A Sentience Article from All-Creatures.org

Can We Assume Consciousness or Happiness in Other Animals?

From Karen Davis, President, UPC United Poultry Concerns
February 2023

Most people who share their home with one or more companion animals take it for granted that their companions have feelings including emotions of happiness and wellbeing. Although the behaviors they observe support their presumption, there are those in the scientific establishment who continue to disparage the belief that other animals have emotions or even consciousness, claiming it is “unscientific,” “sentimental,” and “anthropomorphic” to ascribe emotions to a Hen or a Hamster or a Horse.

Listen to Thinking Like a Chicken Podcast, January 13, 2023. Transcript below.

UPC Sanctuary Photo by Karen Davis

Today I want to speak to you about a claim that may sound bizarre, but is seriously proposed by some segments of the scientific community, in particular the Behaviorists. They say there is no reasonable basis for assuming that other-than-human animals are conscious, emotional beings. They reject evidence of animal pleasure and happiness, while at the same time conceding that birds and other animals can experience negative emotions such as fear – after all, they have concocted countless experiments for decades designed to elicit fear in their victims.

I thought about all this over the Christmas holidays as I watched our chickens in our sanctuary yard ENJOYING themselves outdoors! I was reminded again watching a short video on Facebook of cows frolicking in the snow – rubbing their faces in the snow, playing and having FUN together.

A leading critic of the presumption of consciousness and emotions in nonhuman animals is Marian Stamp Dawkins, a professor of animal behavior in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford. Dawkins has experimented for years to find out, in her words, “what hens want” in factory-farming captivity while dismissing the notion that members of other species showing behavior similar to ours – like running eagerly to where food can be found – could be assumed to have emotions of dietary enthusiasm the same as ourselves. The presumption of animal enjoyment, she said, made her depressed.

Why? Because Dr. Jonathan Balcombe’s book Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, she said, threatens to create a chaos in which there will no longer be any distinction “between the anthropomorphism of Bambi and the scientific study of animal behavior.”

While Dawkins implies that Science and the school of Behaviorism amount to the same thing, the Behaviorism to which she subscribes is only one approach toward understanding or trying to understand other animals, and it is one that is being upended by cognitive ethologists like Professor Emeritus Marc Bekoff. Not surprisingly, Dawkins accuses Dr. Bekoff of the Crime of ANTHROPOMORPHISM – ascribing human feelings and desires to other animals.

Most people will agree that there are dimensions of Reality that are beyond Science, just as there are scientific prospects that are beyond Behaviorism. Consider the correlation in human life between things that we must do to survive and perpetuate ourselves and the pleasure we derive from doing these things. For example, we have to drink water and eat in order to live, and drinking water and eating are primary pleasures in human life. We have to have sex in order to perpetuate our species, and sex is a primary pleasure in human life. We have to play – entertain ourselves – in order to relieve tension, and play is a primary pleasure in human life.

So why would it be more reasonable to assume that other animals, engaging in these same activities, have not been endowed by Nature with the same incentives of pleasure and enjoyment to do the things they need to do in order to survive and thrive?

If we believe that we can never make logical inferences about emotions in nonhuman animals, the same restriction applies to the emotions of human beings. Why should we believe Dawkins when she writes that Jonathan Balcombe’s book about animal pleasure left her with a “depressing feeling”? Why tell us about her feelings, which can’t be proved?

In addition, there are studies done in which the pleasure centers in nonhuman animals’ brains are stimulated in such a way as to encourage or compel the animal to seek to perpetuate the pleasurable feeling, as indicated by his or her behavioral response to the stimulus.

There’s a standard of intellectual inquiry that calls for the simplest, most reasonable explanation of a given phenomenon. If I see body language such as drooping in one of our chickens, I conclude that the chicken is not feeling well and that the feeling probably reflects an adverse condition affecting her. On the other hand, if I see a chicken with her tail up, eating with gusto, eyes bright and alert, I conclude that her condition is good and that she feels happy. Why should I doubt these conclusions when the preponderance of evidence supports them?

Quite likely, when a person views nonhuman animals mainly or entirely, for years, in laboratory settings that elicit little more than dullness and dread in the animals being manipulated for study, one loses sight of evolutionary continuity with our fellow creatures and our common evolutionary heritage. Indeed, the school of Behaviorism represented by Marian Stamp Dawkins seems to exist in an institutionalized vacuum without any reference whatsoever to Darwinian Evolution and the World of Nature.

What does Behaviorism teach us about other animals when you think about it? Once we assume that other animals can never “prove” conclusively that they are experiencing beings like ourselves, what basis do we have for treating them with empathy and respect? Looking at how badly we treat our fellow creatures of other species almost universally, I submit there is way too much Behaviorism in the world. Time to break free.

On that note, I will conclude with an observation by the 18th-century English poet, William Cowper (pronounced Cooper), who wrote: "The heart is hard in nature . . . that is not pleased / With sight of animals enjoying life, / Nor feels their happiness augment his own."

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, and that you will share it with others. Please join me for the next podcast episode of Thinking Like a Chicken – News & Views. And have a wonderful day.

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