When I was young, we were told that non-human animals lacked reason; their actions were guided entirely by instinct, even when they appeared to act intelligently. To distract a predator from harming her young, for example, a female piper plover will pretend to have a broken wing and lure the predator away from the nest. It seems like a smart thing to do, but they do the same thing every time, so it appears to be a built-in, instinctive behavior.
Denying reasoning and intelligence to animals has been used to justify people treating animals in any way they wish. Only intelligent beings have rights, so animals, lacking rights, can furnish us with food, clothing, and such entertainments as zoos, circuses, rodeos, and bullfights. We needn’t feel guilty when we kill or enslave them.
In addition to denying that animals can reason, some researchers in the 20th century claimed that few animals have a sense of personal identity. If you put color on a dog’s snout and lead her to a mirror, she won’t react to seeing herself with a colored snout, such as by trying to rub the color off. It seems that she doesn’t recognize herself in a mirror. Apes do better on the color recognition test, so researchers concluded that they have a better sense of their individual selves than almost all other animals. Again, animals that lack a sense of personal identity can be used for exclusively human benefit because, lacking a sense of self, they can’t think of themselves as subjects of abuse.
Such denials of animals reasoning and self-identity, however, are based on faulty reasoning. They remind me of the ancient Greeks who dismissed foreigners as inferior beings because they couldn’t speak intelligibly. Their speech just sounded like “ba ba ba …”, hence the Greeks called them barbarians. We now know that it was the Greeks, not the so-called barbarians who were unsophisticated about the intelligence of other human beings.
The intelligence, reasoning, and self-identification of animals is similarly discounted unfairly when our tests fail to explore the possibility that animals manifest these traits differently than we do, just as the “barbarians” manifested thoughts differently than the Greeks. This was the problem with the mirror test for self-recognition. Dogs are guided more by smell than by sight. Using smell as a test for self-identification, we’d seem much less intelligent than dogs. As pack animals, dogs must have some sense of their own identity in order to know where they fit into the group’s hierarchy.
Among human beings, reason is manifested largely through language. When I’m thinking through a problem alone, I talk to myself. When thinking it through with other people, I talk to them. If we turn the sofa with its back toward the floor, I think we can fit it through the doorway.
Although many animals communicate with sounds, their oral communication lacks the variety of sounds and potential messages that we depend on when we communicate orally. In short, they don’t have what we normally think of as language. Since our reasoning is communicated largely through language, and animals lack such language, people concluded that animals can’t reason. Again, like the ancient Greeks, we dismiss abilities which are expressed in ways that are unfamiliar to us.
Here’s an example of animal reasoning. Kenyan monkeys live in extended families. One juvenile hurt another while the two wrestled. Twenty minutes later the sister of the victim, without provocation, bit the tail of the perpetrator’s sister. She didn’t have human language to say, “You hurt my sister, so I’ll hurt yours.” But that’s what her actions said.
Some animals can count at least up to seven. Feral cats who were fed on a certain day each week didn’t go every day to the place where they were fed. They just showed up on the day of the feeding.
Dogs can reason. I had a dog, presumably a collie-St. Bernard mix, who often tried to escape our fenced-in yard by digging a hole under the fence. When she saw me at the window, she would immediately stop digging and sit on the unfinished hole so as to hide it from me. Although she couldn’t put it into words, she acted as though she knew that if I were aware of her digging I’d do something to prevent the hole’s completion and thereby frustrate her attempted escape. She was like a human four-year old trying to hide candy taken from a drawer that her parents had forbidden her to open.
Of course, animals can’t reason as much as we can. I’m a terrible chess player, but I can beat any dog I know. Nevertheless, we can no longer justify our exploitation of animals by claiming that they can’t reason and have no sense of self-identity.
You can reply at my e-mail wenz.peter@uis.edu.
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