In a new blog here at PsychologyToday.com—The Hidden
Lives of Animals: Understanding Animal Behavior—Jonathan Balcombe,
Ph. D., writes, “For much of the twentieth century, science didn’t view animals
as thinking, feeling beings. Today that’s all changed. Science has emerged from
what American neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp has termed its ‘terminal
agnosticism’ towards animal experience.”
Actually, scientists have
viewed animals as “thinking beings” for quite some time. The literature on
animal behavior is rife with explanations based on thought: animals are said to
know their “rank and status” in a pecking order, “mark their territories,” use
their urine to “ send messages” to members of rival groups, and when threatened
they’re said to “make themselves look bigger” to potential attackers,
etc. In fact, if we’re to believe the literature, nearly everything
animals do is based on some kind of mental thought process.
However, when it comes to
cognitive scientists (the men and women who study comparative cognition),
Balcombe is correct. They’ve been very careful about not imputing cognitive and
emotional abilities to their animal subjects unless there’s enough data to
support such conclusions. After all, their job is to discover what cognitive
abilities animals do and don’t have, then compare those abilities to ours. And,
as scientists, they have to be as careful and assiduous about this task as
possible. And from all serious studies done on the subject, there seems to be a
distinct difference between a feeling being (non-human animal), and a
“thinking, feeling” being (humans and some cetaceans).
So, yes, animals feel things, but they do they think?
In “Vulture
Culture,” his first article here, Balcombe starts off with a
description of a female vulture he once observed at an animal-welfare event.
“She wasn’t smelly or scruffy. She looked immaculate. She had a presence. If I
had to choose one word to describe her it would be dignified. She wasn’t an object
but a subject—a thinking, feeling being.”
How does he know this?
We’re not told. But Balcombe goes on to say that new scientific research shows
that animals have cognitive abilities far beyond what we might expect.
“Elephants,” he writes, “keep mental tabs on thirty or more compatriots.
Baboons bereave the loss of an infant and seek therapy by expanding their
social networks. Caged starlings become pessimistic and free ones optimistic.
Rats know what they know and don’t know. Scrub jays remember the what/where/when
of a past event. Domestic dogs object to unfair treatment. And chimps trounce
humans in a short-term memory task.”
Most of these statements
are heavily-skewed, ideological interpretations of data, not hard scientific facts.
And I think they can and should be looked at from a more parsimonious (and more
scientific) point of view. As a dog trainer, I’ve already addressed the fallacy
that “domestic dogs object to unfair treatment” in my article “Tuning In to
Your Dog’s Emotions.” Let me just add that the idea of “inequity
aversion” (the ability to object when one is being treated unfairly) comes from
a questionable paper done by two experimental economists. They came up
with this idea, not by doing any experimental research of their own, but by
re-interpreting data from other studies, already available, and then
essentially ignoring anything that didn’t fit their theory. (“The Rhetoric of Inequity Aversion,” Avner Shaked, Economics Department, Bonn
University, 1 March 2005.)
Frans de Waal of Emory
University, then applied this idea to monkeys. (De Waal defines himself as
someone whose goal is to find as many commonalities between humans and monkeys
as possible.) De Waal admitted that his experiment with captive monkeys
was flawed since it probably couldn’t be applied to animals in the wild.
However, when this flawed,
though possibly valid (in terms of human social dynamics), concept from
experimental economics, was applied to chimps, scientists at the Max Planck
Institute came to a very different conclusion: to them it was about expectation,
not inequity. (“Are apes
really inequity averse?”, Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, September, 2006.)
Meanwhile, another
researcher, Fredericke Range, at “The Clever Dogs Lab” at the University of
Vienna, compounded what I view as De Waal’s mistake even further by applying
this already stretched hypothesis to domesticated dogs.
Does Balcombe know the
pedigree of this idea?
As for elephants keeping
mental tabs on their companions, it’s not uncommon for most social mammals,
even birds, to have a visceral awareness of the salient features of their
environment. Birds don’t need to be able to do math to know when an egg is
missing. Certainly elephants would be capable of being aware of the presence or
absence of group members without needing to use a conscious mental thought
process.
As for baboons, they may
feel the emotional shock as well as the visceral loss that the death of an
infant would engender, but is that same thing as grief? Certainly when an
animal is giving and receiving physical comfort from its offspring, and the
offspring’s physical and energetic presence is gone (not to mention the flow of
oxytocin inherent to intimacy involved in that kind of emotional connection),
any animal would seek some form of comfort or replacement. Is that the same
thing as “seeking therapy?”
Marc Bekoff, whom I admire
greatly, has written a number or articles here, putting forth a similar
perspective to Balcombe’s. He’s circumspect and scientific in his writings, but
often writes that animals can
feel grief, which I think is also a mistake.
The problem is that real
grief requires not just the feelings of shock and loss, which most animals (at
least birds and mammals) are capable of experiencing; it also requires a
corresponding mental thought process. After all, we have the ability to explain
things to ourselves, we can time travel, mentally, to the future and tell
ourselves that “time heals all wounds,” or fondly remember past events, or talk
it over with friends and relatives, we can read Kubler-Ross, or just mentally
sort things out. But if an animal doesn’t have any of those capacities, then it
seems to me that their feelings may be all the more painful and traumatic.
Whose heart wouldn’t go out to such a being?
So in my view, by labeling
the animal’s experience “grief,” and by failing to discuss what serious
cognitive scientists tell us is the real nature of animal cognition—which
doesn’t include the ability to engage in internal narrative, perspective-taking, mental time travel,
math or language, etc.—, we defeat our own purpose.
In my experience, as a dog
trainer of over 20 years, the more that people believe dogs do things for
reasons (i.e., the more people believe that their dogs can think), the more
those dogs tend to be harshly punished or mistreated: “He knows what he did is
wrong!” On the other hand, the more we understand that dogs are emotional, and that
they can feel things very deeply, but can’t think,the kinder we tend to be
toward them.
I think we should
concentrate on the one thing we really share with animals: simple emotions.
That’s the common ground. The more we inflate or shade the truth about animal
cognition, the more animals will suffer.
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