article on animal consciousness in WSJ today

October 27, 2006

Hello --

The Wall Street Journal has published a story today entitled " What your pet is

thinking " -- here are a couple of notes from it as it's a long article -- this

is great fodder to use in any discussions you might have on animal welfare

issues, as the Journal is a conservative publication -- an argument in it for

animal consciousness is a powerful one for those who are skeptics of " left-wing "

media.

Key thesis: ...Researchers around the world are providing tantalizing evidence

that animals not only learn and remember but that they may also have

consciousness -- in other words, they may be capable of thinking about their

thoughts and knowing that they know.

Key point: ...The research is also coloring thinking about everything from

science labs to farms and food-production facilities. Having demolished concrete

cages in favor of naturalistic enclosures, many zoos are also offering animals

" environmental enrichment " designed to exercise their minds, and housing them in

social groups where they can express their emotions. The nonprofit Great Ape

Project, Seattle, is campaigning on behalf of the primates for " life, liberty

and protection against torture. " And this year a member of the Spanish

parliament introduced a resolution to protect great apes from " maltreatment,

slavery, torture, death and extinction. " Federal animal-welfare acts have long

required researchers who use primates to take into account their " psychological

well-being, " but researchers say more institutions that use lab dogs, rabbits

and other small animals are voluntarily adopting the rules. " Without question,

these discoveries [on animal awareness] are having an effect, " says Wayne

Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of the Humane Society of the U.S.

.... And if chimps and monkeys have hints of consciousness, do less-brainy

animals have it, too? Does that mean people shouldn't hunt them, imprison them

or eat them? Opponents of experimenting on animals say creatures as low on the

evolutionary ladder as rats and mice are capable of suffering, even if they

can't engage in self-reflection.

Karen

_______________

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October 27, 2006

Hello again -- I have had a few requests for the entire article as the WSJ site

is a pay-to-access site, so here it is -- Karen

What Your Pet is Thinking

By SHARON BEGLEY

October 27, 2006; Page W1

From the day they brought her home, the D'Avellas' black-and-white mutt loathed

ringing phones. At the first trill, Jay Dee would bolt from the room and howl

until someone picked up. But within a few weeks, the D'Avellas began missing

calls: When the phone rang, their friends later told them, someone would pick up

and then the line would go dead.

One evening, Aida D'Avella solved the mystery. Sitting in the family room of her

Newark, N.J., home, Ms. D'Avella got up as the phone rang, but the dog beat her

to it. Jay Dee ran straight to the ringing phone, lifted the receiver off the

hook in her jaws, replaced it and returned contentedly to her spot on the rug.

Just about every pet lover has a story about the astonishing intelligence of his

cat, dog, bird, ferret or chinchilla. Ethologists, the scientists who study

animal behavior, have amassed thousands of studies showing that animals can

count, understand cause and effect, form abstractions, solve problems, use tools

and even deceive. But lately scientists have gone a step further: Researchers

around the world are providing tantalizing evidence that animals not only learn

and remember but that they may also have consciousness -- in other words, they

may be capable of thinking about their thoughts and knowing that they know.

In the past few years, top journals have been publishing reports on

self-awareness in dolphins and wild chimps whose different nut-cracking

" technologies " constitute unique cultures. Others argue that rats have a sense

of fun, mice show empathy for cage-mates and scrub jays are capable of " mental

time travel " that enables them to remember where they stashed worms and seeds.

While researchers have yet to attain the field's holy grail -- proving that

animals are self-aware -- the findings already have broad implications. For the

69 million U.S. households that own a pet, such knowledge might lead owners to

question their animal companions' awareness of what they're fed, how they're

housed and how often the kitty litter is changed. All of that would be a boon

for the pet industry, which generates $38 billion in annual revenue, according

to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, selling everything from

food and grooming services to pet exercise gear, hotels and psychics.

Drug companies are already addressing animals' feelings. Some 15 million dogs

have taken Pfizer Inc.'s animal pain-reliever Remadyl. The company's Anipryl

targets " cognitive dysfunction syndrome " in dogs. (In a dog, symptoms include

failing to recognize people or respond to its name and getting lost in the

house.) Experts expect a steady stream of drugs aimed at pets' minds instead of

bodies.

The research is also coloring thinking about everything from science labs to

farms and food-production facilities. Having demolished concrete cages in favor

of naturalistic enclosures, many zoos are also offering animals " environmental

enrichment " designed to exercise their minds, and housing them in social groups

where they can express their emotions. The nonprofit Great Ape Project, Seattle,

is campaigning on behalf of the primates for " life, liberty and protection

against torture. " And this year a member of the Spanish parliament introduced a

resolution to protect great apes from " maltreatment, slavery, torture, death and

extinction. " Federal animal-welfare acts have long required researchers who use

primates to take into account their " psychological well-being, " but researchers

say more institutions that use lab dogs, rabbits and other small animals are

voluntarily adopting the rules. " Without question, these discoveries [on animal

awareness] are having an effect, " says Wayne Pacelle, president and chief

executive officer of the Humane Society of the U.S.

And if chimps and monkeys have hints of consciousness, do less-brainy animals

have it, too? Does that mean people shouldn't hunt them, imprison them or eat

them? Opponents of experimenting on animals say creatures as low on the

evolutionary ladder as rats and mice are capable of suffering, even if they

can't engage in self-reflection.

Some researchers say humans may be a bit too eager to attribute high-level

mental functioning to animals, and end up inferring mental states that don't

exist. Bonnie Beaver, professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A & M University

and former president of the American Veterinary Medicine Association, says that

when dogs act distressed in a boarding kennel, they're showing unfamiliarity

with the surroundings, not resentment that their owner is vacationing in Bali.

And if a dog looks guilty over leaving a mess on the rug, it is being

submissive, she says, not showing a more complex emotion. " Most times, " she

says, " owners are reading things that are not there. "

Not too long ago, scientists scoffed at the idea that animals could have

consciousness. Philosophers haggle endlessly about the meaning of the word, of

course. But they generally agree that it isn't enough to solve problems, learn

or remember -- a semiconductor can do that -- but to be aware of the contents of

one's own mind. When it comes to animals, the question " was thought of as

impossible to answer with objective observations, " says Clive Wynne, an

associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Now

he sees an increase in such studies aimed at discovering what's going on inside

animals' heads.

At the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Robert Hampton, who

has made some of the field's most significant findings, studies whether rhesus

monkeys know if they know something. In one series of experiments, he gave the

monkeys memory tests over a period of weeks. After seeing four images on a

monitor, the monkeys would be asked to choose which one they had seen before.

But before taking the test, the monkeys had a choice of pressing one of two

icons whose meaning they already knew. One meant, " Yup, I'm ready to take the

test. " The other meant, " No test for me, thanks. " They had an incentive to take

it only if they remembered the target image: Failing the test brought them no

reward, passing it got them a handful of peanuts, and declining to take the test

got them monkey-chow pellets, which they don't like as much as peanuts but are

better than nothing.

When the monkeys chose to take the test, they passed more than 80% of the time,

apparently declining to take the test when their memory was poor. When they

weren't given a choice and Prof. Hampton gave them the test anyway, they chose

the correct image much less often. That suggests they knew the contents of their

memory and assessed it before deciding whether to take the test -- a sign of

self-reflective consciousness. " The monkeys know whether they remember

something, " says Prof. Hampton, who reported his latest monkey findings in May

in the journal Behavioural Processes.

A key ingredient of consciousness is having a sense of self, a feeling that

there's a " you " inside your brain. One sign of that is being able to imagine

yourself in a different time and place. Some scientists have said that's why

chimps in a forest pick up a stone so that they can crack a nut that they left

far away, and why New Caledonian crows make hook-shaped devices to fish for

bugs.

But maybe, skeptics say, chimps and crows learned that a rock, or hook, equals

lunch and just act reflexively. To try to rule this out, scientists at the Max

Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, taught

orangutans and bonobos, considered the great apes closest to humans, how to use

tools to snare grapes that were otherwise out of reach. Then they gave the

animals a chance to take the right tools into a " waiting room, " where they were

kept for times ranging from five minutes to overnight, before being led back to

the room with the grapes. The clever move, of course, was to grab a tool before

going to the waiting room.

All 10 animals managed this at least sometimes, the researchers reported in May

in the journal Science. Because the animals had to plan so far ahead, the

scientists argue, the experiment showed an ability to anticipate needs. " It's

hard to argue that these animals do not have consciousness, " says primatologist

Frans de Waal at Yerkes.

Dissenters argue that any behavior that meets a basic need such as hunger

shouldn't be ascribed to anything as lofty as consciousness. More and more,

however, scientists are observing what they call altruistic behavior that has no

evident purpose. Prof. de Waal once watched as a bonobo picked up a starling.

The bonobo carried it outside its enclosure and set the bird on its feet. When

it didn't fly away, the ape took it to higher ground, carefully unfolded its

wings and tossed it into the air. Still having no luck, she stood guard over it

and protected it from a young bonobo that was nearby.

Since such behavior doesn't help the bonobo to survive, it's unlikely to be

genetically programmed, says Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor of ecology and

evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. If a person acted

this way, " we would say this reflects planning, thought and caring, " he adds.

" When you see behaviors that are too flexible and variable to be preprogrammed,

you have to consider whether they are the result of true consciousness. "

In June, scientists reported new insights about compassion in African elephants.

These animals often seem curious about the bodies of dead elephants, but no one

knew whether they felt compassion for the dying or dead. A matriarch in the

Samburu Reserve in northern Kenya, which researchers had named Eleanor,

collapsed in October 2003. Grace, matriarch of a different family, walked over

and used her tusks to lift Eleanor onto her feet, according to Iain

Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Animals, Nairobi, and colleagues at the University

of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley, reporting in the journal

Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

But Eleanor was too shaky to stand. Grace tried again, this time pushing Eleanor

to walk, but Eleanor again fell. Grace appeared " very stressed, " called loudly

and often, and kept nudging and pushing Eleanor. Although she failed, Grace

stayed with the dying elephant as night fell. Eleanor died the next day.

Grace's interest in an unrelated animal can't be explained by her genetic

disposition to help a close relative, a behavior that's been well established.

The scientists instead argue that the elephant was showing compassion. Mr.

Douglas-Hamilton has also seen elephants guard and help unrelated elephants who

have been hit by tranquilizer darts to let researchers tag the animals. Since

standing by an animal that has been shot puts the other animals in harm's way,

it's hard to argue self-interest.

Critics say that consciousness is in the eye of besotted observers, and animals

are no more than stimulus-response machines. Florida's Prof. Wynne, for one, is

skeptical that chimps know what they know. " To know one's own mental states does

not necessarily imply conscious awareness, " he says. " You can be unconsciously

aware of what you know. " Game-show contestants, for instance, sometimes press a

buzzer to answer before they consciously know the answer -- knowing

unconsciously that they know.

Anyone whose dog has ever run to the front door, leash in its mouth, assumes

that animals form intentions. But that might also reflect dumb learning: the dog

figured out that leash equals walk. A computer could be rigged to learn the same

cause-and-effect relationship. Some scientists also see intentionality when

beavers plug holes in their dam, bowerbirds build baroque nests, ants cultivate

fungus farms and plovers feign injury to lure predators away from their

hatchlings. But many researchers give genes, not conscious intentions, the

credit for these clever behaviors.

As for emotions, the conventional view has long been that while animals might

seem to be sad, happy, curious or angry, these weren't true emotions: The

creature didn't know that it felt any of these things. Daniel Povinelli of the

University of Louisiana, who has done pioneering studies of whether chimps

understand that people and other chimps have mental states, wonders whether

chimps are aware of their emotions: " I don't think there is persuasive evidence

of that. "

The trouble is that all sorts of animals -- from those in the African bush to

those in your living room -- keep acting as if they truly do have emotions

remarkably like humans'. Last month, Ya Ya, a panda in a Chinese zoo,

accidentally crushed her newborn to death. She seemed inconsolable -- wailing

and frantically searching for the tiny body. The keeper said that when he called

her name, she just looked up at him with tear-filled eyes before lowering her

head again. The conventional view is that these were instinctive, reflexive

reactions, and that Ya Ya didn't know she was sad. As the evidence for animal

consciousness piles up, that view becomes harder to support.

Write to Sharon Begley at sharon.begley

-------

> karenwitham

>

> article on animal consciousness in WSJ today

> Fri, 27 Oct 2006 13:40:22 -0400

>

> Hello --

>

> The Wall Street Journal has published a story today entitled " What your pet is