ASK THE ANIMALS AND THE WILL TELL YOU:

A LOOK AT ANIMAL SENTIENCE

PART THREE:  ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

“Crows hold a grudge, and they are big gossips.”   ~ Prof. David Craig

“Mice value self-actualizaton.”  ~ Dr. Jonathan Balcombe

In Part One of this series on animal sentience we looked at animals and physical pain.  In PartTwo, we looked at animals and emotions.  In this Part Three, we’ll take a look at animal intelligence.  Humans have consistently underestimated animal intelligence and awareness of the world around them.  We tend to believe that animals go through life with very little understanding of what is happening around them, responding to their environment instinctively.  It turns out, however, that animals are much more intelligent than we have previously believed.  They make choices, they have preferences, they plan for the future and remember the past, and, just like humans, they suffer from boredom if they do not have enough to occupy them.  These realities have an impact on what it means to treat animals humanely and what our obligations of right dominion include.

In considering our obligations to our fellow creatures, however, it is important to remember, as Marc Bekoff cautions, that “[i]ntelligence and suffering are not necessarily correlated, and clever animals don’t suffer more than less clever individuals.  . . .  even if animals don’t know who they are, they can still suffer, they can still be aware of their feelings, and they can still clearly tell us and other animals what they want and what they don’t want.”[1]  Likewise, Jonathan Balcombe tells us that “a less intelligent animal may experience life no less richly than a human, in the sensory realms.”[2]  

Moreover, he continues, “[i]n the emotional domain, it is far from clear that a monkey’s or a rabbit’s fear is felt less acutely than our own fear, or that feelings of affection, and subsequent grief at their loss, are duller between two parrots who mate for life than such feelings between two humans.”[3] Yet, while intelligence is not necessary to suffering and we should not assume that because an animal is less intelligent it suffers less, still, understanding the intellectual capacities of animals helps us to understand what their lives are like, so that we can better understand our obligations to care for them in our exercise of dominion.  

Balcombe explains that it is difficult to compare the intelligence of different kinds of animals, including the intelligence of nonhumans with humans.  It is like comparing the way animals move.  “Do fish move better than horses?  . . . Animals are as intelligent as they need to be.”[4]  Stories and study results demonstrating animals’ reason, memory, problem-solving, and intelligence abound, involving animals from chimps and dolphins to birds, fish and mice.  Balcombe observes: “[w]hen animals show the hallmarks of having a mind and thinking about things, down tumbles one of the most insidious and destructive ideas of all time:  that you need language to think.”[5]^,[6]   For instance, many animals think about and plan for the future.  Bekoff again:

… there are literally volumes of data showing that individuals of many species do think about the future, from Mexican jays, red foxes, and wolves caching feed for later retrieval, to a subordinate chimpanzee or wolf pretending that he doesn’t see a favored food item in the presence of a dominant individual and later returning to eat it when the dominant animal is not around.”[7] 

Laboratory mice (who, as you will recall, are not considered “animals” under laws governing the treatment of laboratory animals, and so lack even minimal protection from abuse) have demonstrated significant intelligence, learning extremely complex mazes in little time with no associated deprivation or reward and have shown “an almost obstinate insistence on exercising control over their environment.”[8] Balcombe recounts one experiment in which the scientist “noticed that the mice tended to resist ‘with astonishing vigor’ being forced to do something. . . . The conclusion: mice value self-actualizaton.”[9] Crows have also demonstrated significant intelligence.  For example, they make tools to solve problems.[10] Watch this video to see a crow using a hook to get food out of a tube.  

They also teach others in the flock and their young how to make and use tools once they have solved a problem.  Some scientists believe they may even be better at tool use than chimps.[11]  They also recognize individual humans, remember them for years, and can distinguish between those who are friendly and those who are dangerous, and they pass along their knowledge to others.  “Crows hold a grudge, and they are big gossips,” says Professor David Craig, co-author of the crow study, which appeared in Animal Behavior magazine, “They spread the information around.  If you're bad to one crow, many more may hear about it.”[12]

Moreover, many animals depend on a complex social structure for their well-being.  These animals display a sense of fair play and know right from wrong, in the sense of knowing what is expected among members of the group.  They may not philosophize about universal truths or the meaning of life, but they understand the rules by which they are expected to conduct themselves in the setting in which they operate.  In order to succeed within their groups, they need what Bekoff, describes as “morality,” which requires “cooperation, reciprocity, empathy, and helping.”[13]  Animal play “appears to rely on the universal human value of the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do to you.”[14]  This, he explains, requires empathy and implies reciprocity.  It also requires a sense of “fairness,” so when animals play together, those of greater size, strength, or social status, do not take advantage of those assets.[15]  Balcombe likewise explains that animals will “self-handicap” in play, so as not to be unfairly matched with a play partner.[16] Those who do well in play tend to be those who do well in the social setting.  Those who disregard the rules are not invited to play again.[17] The animal kingdom, Bekoff, Balcombe, and others have concluded, has more to do with cooperation than competition.   

All of this demonstrates that animals are very much involved in their surroundings.  They are engaged.  Treating animals humanely, therefore, includes the obligation to ensure that animals have surroundings that keep them engaged, give them things to do, and allow them to use their brains and their skills.  Keeping animals isolated in barren cages, for example, is its own special cruelty, wholly apart from whether the animal is in physical pain.  Yet it is a cruelty endured by so many animals in labs, in zoos, in circuses, factory farms, and other places.  God has created the animals with rich capacities for exploring the world He created.  As God’s representative to these creatures, we must allow them to use those capacities.  He created the animals – as he created humans – for joy and abundance.  We do Him and the animals – and ourselves – such a great disservice when we strip their lives to the minimal requirements for existence and then snuff out even that without so much as a thought.

We have a long way to go to do the job God has given us.   
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Photo credits:
Rabbits: By Camilo Gonzalez (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Crow: By Kkohli613 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 
Dogs playing: By Les Chatfield from Brighton, England (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons 

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[1] Bekoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals. Novato: New World Library, 2007, p. 28.

[2] Balcombe, Jonathan.  Second Nature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 16.

[3] Balcombe p. 16.

[4] Balcombe, p. 31.  He also notes that in some cases, nonhumans are “smarter” than humans.  In Japan, one study of cognition using chimpanzees required chimps to recall in sequence the numbers 1 through 9 randomly scattered on a computer screen.  One particular chimp excelled at this, regularly getting the entire sequence correct.  “Humans barely pass the test with just four or five numbers.” In a head-to-head competition with a human memory champion, “the chimp performed three times better.” Even “the average chimp scores twice as well as the average human on this short-term memory task” (32-33). 

[5] Balcombe, pp.  43-44.  Dr. Temple Grandin believes that animals think in the same way autistic people, such as Grandin herself, think: in visual images rather than words. (Scully, 244-45; Grandin, Thinking the Way Animals Do, Western Horseman, Nov. 1997, pp.140-145, http://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html.

[6] Descarte made clear that this limitation was not, in his view (or in the views of many influenced by him), restricted to the ability to think abstractly.  He asserted that it was clear that animals have no thoughts, and no ability to reason, at all.  See my earlier post, Why Has The Church Traditionally Taken A Different View?

[7] Bekoff, p. 14.

[8] Balcombe, p. 26.

[9] Balcombe., pp. 26-27.

[10] A. A. S. Weir, J. Chappell, A. Kacelnik, “Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows,” Science Magazine, 2002, http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/crow/; video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg.

[11] John Pickrell, “Crows Better at Tool Building Than Chimps, Study Says,” National GeographicMagazine, April 23, 2003,  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0423_030423_crowtools.html.

[12] Williamette University website, “Research Finds Crows Recognize and Remember Human Faces,” http://www.willamette.edu/people/archives/2010/02/crows.html.

[13] Bekoff, p. 88.  He distinguishes between morality, which he describes as “an essentially social phenomenon: it arises in the interactions between and among individuals, and it exists as a kind of webbing or social fabric that holds together a complicated tapestry of social relationships,” and ethics, which he views as suggesting “the contemplative study of subtle questions of rightness or fairness.”  Bekoff is “arguing that some animals have moral codes of behavior, but not that animals have ethics” (88, emphasis original).

[14] Bekoff, p. 87.

[15] Bekoff, pp. 87-96.

[16] Balcombe, pp. 129-30.

[17] Bekoff, p. 87.