What is it like to be an animal?

James Rattee:

This is my cat, Otis. I spend much of my days staring at him, wondering exactly what he's thinking and feeling. Who are you Otis? What do you want?

Welcome back to a new season of LSE IQ. This is the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question. I'm James Rattee from the IQ team. We work with academics to bring you their latest research and ideas. Inspired by Otis, in this episode, I'll be asking, "What is it like to be an animal?" We'll travel to the local park to find out how smart dogs are. We'll hear about a campaign arguing that chimpanzees should be classed as people with their own rights. And finally, we'll ask whether insects and other invertebrates have feelings.

Associate Professor Jonathan Birch leads the Foundations of Animal Sentience Project, which is based at LSE. While research into animal sentience is relatively new, Jonathan told me that interest in animal's subjective experience has a long history.

Jonathan Birch:

Even in ancient Greece, Aristotle had this notion of a sensitive soul. Plants have merely nutritive souls, they merely grow, but animals have sensitive souls, they're sentient, they feel things.

James Rattee:

So what do we mean by sentience?

Jonathan Birch:

I think sentience is feeling. It's from the Latin for, to feel, it's the capacity to have feelings. And feelings are states that we are very familiar with from our own lives, they include joy, happiness, pain, pleasure, comfort, thirst, hunger, warmth, they can be anything from quite basic bodily sensations to quite complicated emotions. To be sentient is just to have feelings, for there to be something it feels like, to be living your life from your point of view,

James Rattee:

Animal subjectivity is a topic that is also long fascinated Professor Kristin Andrews, the York Research Chair in Animal Minds at York University, Toronto. Her interest in animals, like many of us, began at an early age.

Kristin Andrews:

It's funny, it's one of those, I think, kind of typical children's stories, that I loved animals. When I was a kid, we adopted a stray cat, I watched Flipper on TV, you know that show with the dolphin?

James Rattee:

Yes.

Kristin Andrews:

And I just always thought that the animals were really interesting, and that they had a lot to teach me. And so when I was doing my undergraduate studies at Antioch College, I had opportunity to visit a dolphin cognition research lab, and I just completely fell for the research as well.

James Rattee:

And do you think, as a species, we have a little bit of a head start with our experience with having our own pets?

Kristin Andrews:

So when humans are living in close proximity with animals, they develop a sort of expertise about those species, the same way parents develop expertise about children without any formal training. And of course it's not scientific, but it is a rich folk knowledge from which the science is built up from. And we do have a head start when it comes to the animals that live in our houses. Looks like with dogs, and perhaps with cats, there have been these co-evolutionary processes between human beings and dogs, and that we've maybe domesticated one another as well. And this research on dog cognition, or dog-nition, that's sprung up over the last 10 years or so, I think has been extremely promising. It's a really good place for us to start in understanding other animal minds.

James Rattee:

One important aspect of dognition is intelligence. Knowing how smart an animal is, is surely a good place to start if we're trying to figure out how animals experience the world. LSE research fellow Rosalind Arden specializes in canine intelligence. We met in the popular dog hangout, Regents Park, where she told me her work can be traced back to her own dog, jenny.

Rosalind Arden:

My daughter said, "Oh, I want a dog. I want something that just loves me unconditionally." So I said, "No, no, no, not on your name, I'm not getting a dog, never will, never dream of it." And of course, six weeks later we had a dog. And this dog just kind of sat on my feet throughout most of my PhD being absolutely adorable, and I really invested heavily in her, I think, because we were alone together a lot. And I would notice that she would know things that I hadn't taught her. So things like come and sit, I taught her explicitly and it wasn't surprising to me that she learned those things. But one day, I was talking to my partner, and I said, "Hey, I wonder if David's coming around?" And Jenny, the dog, just immediately flipped her head around to the window and looked as if to see if his car was coming up the drive, or that's what it appeared to be.

And then I thought, oh man, she's picked up what we would call an acoustic signal, the sound of a word, and she's made it associated with that real thing, David, my son. And she is looking to see, in the only plausible place, which is the direction he could maybe be coming from. So I started to notice things, and I would notice, say, for example, if I would say, "Hey, look at that bird," she'd immediately look up at the sky, nowhere else. And I thought, ah, I think she's picked up some language without me actually teaching it to her explicitly. She's just made that association. And then I just started thinking, you know what? I'd love to be systematic and learn about this a little bit more.

James Rattee:

So, how did Rosalind set about devising a series of tests to measure dog IQ?

Rosalind Arden:

Well, the first thing I thought about was what's a dog trying to do in its dog life? And I thought, okay, well a dog will want to be able to estimate size, he'll want to know who to take on and who to back off from. It's probably an advantage to know the difference between bigger and smaller. A dog, I thought, will want to know how to get out. And a dog will want to know how to read others' intentions to some extent, particularly human's intentions, because dogs have co-evolved with humans.

James Rattee:

Rosalind quickly realized that dog IQ should be measured in terms of skills that dogs need. In other words, dog IQ is about how well they dog, not how well they human. With this in mind, she set about constructing some tests to assess variations in intelligence between dogs.

Rosalind Arden:

I mean, it was very funny because I was just so confident that this was going to be a piece of cake, and I was so wrong. So these really well experienced dog people in Wales had a barn, and I'd get calls from them, sitting at my desk in London, and they'd be saying things like, "We've set up the testing room and he just came in and just peed on everything." There was one test that we did which involved comparing bigger and smaller, and so we had paper plates with peanut butter smeared on them, within concentric circles. And I was being the dog, crawling around on the floor, trying to figure out what height was the right height, and which field vision the dog had, so that we could figure out how to make the test work.

James Rattee:

Rosalind's work is still in its early stages, but she has come to some important conclusions. Firstly, her findings indicate that a dog's intelligence is structured much like her own, if they're good at one task, they tend to be good at another. And this suggests there is such a thing as general intelligence in dogs. But how intelligent are dogs when compared to other species?

Rosalind Arden:

I think a dog has evolved to do dog things, and a camel has evolved to do camel things, so I think the question is kind of bonkers. Having said that, it's quite obvious that some animals have great behavioral, flexible repertoires, and I'm not denying that. But I think asking whether or not a camel or an octopus is smarter is kind of a dumb question.

James Rattee:

So, we shouldn't be pitting dogs against cats, or llamas versus sea lions, in an intelligence link table. More importantly, intelligence shouldn't be used to justify why certain animals are worthy of our care and attention.

Rosalind Arden:

We don't love dogs for their intelligence, we love them for who they are, like our kids, and our friends, and our colleagues. We don't assess people just on their intelligence to figure out if we want them to be close to us. It is not the case that, I think, the more intelligent animals ought to be treated well and the less intelligent animals should be treated poorly. Not at all. I think it's more a case of using intelligence as a bait to get humans to think more carefully about other species. There is some evidence that in primates, when people learn something about the richness of the primate brain through empirical work, getting out in popular science, that people started thinking, we shouldn't be locking them up in cages and just having them live with a concrete floor. We should be treating them better than that.

James Rattee:

In 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed a lawsuit in New York, demanding that a chimp named Tommy be given legal rights.

Reporter 1:

Tommy is 26 years old and lives in Gloversville. He is living in a cage at the home of a Fulton County businessman, Patrick Lavery. A group called the Nonhuman Rights Project argues that Lavery has no right to keep Tommy.

James Rattee:

The conditions were pretty awful, and inspired the Nonhuman Rights Project to take action.

Reporter 2:

That's how we treat a human criminal who's committed the worst kind of offenses, we put them in solitary confinement in a cage. These beings had never harmed anyone, and yet they suffer, the way we would suffer, in a cage in solitary confinement.

James Rattee:

The case attracted a lot of publicity because it argued that humans aren't the only species deserving of rights. Tommy, they argued, should be considered as a nonhuman person, and that to be a person necessarily means you have rights, and those rights should prohibit people like Lavery being able to own and confine chimpanzees.

Reporter 2:

So legal person means that you count in a courtroom, you're not invisible to the judges.

James Rattee:

Kristin Andrews followed Tommy's story closely, and highlights why the case is significant in terms of how, as a society, we need to rethink how we understand animals.

Kristin Andrews:

One thing that is important to know, to begin with, is that the legal grounding for personhood and rights, what you have is a situation such that you are either a person who's granted legal rights, or you are an entity, you're an object and you don't have legal rights, so you can be owned, you can be bought and you can be sold. And when it comes to things like tables and chairs, and books and other objects, it's very easy to categorize them into the objects, the things that don't have rights, and we can buy them and sell them. And when it comes to human beings, it's very easy to categorize them as persons with rights, who can't be bought or sold.

But then we have this whole set of beings in the middle that neither seem like books or chairs, or human beings, and these are the nonhuman animals. So when you have a nonhuman animal that's being treated in a way that seems to be problematic, say they're being locked up in a prison, like the chimpanzees in this case in New York. So you can't argue that he's a person with rights because he's a chimpanzee, and in the legal context, if you're not a person with rights, you're an object like a book or a chair. And so Steven Weiss with the Nonhuman Rights Project was arguing that, in fact, chimpanzees and other animals should be seen as persons, with rights, and not like books without rights.

James Rattee:

Whether some animals should have rights is a contentious subject. Jonathan Birch is skeptical about Tommy's case.

Jonathan Birch:

When people have wanted to argue that some animals should have rights akin to human rights, the argument has typically been, these animals meet all the criteria for personhood. That said, it hasn't been entirely successful so far, and it doesn't surprise me. I think there are real limits to an approach that involves trying to get courts to recognize animal rights before the rest of society, and before Parliaments and Congress, are there. It's never really been a rights based approach, what we have is animal welfare laws that put limits on people, and limit what people are allowed to do, and legally that is an important difference.

James Rattee:

The argument against animal rights is not just that animals are not people, but that we already have animal welfare laws and practices. Animal welfare has, on the whole, improved in recent years. So why are people arguing for rights for animals like Tommy, and not just stronger animal welfare laws?

Kristin Andrews:

When you're thinking about animal welfare, you're still thinking about animals as objects, owned by us. Animal welfare is about the proper handling of material, is one way of putting it. So we have laws about how to handle nuclear material, and animal welfare is kind of like that, it's kind of saying, well, when you're handling a chicken in a chicken facility, you need to handle them such that they have this much space, they have this much light, and so on and so forth. But, you're not respecting them as valuable in and of themselves, there is no attention paid to the individual as something that's an autonomous being, as opposed to something that has importance in a relational way, that they have instrumental value related to human beings. And I think that when you start talking about animal rights, as opposed to just animal welfare, it really forces you to stop thinking in a paternalistic way about animals, as in, how can we handle them in order to achieve our goals, while being good people and not torturing anybody?

James Rattee:

You're listening to LSE IQ. In this episode, we are asking, "What's it like to be an animal?" As opposed to animal welfare, animal rights, i.e. giving some animals personhood, would fundamentally shift how society understands animals. For the first time, we would say that at least some animals are not objects, but are nonhuman people with their own intrinsic rights. So far, the idea has not succeeded in the courtroom.

Reporter 3:

In the first case of its kind, a New York appeals court has rejected an animal rights advocate's bid to extend legal personhood to chimpanzees. The court has said the animals are incapable of bearing the responsibilities that come with having legal rights.

James Rattee:

Tommy's case ultimately ended in failure, although one of the judges presiding over the case has subsequently expressed reservations about his ruling, conceding, while it may be arguable that a chimpanzee is not a person, there is no doubt that it is not merely a thing. The path to personhood clearly faces a lot of barriers.

Kristin Andrews:

If you offer rights to a chimpanzee, who's next? And is it going to be a chicken and a cow? Or a pig? And if I like to eat chickens and cows and pigs, does that mean I have to stop eating chickens and cows and pigs? I think that's a real blockage, and I think that it's a blockage that it's important to be really sympathetic to. It's a culture that people have grown up in, eating these animals, and it's not going to be a switch, throwing a switch, seeing a legal argument, or a philosophical argument, isn't going to make people think or feel that what they've been doing their whole life has been horrific. But with lots of other cases of social justice, I think that we see changes that happen over generations.

James Rattee:

While there are challenges, the case for animal rights is only just beginning. It's important to remember that ascribing personhood to all humans has had a long and painful history. Developing a more robust definition of personhood is therefore vital if we are to create a better society. Kristen has been playing a crucial role in this. She has been developing a better definition of what it means to be a person, both nonhuman and human, and has devised what can be described as a cluster based approach.

Kristin Andrews:

My work in this project was kind of detailing what it is to be a person with rights, what these properties are, what sort of capacities you might have, what sort of relationships you might have, in order to be deemed a person, and to argue that chimpanzees in fact have a lot of these properties, like humans who are babies, who maybe don't have a lot of cognitive capacities yet. Or even like humans who don't have a lot of friends and just like to be by themselves. That, in fact, what we see is not, hey, you have to have this particular thing, you have to have language, or you have to have metacognition, or you have to have theory of mind, in order to be a person, because we know humans who lack all of those things.

Instead, in my work, what I've been arguing is that we have a cluster concept of a person. So you think about all of these properties that we associate with human beings, that we are in relationships with others, we have empathy, we are moral. We have language, we have metacognition, except when we don't. And we look to see what sort of clusters of those properties exist in other species as well. So it's not that you need to have any one of those in particular, but if you have an array of those, then you're more like the human-case than you are like the bookcase, and you ought to be granted rights the way human beings are, and if you don't want to be locked in a garage, you shouldn't be locked in a garage.

James Rattee:

Personhood in animals or humans cannot be boiled down to one characteristic. It's not necessarily about being smart, or good at one particular thing, but what are some of the possible aspects of personhood?

Kristin Andrews:

So, rationality is one of the properties that often gets presented as really important for personhood, or a rights bearer. And rationality was a property that for a very long time was associated purely with humans. Aristotle called human the rational animal, after all. And it took some time before humans became smart enough to realize that other animals are also rational. Some of this came from research and labs doing experiments.

This is an old story, too, the story of Chrysippus’s dog, a story where the dog was chasing a hare down a path, and the path forked into three different paths. The dog sniffed the first path, the dog sniffed the second path, and then without sniffing, ran down the third path. That's an example of reasoning from exclusion, that's a logical reasoning capacity.

Another property that's associated with personhood over the years has been empathy. Chimpanzees have been shown to help other chimpanzees cross busy roads that cut through their environments. This is usually an alpha male leading a group, single file, across a road. The photos are brilliant.

So a lot of these properties having to do with intelligence or rationality or mental time travel, and others more social, like empathy and morality, kind of come together to form this richer picture of a person as someone who's smart and caring, who's got intelligence and also fellow feeling.

James Rattee:

Is this clustered approach to understanding the rights of animals, will that need to be applied with each particular species?

Kristin Andrews:

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that right now we're at a position where going species by species actually makes some sense, or at least maybe taxes, looking at say great apes and looking at old world monkeys, and new world monkeys, and looking at citations.

James Rattee:

There must be a tension between seeing things that are similar, but also recognizing difference, variety, so you're not going around in your own mini-Disney movie thinking they're all exactly like me.

Kristin Andrews:

Yeah, and I think one of the things that really complements understanding the diversity in animal species is understanding the diversity among humans. So once you start seeing that, even within your own culture, you have neuro-diversity, you can't assume that all people are going to be just like you in, the way they respond to situations, the way they feel their cognitive capacities. And then, once you realize also, that across cultures, people are going to be responding differently, there are different cultural norms and social norms, that there's a ton of diversity among humans.

I think it makes it easier to see the diversity in other species as well, and not be afraid of diversity, and not think, oh, the chimpanzee has to be just like me in order to be valuable. No, the chimpanzee doesn't. There are very few people who are just like me, and that's great. There's a lot of interesting sets of properties out there, and I think our challenge is finding out what those sets of properties are, and appreciating the different ways in which they cluster. What kind of persons are they? And what sort of rights should we ascribe to them, given their own needs and interests?

James Rattee:

Kristin's conception of personhood embraces the idea of animal diversity. It also links back to Rosalind Arden's work on dog IQ, which asks us to think about the world from a dog's point of view. Just because an animal is different doesn't mean it hasn't got its own rich inner life. But how far does this go? Can we empathize with animals that are very different from us? What about an octopus? Or a lobster? Rights for these animals are certainly not being considered by lawmakers at this stage, but they are thinking about their welfare and their capacity to experience feelings. The sentience, or capacity for feeling, in invertebrates is one focus of Jonathan Birch's research. His work has resulted in the UK government calling for certain invertebrates, cephalopod mollusks such octopuses, and decapod crustaceans, things like crabs, to be regarded as sentient as part of the forthcoming animal welfare bill.

Jonathan Birch:

And I think there's quite a good case for trying to bring in some regulations on slaughter methods, at least, if nothing else, to try and stop some of the gratuitous and extreme slaughter methods that are often used on invertebrates, particularly crabs and lobsters. Things like dropping them in boiling water, where, I don't think anyone really thinks of that as best practice even now, but there's no law to stop it, not in the UK, and that to me would be a really simple and easy way to actually show that we care about these animals.

James Rattee:

And what about insects? How should we be thinking about that? This is the film classic, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Early on, the shrunken kids of the title meet and befriend an ant, then in a dramatic final scene, the ant sacrifices itself, defending the kids from a vicious scorpion.

Character 1:

He looks hurt.

Character 2:

No.

Character 3:

He saved my life.

James Rattee:

As an impressionable young child, the movie revolutionized how I thought about ants. No longer were they something to be trodden on, but a creature that should be treated with kindness and respect. So, should we be thinking about how we treat insects?

Jonathan Birch:

Yeah, I remember kids cutting up worms when I was a child as well. People are often casually cruel to invertebrates, and of course I oppose that. Yeah, it is very important that if we're going to impose harm on any animal that we think might be sentient, we have a good reason to do so. And so it's very important not to be gratuitously cruel in the way that stamping on animals for no reason, or cutting them up for no reason, or dropping them and boiling water for no reason, is gratuitous. And we certainly can't rule out the possibility that insects have feelings. If they do, they're implemented in a very different way to those of mammals, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that they have feelings. And so, if the evidence does tend in that direction, we'll have some tough questions about how we treat insects going forward.

Now, I think there really is something absurd about the idea of a ban on treading on insects or something like that, because something like that would be completely impractical and unenforceable. Nonetheless, there are real issues about insect farming, where you have these insect farms where millions and millions of insects are packed into tiny spaces, and then put through shredders, where that's currently outside the scope of animal welfare legislation completely. And you might think, well, if the evidence does point towards some insects having feelings, should it really be completely beyond the reach of animal welfare law? Or should we be trying to think about ways in which we could formulate some practical, sensible, proportionate regulations to make sure that people are not just gratuitously torturing insects?

James Rattee:

Whether we're thinking about animal rights or animal welfare, one thing is clear. There is a palpable interest in, and concern about animals, how they experience the world, and how we should relate to them. Where has this interest come from? And more importantly, where will it take us?

Kristin Andrews:

Well, there are two different kinds of answers I can give. One is a kind of funny, silly answer, which might actually be true, but the internet. So the internet of cats, and the internet of dogs, and all of these hilarious videos that we see all the time, brings animal into our houses, on our phones, and it's fascinating to watch, people love it. And it also shows us a really different side of animals when we see like a pig and a kitten becoming best friends, or a goose living in someone's house. I think that's had a certain effect, and from that things have kind of steamrolled a bit, so you see documentary films being made that've had a lot of impact.

But, another reason, and I don't know if it's really true or not, but I wonder to what extent people have been feeling like there's been a certain amount of good progress when it comes to social justice in humans, among human groups, obviously nowhere near perfect, I don't mean to imply that at all. But there's been progress, and appreciation of all sorts of difference, culturally, sexually, and as far as ability goes. These are being taught to my daughter in school. That's progress, that did not happen when I was 13. And it might be that people are feeling optimistic because there is so much, at least education and talk, about these topics, not yet translating into a lot of impacts on people's lives, I'm afraid, but it might be that people feel like, yeah, we can also start thinking about the interests of nonhuman animals as well, that we can't just stop at humans, that there's no real way to justify stopping at promoting the interests and welfare of humans who are different from me, but we can promote interests of all the sentient creatures.

James Rattee:

As we collectively strive to expand the circle of social justice for animals, I can't help but think what I should be doing, what role can I play in improving the lives of animals? I then hear a meow, and see my cat, Otis, patiently staring up at me. While I might not know exactly what is going on in his mind, I can tell he's hungry, and annoyed I haven't fed him yet. I better go feed him.

If you'd like to find out more about the research in this episode, please head to the show notes. And if you enjoy LSE IQ, please leave us a review. Next month on LSE IQ, Joanna Bale is asking, "Has COVID killed the office?"