Is anthropomor-fear finally behind us?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, zoology, animal studies, cognition

By one common definition, Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. Among zoologists, it has been considered a serious fallacy to use "anthropomorphic language" when speaking about animal behavior and the possible "internal state" of an animal. The fear of making animals "too human" has actually held back the valid study of animal thought and behavior, purposes, and feelings for more than a century.

The recent book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Franz de Waal, is a kind of manifesto that explores and validates studies of the ability of many species of animal to plan, use tools, make tools and even toolkits, deceive one another (and experimenters), and think in all sorts of ways that we, in our hubris, have long denied they can do.

Consider the opening story, of a female chimpanzee who takes straw bedding outside her sleeping enclosure, where we must surmise she expects to encounter chilly conditions. Dr. de Waal expresses the surprise he felt when she first did this. It was entirely unexpected. Later in the book we find that creatures as small as some spiders can also anticipate future conditions and make plans to deal with them. They are not just acting by "instinct," a term for which I have not encountered a satisfactory definition or explanation.

As a college student taking the occasional course in biology (I was a chemistry major at first, later a geology major), I heard the typical series of canards, that "animals will never do" something or other. When Jane Goodall reported tool creation and use by chimpanzees, Louis Leakey wrote, "…scientists are faced with three choices: They must accept chimpanzees as man, they must redefine man, or they must redefine tool." That was in 1967. Have we learned anything in the past half-century? Some have, but I fear most haven't. The author writes, "We routinely deny [animals] capacities that we take for granted in ourselves." (p. 7) He calls this attitude anthropodenial. (p. 30)

Some may be willing to "move the goalposts" a little, saying that chimps and perhaps other apes might do these things, but zoologists and naturalists continue to report more and more species that make and use tools, including crows, elephants, sea otters, and octopuses. Would Louis Leakey advocate accepting octopuses as humans? The brain of an octopus is only partly localized; most of it is spread through the body, such that a severed arm can move about on its own for quite a while. How can a human and an octopus "get into each other's heads", when those heads are so different? But scientists are trying.

Rather than belabor examples, let me come to his most useful conclusion: "There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival." So, whether the cognition of a snail, for example, is "simpler" than ours, all we can say for certain is that it is different. Snails aren't as social as we are, for example, but they do prefer the company of their kind, unlike most felines, which prefer solitude and only meet to mate or fight. Whatever amount of brains they need, however, snails are certainly a successful group of species: by the latest count there are about 70,000 species of them, and half of those are terrestrial, the land snails and tree snails. There is only one species of human.

I wonder how our best athletes would fare in a track meet proctored by cheetahs or antelopes, both of which can run faster than 50 mph? How about a rock-climbing meet, competing with bighorn sheep? Could we compete in color discrimination with snapping shrimp, which have ten kinds of color receptors in their eyes, whereas we have four (one works in low light, the other three by daylight)? We have a hard time seeing in murky water. Bullfrogs can see infrared light, which cuts through the murk better. Many creatures also see ultraviolet light that we can't see. Different senses (there are many more!) mean that animals sense a world we don't sense, and so to cope with it they must think thoughts we don't think, and cannot think.

What about feelings? Ask any pet owner. We all know dogs are very loving. Cats? usually not so much, but some are and some aren't (kind of like many people). And take a look at these three animals, rescues, who turn to one another for companionship and comfort.

When we lived in Oklahoma, one of the farmers that lived a few miles north of town plowed with draft horses. He said, "Their feed costs less than gasoline for a tractor, they start right up on a cold morning, and they greet me enthusiastically every day." I've seen his horses rubbing against him with great affection. There's no other way to describe it. I've also seen a very resentful look on our cat's face when we must delay giving her a meal or a treat, if the delay goes on too long. Yes, I know cats don't have so mobile a face as humans, but they can show feelings, and we soon learn to "read" them. Dr. de Waals reports lab studies that also show now emotional animals are.

This points up a contention I have long had, which the book notes in its own way, that it is quite logical to attribute thinking and feeling to animals that is similar to ours, because we came from them. Our feelings didn't arise by magic when our brains grew to a size of 3 pounds. Great apes, with their one-pound brains have the same feelings, and probably with nearly equal intensity. But they also can show remarkable self-restraint. When we say someone is "behaving like an animal", we are condemning lack of self-control. Actually, many animals are better at that than most people!

I also understand why so many people are unwilling to allow that any animals have a self-concept, or thinking ability. Some still claim they don't feel pain the way we do. Why is this? It is so our conscience won't feel bad when we abuse them. That explains nearly everything about poor treatment of animals. Maybe this book and others sure to follow will begin to break the logjam of scientific opinion and, even more, the thick-headed attitude that we can treat other thinking and feeling creatures just any way we like.