<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/07/when-dogs-recall-toys-and-horses-plan-ahead-are-animals-so-different-from-us>
"The details differ, but really it’s the same story, turning up every few
weeks, for around a decade now. The revelation – and it’s always presented with
a dramatic flourish – is this: animals are much more like us than we thought.
Last week, it was that dogs could remember the names of their old toys – even
when they hadn’t seen them for two years. Language acquisition, that “uniquely
human” thing, was being encroached on, the researchers said: dogs could store
words in their memory. Last month, it was that horses could strategise and plan
ahead, overturning the assumption that they “simply respond to stimuli in the
moment”. And in April, it was that there’s a “realistic possibility of
consciousness” in reptiles, fish and even insects – according to a declaration
signed by some 40 scientists. One of the studies backing the claims recorded
bumblebees playing with wooden balls. The behaviour had no obvious connection
to mating or survival, the authors thought. It was for fun.
The mental territory we can claim to be “uniquely human” is shrinking at an
alarming rate. Wasps can distinguish faces, dolphins call one another by name,
pigs use tools, zebra finches dream, parrots go on Zoom, and sometimes crayfish
get anxious. Chimps, meanwhile, exist in complex cultures, rather like ours,
with fashion trends. In one recorded instance, a high-ranking female chimp
started wearing grass in her ears. Within a week, all the female chimps were
doing it.
Does this seem obvious? It did to Darwin, who, along with other naturalists,
once assumed that animals, like us, were individuals with some form of
consciousness. “Can we feel sure that an old dog with an excellent memory and
some power of imagination, as shewn by his dreams, never reflects on his past
pleasures of the chase?” he wrote in
The Descent of Man.
But Darwin’s successors were more sceptical, and at the start of the 20th
century came a chorus of demands for hard evidence for this point of view.
Opinion changed, and “anthropomorphism” became a sin in the natural sciences.
For many scientists, it is still a word that means you’ve made a mistake –
you’re guilty of sentimentality and intellectual failure.
This piece of wisdom has filtered outwards from academia to policymaking, and
to the general public. The idea that assigning human motivation to animals is a
stupid thing to do is deeply ingrained in us. In a recent article in
Psychology Today, the author frets that children are being taught to
anthropomorphise, which he takes for granted is an error.
The British government only recognised animal sentience in law in 2021. But the
more we find out about our fellow creatures, the more the evidence is swinging
behind devoted dog owners, Beatrix Potter readers and Disney aficionados. We
might in fact be guilty of the opposite bias – stubbornly looking the other way
as animals demonstrate guilt, pain, happiness and theory of mind; of
overestimating ourselves and underestimating the rest of the animal kingdom.
It’s revealing of scientific culture that this bias doesn’t have a common name.
But the late primatologist Frans de Waal called it “anthropodenialism”.
If so, it’s an important mistake to correct. First, because there’s an obvious
link between cruelty and the belief that your victims are not, like you,
capable of deep suffering. It wasn’t until 1987 that the medical profession
recognised that newborns could feel pain (they couldn’t tell us after all). So
babies were regularly operated on without anaesthetics or any type of sedation.
Mothers recorded evidence of trauma in later life – these children would shake
and vomit when visiting a hospital."
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
