Omnivore - The Antispeciesist Revolution: On Animal Intelligence, Personhood, and Morality

This collection of links on animal rights, animal intelligence, animal consciousness, animal morality, and a whole lot more, appeared on Bookforum's Omnivore blog a couple of weeks ago.


The antispeciesist revolution

AUG 6 2013 

9:00AM

• From The Humanist, Namit Arora on eating animals: Opposition to factory farming as an ethical starting point. 
• Should chimpanzees have legal rights? The “animal personhood” movement believes dolphins, great apes, and elephants deserve to be able to sue — and now it has a plaintiff. 
• On being an octopus: Peter Godfrey-Smith on diving deep in search of the human mind. 
• James McWilliams on radical activism and the future of animal rights. 
• Animals have thoughts, feelings and personality — why have we taken so long to catch up with animal consciousness? 
• Tom McClelland reviews Can Animals Be Moral? by Mark Rowlands. 
• If you know how a cow feels, will you eat less meat? Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus, students experience what it might feel like to be a cow. 
• An excerpt from Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory by Vaclav Smil. 
• Researchers find more evidence that dolphins use names. 
• David Pearce on the antispeciesist revolution. 
• Andrew C. Revkin on a closer look at “nonhuman personhood” and animal welfare. 
• The first chapter from Social Learning: An Introduction to Mechanisms, Methods, and Models by William Hoppitt and Kevin N. Laland. 
• Julie Hecht on how to teach language to dogs. 
• Peter Singer on the world's first cruelty-free hamburger: Today's tasting of in vitro meat could herald a future free from needless animal suffering and polluting factory farms.

Jason G. Goldman Reviews Virginia Morell’s "Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures"

At the University of Washington's Conservation journal, Jason Goldman offers a review of the new book from noted science writer, Virginia Morell, Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures. Her book explores the "frontiers of research on animal cognition and emotion, offering a surprising and moving exploration into the hearts and minds of wild and domesticated animals."

One of the chapters focused on some research by Victoria Braithwaite on pain experience and found that there is pretty solid evidence that fish experience pain.

Here is a snippet of the review to get your interest:

Animals “cannot argue for their rights or how they might best be treated or farmed or managed,” she says. “Most animals have no voice that we can hear, unless we speak up for them.” What seems absent from this argument is a discussion about animal rights versus animal welfare. (Braithwaite provides one answer: it is more ethical to use barbless hooks.) But this is a small quibble with an otherwise compelling book.

Sounds like an interesting book . . . wherever one stands on the issue of animal rights.

GATHERING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

June 10, 2013

Jason G. Goldman reviews Virginia Morell’s Animal Wise

It was just after six o’clock in the evening on an autumn day in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve. A researcher watched a female elephant known as Eleanor collapse. She was a matriarch, an elder within female-dominated elephant society. Her swollen trunk dragged on the ground. One of her tusks was broken, evidence of another recent fall. Another matriarch, Grace, ran toward her and tried to stabilize the ailing pachyderm with her tusks. But Eleanor’s back legs were too weak to support her massive body, and she fell again. The rest of her herd had continued their journey, but Grace stayed with Eleanor as day turned into night.

By eleven o’clock the next morning, Eleanor was dead. Over the next few days, no fewer than five other elephant groups visited Eleanor’s carcass. Several of these, like Grace, were completely unrelated to her. They poked at her lifeless body, sniffed it, and felt it with their feet and with their trunks. Did they know that they were touching death? Do elephants grieve?

This story is well known among animal cognition researchers, and it is one that Virginia Morell beautifully—almost poetically—recounts in her book Animal Wise. “Her six-month-old calf never left its mother’s side, even after park rangers cut out her tusks to make sure they did not fall into the hands of poachers,” she writes. By the calf’s ninth month, researchers had lost track of it and assumed it was “probably killed by a predator.” Like us, elephants are lost without their mothers.

But we’ve only just come to recognize this. Comparative cognition laboratories have historically relied upon just three animals. Morell recounts a conversation with one cognitive scientist who pointed out that decades of research were built upon “rats, pigeons, and college sophomores—preferably male.” It’s laughable now, but this is the thinking that dominated the fields of psychology and cognition for so long. Cognitive scientists have since adopted other species into their research programs, examining critters more familiar to anthropologists, ethologists, or evolutionary biologists.

Take dolphins and chimpanzees. On the surface, they’re tremendously different. But they are both, like humans, highly social. By comparing them, scientists can understand the evolution of sociality—and in doing so, might better grasp what it means to be human. Or consider Fido. Dogs are sensitive to human social cues in a way that even our closest cousins, the bonobos, are not. The list goes on: songbirds tell us about the evolution of language. Ants and bees teach us about group decision making. Fish are being used to investigate emotion.

Animal Wise by Virginia Morell, Crown, 2013 

The practical uses of knowledge derived from animal cognition research should be obvious, though perhaps it became so only in recent years. “It was very common in the last century,” Morell writes, “to manage wild animals almost as if they were vegetable crops. Even today, whale populations are referred to as ‘stocks,’ implying that they are farmed.” But a pod of whales is not like a field of carrots, an elephant herd is not like an apple orchard, a chimpanzee family is not a sheaf of wheat. It takes more than sunlight and water to build a bonobo.

Recent history has proven that husbandry and management programs are more successful when they’re informed by a species’ natural feeding habits, navigation skills, mating, parenting, and other social behaviors. But Morell leaves the reader with a very different sort of argument, one that appeals to our emotions—the very same emotions we share with other animals.

In a chapter on emotion and fish, Morell describes a study conducted by biologist Victoria Braithwaite. She injected a bit of bee venom into the lips of some trout. The fish behaved in a way that “suggested discomfort.” They rocked back and forth, which is unusual for trout but is also eerily similar to something distressed primates do. For three hours, the fish avoided food. Other trout, which had been injected with a harmless saline solution and had therefore felt the same needle-prick, “ate with as much gusto as did a group of untreated fish.” So the trout weren’t reacting in a simple, mindless, reflexive way to the injection.

If fish can feel pain, Morell pointedly asks, should we practice catch-and-release sport fishing? It is here that her narrative comes a bit too close to an animal-rights call to arms. Animals “cannot argue for their rights or how they might best be treated or farmed or managed,” she says. “Most animals have no voice that we can hear, unless we speak up for them.” What seems absent from this argument is a discussion about animal rights versus animal welfare. (Braithwaite provides one answer: it is more ethical to use barbless hooks.) But this is a small quibble with an otherwise compelling book.

“What do the minds of animals tell us about ourselves?” Morell asks in the final chapter of Animal Wise. She responds that “they have moments of anger, and sorrow, and love. Their animal minds tell us that they are our kin.” Instead of simply relying on animal cognition research to drive better or more effective conservation efforts, Morell argues, by studying animal cognition we will better understand our own place within the broader animal kingdom.

Animals grieve for their dead. Animals play. Animals teach. Some animals even seem to imagine. By peering into the minds of crows, monkeys, dolphins, or dogs, will we see our own reflections staring back? And if we do, will that spur us to treat our nonhuman cousins with empathy and compassion?

Humans are quick to draw superficial distinctions between groups within their own species in order to justify or rationalize the poor treatment of others. Can we expect better of our species when it comes to the way we treat other taxa? I’m not sure. ❧


~ Jason G. Goldman received his PhD in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on social cognition in animals. He writes “The Thoughtful Animal” blog on the Scientific American blog network.

Art: “Love Rat” by Banksy

David Pearce - Interview: On the Nature of Consciousness and Mind

This is an interesting interview - Pearce has some good and important ideas, but I have serious reservations about the idea of eliminating "all forms of unpleasant experience." Then how would we learn and grow? The deepest most profound learning in life often comes from deep and often disturbing suffering. No suffering, no real growth in wisdom and compassion.

This comes from the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology (IEET).

David Pearce - Interview: On the nature of consciousness and mind

 

David Pearce

BY Adam Ford
Posted: Mar 6, 2013

David Pearce is a British utilitarian philosopher. He believes and promotes the idea that there exists a strong ethical imperative for humans to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His book-length internet manifesto The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, pharmacology, and neurosurgery could potentially converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience among human and non-human animals, replacing suffering with gradients of well-being, a project he refers to as “paradise engineering”. A transhumanist and a vegan, Pearce believes that we (or our future posthuman descendants) have a responsibility not only to avoid cruelty to animals within human society but also to alleviate the suffering of animals in the wild.

 Listen/View

Authors@Google Will Tuttle: The World Peace Diet - Being Healthy and Saving the Planet

According to Wikipedia, Will Tuttle is a former Zen monk who studied in Korea. He holds a master's in humanities from San Francisco State University and a PhD in the philosophy of education from the University of California, Berkeley. He often speaks at vegetarian, spiritual, and animal rights conferences and at local vegetarian societies. He also speaks about inner and outer peace and harmony in the context of a vegan diet.

I support the majority of his views, but I am an omnivore - and I try to eat organic, free range chicken, turkey, grassfed beef and elk, and wild caught salmon. Yes, the world might be a better place if people like me stopped eating meat altogether, but alas, I am a human being in a human body and I give my body the nutrition it needs. I tried being a vegetarian for a while (and I know more than most about how to combine foods to get adequate amino acids), but I was not able to get sufficient nutrition for my lifestyle.

Take that for what it's worth - your results may vary.

About The World Peace Diet: VegNews reviewed Tuttle's book with considerable praise, suggesting he sought to

"...lift the discussion of veganism to a higher level. He argues cogently for a spiritual component, one where the consequence of using and consuming animals, so ubiquitous in human society, affects us not only in ways that can be measured physically, but spiritually as well. He convincingly shows how science and patriarchical religions, so often at odds in Western Society, are both cut from the same cloth—one that reinforces the domination of women, animals and nature in order to further the interests of the ruling elite. Yet for all of the complexities of how we ended up where we are, Tuttle’s remedy of spiritual veganism is offered as the cure for what ails us."

At the site for the book, they offer some free downloads, which I will link to below. But now, on to our feature presentation.

Authors@Google - Will Tuttle: The World Peace Diet

If you wonder how the food you eat affects your health and well-being and that of those you care about, you shouldn't miss this talk. Will Tuttle delivers an inspiring talk about the food we choose, where it comes from, and how it affects us physically, culturally, and spiritually. You will learn how we have become disconnected from our innate wisdom, and how to make positive changes that promote wellness, encourage wisdom and abundance, and minimize our eco-footprints on the Earth.

Free downloads from Will Tuttle and his website:

We are offering 2 complimentary downloads on this page
Please enjoy and share.

1 - "Intuitive Cooking" - A PDF file of plant-based recipes by Madeleine Tuttle
2 - "Living in Harmony with All Life" - an audio discourse by Dr. Will Tuttle - English & German

These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

To download "Intuitve Cooking" and/or the MP3 audio file of the 75-minute CD, Living In Harmony With All Life by Dr. Tuttle, please enter your email address here. You will automatically be taken to a page with the download links.

Downloading the PDF books below requires the submission of a first name and email address at their page, linked to at the top of the section.

• Click here to download a printable PDF file of The World Peace Diet by Dr. Will Tuttle
  
• Click here to download a Spanish-language printable PDF file of The World Peace Diet by Dr. Will Tuttle

Jeremy Trombley - Three Kinds of Anthropocentrism

This cool article comes from Jeremy Trombley's Struggle Forever blog (A Guide to Utopia). In this post, he outlines three central forms of anthropocentrism - a very useful guide for those of us who tend to find this aspect of spirituality and science rather annoying.


He makes a great point in the final paragraph - when philosophers (and others) are using the term anthropocentrism, they often have not defined the term adequately to be sure both people are discussing the same idea. This post will help with that for those who care.


I propose a fourth category - and probably a too general version of the word's usage - see below.

Anthropocentrisms

Recently there has has been a lot of talk about non-anthropocentrism, and what that would mean for ethics, politics, and philosophy in general.  I think some of the difficulty in agreement comes from the fact that different people have different conceptions of anthropocentrism and therefore different thresholds for what constitutes non-anthropocentrism.  I remember thinking a lot about this during a course I took in the Fall of 2010.  It was a class in environmental ethics, so we discussed anthropocentrism a lot.  What became clear to me through our readings and in our discussions was that my definition of anthropocentrism was markedly different from the conceptions put forward by the authors and my classmates.  The difference made my threshold for accepting a given approach or philosophy as non-anthropocentric somewhat higher than others.  Let me break down a couple of the different approaches to anthropocentrism that I’ve noticed and explain how they affect our reactions to different philosophies.


1) Boundary anthropocentrism – This is, as far as I can tell, the most common approach to anthropocentrism.  It argues that anthropocentric philosophies arbitrarily circumscribe ethical consideration to humans.  Thus an arbitrary boundary is created which limits the ethical consideration that can be given to non-humans.  The solution to this – the way to create a non-anthropocentric approach – is to extend the boundary to encompass non-humans, or at least certain classes of non-humans (i.e. animals).  To take a simple example we can look at the discourse on animal rights.  Early rights theorists limited the ascription of rights to humans – animals simply were not considered to possess inalienable rights, but were treated as utilitarian objects for human consumption.  Animal rights discourse takes the same ethical basis – rights – but extends the boundary of consideration beyond the human such that animals would be thought to have intrinsic value and inalienable rights just as humans do.  The same approach has been used to extend certain rights to ecosystems and other non-human organisms and assemblages.  But it doesn’t have to be rights specifically – it could be any form of ethical argument that’s used for humans (utilitarian, deontological, etc.) that is then extended to non-humans.  Thus, for this type of non-anthropocentric philosopher, the extension of human values to non-human beings is sufficient to create a non-anthropocentric ethics.


2) Agential anthropocentrism – This approach to anthropocentrism is somewhat more stringent than boundary anthropocentrism.  In this approach anthropocentrism is the failure to recognize the active participation of non-humans in the co-construction of relationships.  It’s possible for a philosophy to be non-anthropocentric from a boundary perspective, but still be anthropocentric from an agential perspective.  For example, in a rights based framework, it’s possible to extend rights to animals, but to see them as essentially unable to speak, act, or participate in a relationship themselves.  Thus the extension of rights to animals is a fundamentally human act – that we humans value them, and therefore we ought to give them some ethical consideration.  Instead agential anthropocentrism would recognize that animals, plants, even rocks in some sense contribute to the relationships that we compose with them.  These relationships are often unbalanced simply because we fail to recognize them as active participants and instead treat them as mere matter to be manipulated to our will.  However, it argues that simply extending human values to non-humans is insufficient to overcome that imbalance.  We must instead understand how humans and non-humans relate to one another, how they alter and affect one another, and how they both actively compose those relationships.  Only then can we hope to overcome our anthropocentrism.  This also corresponds to some forms of anti-correlationism, I think, and is the approach I tend to take towards anthropocentrism.


3) Perspectival anthropocentrism – This, I think, is the approach Levi Bryant is advocating, and is even more stringent from what I can tell.  For this approach, anthropocentrism is defined as the inability to see and understand from a non-human perspective how the world is shaped and how they relate to one another.  To use the example Levi was toying with a few weeks back, it’s not enough to extend ethical consideration to a shark, nor is it enough to recognize the shark as an active participant in the co-construction of relationships.  Instead, we must understand the shark’s ethics in order to be non-anthropocentric.  A truly non-anthropocentric ethics would be able to describe the ways in which sharks, worms, jellyfish, bats, iguanas, plants, and maybe even computers, rocks, books, and houses see the world and interact with it ethically.  Such a task is likely to be impossible, and Levi recognizes this, so we content our selves with boundary or agential non-anthropocentrisms, but these will always fall short of the true non-anthropocentric ethics that we need.


I think the differences between these approaches to anthropocentrism make communication between philosophers who follow them difficult to manage.  Often the definition of anthropocentrism, and thus the threshold for non-anthropocentrism, is taken for granted in these debates.  What ends up happening is an argument over how to achieve non-anthropocentrism, when what really needs to take place is a discussion about what exactly we mean when we talk about anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism.  I’m not in a position to advocate any of these (though I tend towards the agential approach in practice), but only wanted to point out a discrepancy I’ve seen in these discussions.  Hopefully it makes for better discussion in the long run.


Note: All of this also applies to the concept of ethnocentrism as well, which I take to be a subtype of the broader category of anthropocentrism.  Also, these names (boundary, agential, and perspectival) are not ideal – they’re the best I could come up with in my morning haze.  If anyone wants to suggest better terms, I would wholeheartedly approve. 

My offering:

Consciousness Anthropocentrism - The perspective that humanity or human consciousness is the
most important species or form of consciousness not only on Earth, but for the entire Kosmos (also making sense of manifest reality and the universe only through that human perspective). This version of anthropocentrism is central to many forms of New Age spirituality (including variations of Integral Theory), and even to some schools of Buddhism (see B Alan Wallace's Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness). In this view, human consciousness is necessary (and sufficient?) for the existence of known universe. The strong anthropic principle (SAP) is similar but not identical, offering the belief that "the Universe is compelled, in some sense, for conscious life to eventually emerge." SAP is foundational for notions of intelligent design.