer, which aims to establish our kinship with and secure basic

rights for our biological relatives. Similarly, scientific findings about

animal intelligence are crucial to the movement for legal rights for animals.

 

From Is to Ought?

Scientific findings are often used as a basis for ethics, law, and social

policy. Some may object that this strategy commits what is known in

philosophy as the " naturalistic fallacy, " whereby one moves implicitly from

the " is " of a natural fact to the " ought " of an ethical norm. Just because

something is doesn't mean it should be. Instances of the naturalistic

fallacies abound. The Social Darwinist claim that " might makes right, " for

example, confuses the essentially arbitrary circumstances of social class

with innate superiority. To take another example, the mere existence of

patriarchy throughout history is no justification for it.

 

But one can also see the limitations of a positivist separation of facts

and values by considering ecology: It is a factual science, but it also

tells us how we ought to live if we wish to harmonize the social world with

the natural one and thereby build sustainable communities. Similarly, once

we know that animals are complex and sensitive beings, we should treat them

accordingly—since the rationalizations humans use to mistreat them may be

scientifically groundless. The inference from " is " to " ought " may be

unavoidable. Rather than trying to escape it, then, we might best be served

by establishing as solid a factual framework as possible for the normative

claims we derive from it.

 

Feeling the winds of change from science, philosophy, and law, it seems

that American culture itself is in the midst of a paradigm shift. As we

learn to appreciate the complexity of animals and the deep continuities

between their world and ours, we begin to respect them more and accord them

the rights they deserve. Every marginalized human group has fought for its

liberation; now it's the animals' turn. Since they can't speak for

themselves, their liberation demands our own liberation from the

long-standing tradition of human biases against them. As we grant animals

minds, we may free our own.

 

Steven Best teaches philosophy and humanities at the University of Texas at

El Paso. He is the author of The Politics of Historical Vision and numerous

essays on environmental ethics, social theory, and the philosophy of

science. His last article for Britannica.com was " Life and Death Ethics:

The Passions and Paradoxes of Peter Singer. "