Zoo Animals and Their Discontents
An Animal Rights Article from All-Creatures.org

FROM

Karen Dawn,  DawnWatch
July 2014

The article quotes Philip Low, a prominent computational neuroscientist, who says, “If you ask my colleagues whether animals have emotions and thoughts, many will drop their voices to a whisper or simply change the subject. They don’t want to touch it.”

The Sunday, July 6th, New York Times Magazine includes a lovely and important article by Alex Halberstadt, titled "Zoo Animals and Their Discontents."

It focuses on the work of Dr. Vint Virga, a behaviorist who works with zoos across the United States and Europe. He studies the behavior of animals as a way of figuring out what they are thinking and feeling, the end goal being to find ways to help them. The article makes clear that it has only recently become widely accepted (and is still not universally so) that animals think and feel at all.

The article quotes Philip Low, a prominent computational neuroscientist, who says, “If you ask my colleagues whether animals have emotions and thoughts, many will drop their voices to a whisper or simply change the subject. They don’t want to touch it.”

But we read:

That may be changing. A profusion of recent studies has shown animals to be far closer to us than we previously believed — it turns out that common shore crabs feel and remember pain, zebra finches experience REM sleep, fruit-fly brothers cooperate, dolphins and elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, chimpanzees assist one another without expecting favors in return and dogs really do feel elation in their owners’ presence. In the summer of 2012, an unprecedented document, masterminded by Low — 'The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Human and Nonhuman Animals' — was signed by a group of leading animal researchers in the presence of Stephen Hawking. It asserted that mammals, birds and other creatures like octopuses possess consciousness and, in all likelihood, emotions and self-awareness. Scientists, as a rule, don’t issue declarations. But Low claims that the new research, and the ripples of unease it has engendered among rank-and-file colleagues, demanded an emphatic gesture.

Halberstadt's New York Times Magazine article mixes a discussion of the implications of what we are learning about animal cognition and emotion with touching tales about animals that Virga treats. It is delightful to read. And it opens the door for further discussion about the implications of what we are learning -- how those implications could color our thinking, not only on the issue of captivity -- how our new knowledge could have a much wider and more profound impact on our dealings with other species.


DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at DawnWatch. You may forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts only if you do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this parenthesized tag line - http://www.dawnwatch.com/


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