MORE
THAN MEATS THE EYE
You May Scoff at the Idea of an
Emotional Cow, but the Latest Research
Suggests Animals Might have Feelings
Just Like Ours.
The Guardian, Laura Spinney, March 17,
2005
In one of his famous cartoons, American
Gary Larson has cows standing about
on their hind feet, smoking fags by
the side of a road. One of them, the
lookout, shouts "Car!" and
by the time the motorist reaches them
he gazes out on an idyllic scene of
cows munching grass on all fours. The
cows are doing cow things, and all is
well with the world.
It's
a good joke, of course. Or maybe a dark
reference to the not-so-distant past
when Europeans - and some Americans
- dressed animals up, put them on trial
for heinous crimes and executed them,
thereby judging them on a par with humans
when it came to freely deciding their
actions and being morally responsible
for the outcomes.
Since those times, ideas about animals
have swung to the opposite extreme,
with animals being judged as lacking
awareness of their own internal states
and relationships to others, and hence
incapable of true suffering, not to
mention criminal behaviour. Those ideas,
arguably, are what until recently gave
people licence to carry out cruel animal
experiments and to farm animals in conditions
that, applied to humans, would be called
torture.
But new research suggests that animals
have far more complex cognitive and
social skills than we gave them credit
for. The focus in recent decades has
been on wildlife but the uncomfortable
truth now emerging is that something
similar holds for animals we like to
eat: pigs, sheep, cows, chickens. At
a meeting in London on animal sentience
today, leading scientists and animal
welfare experts will claim that we are
in the middle of yet another swing in
the way we treat animals - away from
dumb beasts, but not as far, hopefully,
as pigs in culottes.
First for some findings. Last October,
Ana da Costa and colleagues at the Babraham
Institute in Cambridge reported that
when sheep were isolated from their
flock, they experienced stress as measured
by increases in heart rate, stress hormones
and bleating. But showing them pictures
of familiar sheep faces reduced their
stress on all three counts. The same
effect was not produced when they were
shown pictures of goat faces or inverted
triangles.
Cows, too, can recognise a familiar
face, says Donald Broom, professor of
animal welfare at the University of
Cambridge, and often form long-lasting,
cooperative partnerships. They also
show a physiological response on learning
something new. He and colleague Kristin
Hagen put heifers in a situation where
they had to press a panel to open a
gate and gain access to food. Those
that learned the task were more likely
to experience a leap in heart rate and
to gallop than those that did not -"the
eureka response".
Other research has shown that if offered
a choice of two feeding stalls, pigs
will avoid the one they remember being
shut into, previously, for several hours
after eating, and go for the one they
were released from quickly. Lame broiler
hens, or hens bred for meat, will choose
food laced with painkillers over food
that is not. And rainbow trout will
learn to react to cues that predict
noxious stimuli, moving away from them
to a different part of the tank.
None of these findings proves that animals
feel pain, or joy for that matter, in
the same way that humans do - and there
is no way of testing their subjective
experience. But according to Broom,
the evidence that they are capable of
learning associations suggests brains
that are, at the very least, aware of
what has happened in the past and of
acting on it in future. That awareness
tends to engender respect in humans,
he says. It is the foundation of collaboration
and mutual aid - for instance, knowing
not to attack a familiar face. In animal
communities, even unrelated individuals
take care not to harm each other. Animals
with sharp horns or big teeth, or weighing
several tonnes, will move carefully
so as not to damage others - an observation
that, in the past, has been put down
to their desire to avoid retaliation.
But, says Broom, "there are so
many cases where injury would be easy
and retaliation would be unlikely, it's
clear enough that a lot of this is done
with a more general aim of keeping the
group stable".
He points to plentiful examples of animals
collaborating rather than competing.
Cows and horses form "grooming
partnerships", just as chimps do.
Altruism is compatible with the survival
of the fittest, if helping others increases
the likelihood that one's own genes
will be passed on - if those you help
share some of your genes. Humans violate
that rule by occasionally helping out
unrelated individuals. Broom now thinks
it isn't only humans that behave in
this mysterious fashion, and that animal
societies have been misunderstood. "In
any social species with a reasonably
advanced brain, it is necessary to have
something equivalent to morality in
order that the society will function,"
he says.
American animal rights lawyer Steven
Wise has taken that idea a step further.
He argues that the foundation for according
basic civil liberties to people is that
they possess "practical autonomy"
- that is, a sense of self, plus the
ability to desire something and to have
the intention of fulfilling that desire.
Roaming through the literature on animal
cognition, he found that this applied
to quite a lot of animals - namely the
great apes, elephants, dolphins, African
grey parrots, dogs and honey bees. Now
he says it applies to some farm animals
too. In his latest book, he compares
the current legal status of these animals
to that of the black slave James Somerset,
who in 1772 convinced a British court
that he was a person with rights, not
a piece of property. Among the basic
rights these animals deserve, Wise says,
is the right to freedom from battery,
which would rule out all killing for
food, and most lab testing.
This is not a new argument, and a debate
took place along these lines in New
Zealand in 1999. Scientists and lawyers
tried to persuade the country's parliament
to recognise the closeness of chimps
and other primates to humans, and to
give them rights. They failed, but the
animals were granted instead legal protection
from animal experimentation. Britain
had already taken that step, and Home
Office guidelines now forbid experiments
on chimps, orang-utans and gorillas.
Before it was thrown out, the New Zealand
bill for conferring rights on nonhuman
primates came in for some harsh criticism,
as has Wise. The critics argue that
while animals must be protected from
abuse, rights are part of a social contract
that makes no sense without responsibilities.
The claim that animals have morality
"has an ugly history" in animal
trials, says Andrew Linzey, a theologian
and expert in the ethics of animal welfare
at Oxford University. And Frans de Waal,
a primatologist at Emory University,
Atlanta, points out that social animals
rarely, if ever, direct altruism to
other species.
"The animal rights movement's outrageous
parallel with the abolition of slavery
- apart from being insulting - is morally
flawed," de Waal wrote in the New
York Times in 1999. "Slaves can
and should become full members of society,
animals cannot and will not." Six
years on, he says, he has nothing to
add to that.
Since 1997, European law has recognised
that animals are sentient. That is,
that they can be aware of their surroundings,
of their own bodily sensations including
pain, cold, hunger, and of their relationships
with other animals, including humans.
A sentient animal is not necessarily
intelligent, or capable of learning
or understanding, but it can suffer
in ways that are not purely physical
- for example, by being prevented from
following its natural instincts. So
that change in the law marked a significant
shift from earlier attitudes towards
animals, which defined cruelty in strictly
physical terms. And it is unique. Sentience
is not enshrined in US law - yet.
"We are living through an ethical
revolution when it comes to animals,"
says Linzey. "We are shifting from
seeing them as objects, commodities,
resources, to seeing them as beings
in their own right." He says that
the status of children and animals have
been linked throughout history, both
having been regarded at one time as
the property of their parents and owners
respectively. Societies that have a
bad record on human rights tend also
to have a bad record on animal welfare.
It is significant, he says, that several
Chinese delegates will be attending
the meeting in London, which is organised
by Compassion in World Farming, a group
that campaigns for the abolition of
factory farming.
Peter Li, a political scientist at the
University of Houston-Downtown, Texas,
says that no comprehensive animal cruelty
legislation exists in China and animal
welfare has only been debated there
at all in the last four years. One of
the triggers for the discussion was
the tracing of the severe acute respiratory
syndrome (Sars) epidemic to poor animal
husbandry and, in particular, overcrowded
cages.
It may be early days for China, but
elsewhere research on animal sentience
is beginning to inform approaches to
animal welfare and husbandry. One of
the big problems with farmed fish, for
instance, is their vulnerability to
predators, because having been raised
in hatcheries, they never learn to fear
them. It turns out that fish release
chemical alarm cues when they sense
danger, and that in a natural population,
fish that have survived encounters with
predators give off these cues, triggering
a fear response in others and teaching
them to avoid those predators. According
to Kevin Laland, who studies social
learning in fish at the University of
St Andrews, this kind of teaching is
an example of fish culture. Among fish,
different social groups maintain different
traditions which are passed from generation
to generation. A tradition may be the
path they take through a coral reef,
or the tendency to return to a certain
mating site, or as in this case, the
knowledge that a predator is dangerous.
He says one potential solution to the
predation of farmed fish would be to
introduce into hatcheries fish with
experience of predators. "They
might release some chemical alarm cues
which the naive fish could pick up on,"
he says. That way, the naive fish would
learn to be scared.
Among whales and dolphins, too, hunting
techniques are passed on from individual
to individual. "One of the reasons
why the big whales may not have recolonised
areas from which they have been exterminated
by the whaling industry may be that
the cultural knowledge of how to hunt
that habitat was actually lost with
the animals that were killed,"
says Mark Simmonds, director of science
at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation
Society. Having served on the scientific
committee of the International Whaling
Commission for almost a decade, he is
used to conservation being discussed
in terms of numbers that can sustainably
be removed from the ocean. Now, he says,
it is clear that population boundaries
must be taken into account too, so that
pockets of local knowledge can be preserved.
Farming is also becoming more animal-centred,
says Roland Bonney, director of the
Food Animal Initiative (FAI) in Oxford.
He and his colleagues are developing
housing for pigs that provides them
with a woodchip floor to root in - thereby
satisfying their natural instinct to
dig. But there is still a long way to
go. For instance, free range hens are
seen as the animal-friendly alternative
to battery hens, but it turns out they
have problems of their own: a tendency
to peck at each others' feathers and
in extreme cases, to cannibalise. In
1985, Kim Cheng of the University of
British Columbia noticed that congenitally
blind hens did not do this, and that
blind hens might even be less susceptible
to stress than sighted ones. He suggested
breeding blind, free range hens as a
solution. But Bonney says this would
not be acceptable to him or, he believes,
to the public at large. Instead, the
FAI is conducting research into why
pecking occurs at all.
"There do not seem to be scientific
reasons to think that [blind hens] have
a welfare problem," says Peter
Sandøe, a bioethicist at the
Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University
in Copenhagen, Denmark. "Still
most people would think that it is wrong.
In general, science gives important
but often rather narrow insights into
animal welfare." In 2000, for instance,
a European Commission report recommended
that 30kg per square metre was the maximum
density at which broiler hens should
be kept. But, says Sandøe, "There
is clear evidence suggesting a linear
relationship between density and stress
[in broiler hens], so there is no obvious
cut-off point."
Without a reliable way of gauging animals'
subjective experiences, he says, animal
welfare has to be based largely on common
sense. Some farm animal welfare councils
are taking this on board, but the European
Commission animal welfare committees
are still populated solely by scientists.
Unless scientists admit that many of
their decisions are arbitrary, Sandøe
believes they will discredit the real
science, allowing sceptics in countries
with little or no animal protection
to laugh off their efforts, along with
pig murder trials and Gary Larson cartoons.
Animal Trials
New gloves for the hangman and a dress
for the pig
In his book, The Criminal Prosecution
and Capital Punishment of Animals, 19th
century American scholar Edward Payson
Evans chronicles animal trials that
took place, mainly in Europe, between
the ninth and 19th centuries.
Evans' account was taken from the earlier
published records of one Bartholomé
Chassenée, a 16th century French
jurist who made his reputation as counsel
for an unspecified number of rats. The
rats were prosecuted in the ecclesiastical
court of Autun for having feloniously
eaten and wantonly destroyed local barley.
One of the most notorious cases Evans
describes was the public execution in
1386 of an infanticidal sow in the French
town of Falaise. Having been convicted
by a court of law, the sow was dressed
in human clothes and executed in the
main square by an official hangman who
had been given a new pair of gloves
to mark the solemnity of the occasion.
Sometimes the condemned were offered
clemency. According to Evans, youth
could be grounds for acquittal, as in
the prosecution of a sow and her six
piglets for having murdered and partly
devoured a child. The was sentenced
to death, but the piglets were acquitted
on account of their immaturity and the
bad example set them by their mother.
In all, Evans records around 200 animal
trials in this period, the last one
being the trial of a dog in Délémont,
Switzerland, in 1906.
Further reading
The Evolution of Morality and Religion
Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521529247
Donald Broom on the precursors of our
moral code
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital
Punishment of Animals Faber & Faber,
ISBN 057114893X.
EP Evans's account of animal trials
from the ninth to 19th centuries
Though the Heavens May Fall Da Capo
Press, ISBN 0738206954.
Steven Wise on the trial of a black
slave, James Somerset
Compassion in World Farming 2003 report
on sentience in farm animals
www.animalsentience.com/images/Sentience_report_2003.pdf
