Stephen Best. Animal rights and lies about them

The gorilla's sign vocabulary is 500 words long. Alex the parrot knows the names of more than a hundred different objects, distinguishes seven colors and five varieties of shape. In addition, Alex can count to six and speaks meaningful phrases. Gorilla Michael loves to listen to Luciano Pavarotti and refuses to go for a walk when his concert is broadcast on TV. Hoku the dolphin was grieving after the death of his fellow dolphin Kiko. Chimpanzee Flint died of a heart attack while burying his mother.

The above facts, indicating a high level of emotional and intellectual development in animals, impress even an amateur, but they have not yet received a response among realistic scientists. From a traditional scientific point of view, the minds and feelings of animals are not observable and therefore their existence is incredible. Attributing human properties to animals is a manifestation of anthropomorphism. Calling animals by name like people is unscientific. Therefore, the cited cases from the lives of animals can, at best, be regarded simply as an anecdote.

Modern science continues to use the mechanistic paradigm constructed back in the 17th century, within which animals were viewed as some kind of automata or machines. The modern scientific tradition - from Descartes to behaviorism and sociobiology - has assigned animals the role of non-intelligent beings or mechanisms that are unable to think or feel. Students who adopted this paradigm from school quickly learned to avoid mentioning the subjective life of animals in their works - such references slipped in only as a joke. Guided by this mechanistic view, scientists have described, for example, chimpanzee love as “attachment formation,” elephant rage as “aggressive display,” and bird intelligence as “conditioned reflex.” Scientific journals, as a rule, refused to publish articles that touched on the topic of thinking and emotional development in animals. Jane Goodell explains how far this mechanistic approach can go: “In the first article I wrote [on apes] for Nature, the editor carefully replaced all the 'he's' and 'she's' with 'it's.'

Lost Paradigm

Today the situation has changed significantly - there has been a significant paradigm shift in science, affecting the study of emotions and intelligence in animals. Until the last few decades, people knew relatively little about the minds and emotional lives of animals. A flurry of recent publications and the emergence of a new discipline called cognitive ethology, which studies animal intelligence, indicate that scientists are finally turning to explore the depths of complex animal thinking. For example, it was not until the 1960s, when Jane Goodell traveled to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, that humanity learned that chimpanzees could make and use tools. It wasn't until 1983 that scientists discovered that elephants could transmit information using ultrasound. New research suggests that rats dream and that the "great apes" (chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) have neurons responsible for self-awareness.

Science, which has misled us for so many years, is now initiating a revolution in the way we think about the animal world. Using evidence from evolutionary theory, genetics, neuropsychology, and experimental science, many scientists have convincingly argued that animals can think and feel like humans. However, the first changes in this regard began with Darwin. His theory of natural selection showed that humans are essentially animals and, accordingly, evolve according to the same laws as other animals. Darwin argued that the differences between humans and other animals are described in terms of degree, not in terms of form. Although evolutionary theory has become the dominant paradigm in biology, the idea of ​​evolutionary integrity it implies has not been accepted by the scientific world. Although Darwin outlined the similarities between humans and animals in his work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, scientists have found his argument contradictory. When the activity itself does not involve caring for animals, the mechanistic view is too often the most convenient. At the very least, it allows the scientists who conducted animal experiments to sleep peacefully at night.

Today we know that human DNA is 98% identical to that of chimpanzees, which are genetically closer to humans than, for example, orangutans. Mammals have a limbic system and neocortex, the same parts of the brain that allow humans to experience emotions and think abstractly. Thanks to neuroscience, we know that all mammals have oxytocin, a hormone that is responsible for the pleasure of sex and also plays a key role in the formation of attachment between mother and child. If human emotions and intelligence are chemically and psychologically based, and animals are similarly wired, it is likely that they are also capable of experiencing complex emotions such as love and can think creatively.

In his books The Large Nature and Politics in Chimpanzees, Frans de Waal argues that great apes provided the evolutionary basis for many behavioral and familial patterns in humans. De Waal and Goodell concluded that chimpanzee societies require complex social skills from their members that go far beyond the behavioral patterns envisioned by the mechanistic model. The world of chimpanzees is built not only on instincts, but also on certain rules and norms of behavior. Like us, they live in a communication culture where accumulated knowledge is passed on from generation to generation.

Donald Griffin is considered the father of cognitive ethology and is famous for discovering that bats use echolocation for navigation. Griffin seriously studied the question of whether animals can think. His books Animal Minds and Listening in the Dark dealt a significant blow to the behaviorist tradition going back to John Watson and B.F. Skinner. Since the publication of Griffin's work, a large number of scientific articles have appeared demonstrating the complexity and flexibility of animal intelligence. The myriad observations and experiments that convincingly demonstrate the presence of intelligence in animals have changed the way we look not only at the animal kingdom, but also at ourselves.

Communication skills

Trained in sign language and lexigraphic symbols, great apes were able to communicate their needs, desires and thoughts to both humans and each other. Dolphins understand and follow simple commands such as “put the ball in the basket.” Beavers show great flexibility of mind when building their dams and are able to solve the problem in accordance with specific conditions. Numerous experiments with mirrors and hidden objects suggest that chimpanzees are self-aware and aware of the presence of consciousness in their own kind. The results of thousands and thousands of experiments indicate that animals such as squirrels, prairie dogs and even chickens, using complex, differentiated sound signals, are capable of not only expressing emotions, but also transmitting a variety of information (for example, about the approach of danger). Recent research has shown that birds, primates and cetaceans use communicative means similar to the grammatical structures of human language.

In his book The Animal Mind: An Inside Look, George Page refers to experiments in which adult chimpanzees were found to have analytical thinking abilities that were superior not only to children, but also to some adult homo sapiens. Another researcher was surprised to note that experimental pigeons performed much better on classification tests than his own students. Mark Heuser, in The Wild Mind, takes a “healthy skepticism” approach to the overwhelming evidence for the emotional and intellectual abilities of animals. Looking at the problem from an evolutionary point of view, he argues that the brain of any animal inevitably faces similar problems, and therefore each species has its own “mental toolkit” for processing information about objects, numbers and space. Depending on this, the types differ. The case of homo sapiens is an example of an unprecedented complication of thinking. Thus, Heuser concludes, “we live on the planet together with other intelligent beings... And although the human mind has left its characteristic mark on the planet, we are not alone in this process.”

In his review of Griffin's book Animal Minds, Wasserman concludes that "no statement concerning the existence of consciousness in animals can be verified or verified by experiment." This statement is simply false, since the work of ethology is replete with examples of original experiments designed and carried out to test the emotional and intellectual abilities of animals. Heuser's book, in particular, examines experimental projects in the process of which the presence in animals of certain features of intelligence and the ability to experience emotional experiences is confirmed, refuted, or remains in question.

Of course, the results of such experiments can be interpreted in different ways, and adherents of behaviorism may remain unconvinced. In 1984, Lloyd Morgan formulated the "law of parsimony", which is a variation of Occam's razor. According to this law, one should not appeal to a “higher” function of an organism (intelligence) if a “lower” function (instinct) adequately explains its behavior. Behaviorists used this principle to reduce animal behavior to primitive instincts and learning mechanisms. Morgan himself, despite the fact that the principle he proposed played into the hands of behaviorists, recognized the presence of intelligence in animals. Contrary to the overwhelming evidence for “animal” intelligence, “lower functions” do not explain animal behavior, which rather requires a description that appeals to higher-level principles. In other words, the simplest explanation, not limited to obviously conventional models, would be the recognition of flexibility and a fairly high level of intelligence in animals.

Right and wrong

In a book called Breaking the Cage: On Animal Rights, Harvard law professor and attorney Stephen Wise shows that an animal's intelligence varies depending on how we train it and provide it with the right social conditions. Recognizing only the ways of thinking and communication inherent in homo sapiens, scientists believed that since animals do not speak and do not reason like us, it means that they do not have a mind at all. By measuring the intelligence and communication abilities of animals by human criteria, scientists could be said to have fallen into the sin of anthropomorphism. However, anthropomorphism is not necessarily a crime from a scientific point of view. Of course, one should not attribute properties to animals that they do not possess. But given the commonalities between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, what Griffin called "critical anthropomorphism" may be the best way to understand animals, while "objective impartiality" may hinder the process. scientific knowledge.

Cognitive ethology proves not that animals' emotions and intelligence are as complex as ours, but that they exist in surprisingly diverse forms. Man is, of course, unique in terms of the intelligence he has: no other species of animal is capable of writing sonnets, composing symphonies, solving algebraic equations, or thinking about the structure of the universe. But humans are not unique in having a part of the brain called the neocortex; They are not the only ones who may experience complex feelings like love, longing, empathy or shame. They were not the only ones who created a language for communication, a community and norms of behavior in these communities. We may not even have a monopoly on the presence of aesthetic and moral sense.

The new paradigm of viewing animals as subjects of our lives, rather than simply objects of our observation, has far-reaching consequences. The genetic, behavioral and emotional similarities between humans and great apes, for example, provided the philosophical basis for the Great Apes Project, co-founded by Peter Singer. The goal of this project is to prove the kinship between humans and apes and to fight to provide our biological relatives with basic rights. Thus, scientific research into animal intelligence is extremely important to the animal rights movement.

From statement to action

Scientific research often forms the basis of ethical standards, laws and social policies. Some may argue that the strategy of directly moving from stating a scientific fact to establishing an ethical norm is erroneous and is even known in philosophy as the “natural scientific fallacy.” In other words, just because something exists does not mean it must be so. There are countless examples of natural science misconceptions. Social Darwinism, which proclaims the rule of the strongest, cannot serve as a justification for class inequality. Another example: the mere fact of the existence of patriarchy does not justify it.

However, one must see the limits of the positivist separation of facts and values, taking into account ecology. This science is based on facts, but at the same time its task is to tell us how we should live in order to achieve harmony between human society and the natural world and build a sustainable community.

Likewise, since we know that animals are complex and sensitive beings, we must treat them as such, since the grounds for mistreating them have been scientifically groundless. And in this case, scientific observation inevitably leads to the establishment of an ethical norm.

Feeling the winds of change in science, philosophy, and law, it seems that American culture itself is in the midst of a paradigm shift. By understanding the complexity of the animal world and the depth of the connection between humans and animals, we begin to respect animals more and give them the rights they deserve. Today, any marginal group of people is fighting for their rights. Looks like it's time for the animals. And since they cannot speak for themselves, their liberation depends on our own liberation: we must free ourselves from the shackles of traditional prejudice against them. By recognizing the ability of animals to think, we will free our own brains from unnecessary blinders.

Original article
Translated by Ilya Kun