Dog Buttons

This isn't about fastenings for canine clothes. It's about electronic buttons dogs use to communicate:

Talking Dog Buttons

The article explains the electronic sound board isn't meant to replace the natural canine modes of communication. It offers an additional way for owners to interact with their pets. How it works: "The sound boards for dogs have circular buttons with words on them, each pre-recorded to say the word when pressed." Dogs push the buttons with their noses. Regular, consistent training is required for an animal to learn the which button corresponds to which word and what the words mean. A dog will grasp the significance of "food," for instance, only if the human consistently says "food" when offering a meal. The technique consists of "basic operant conditioning," no different in principle from "training a dog to ring a bell to go outside."

Does the dog understand the words, though, or simply associate a particular stimulus (the sound of the word) with a specific object or outcome? This question arises especially with an expression such as "love you." How can the meaning of an abstract concept like that be demonstrated to an animal? It's not like opening a door in response to the sound "outside." While the dog might learn to link an affectionate action (e.g., licking) with the sound "love," it's quite a stretch to assume he or she "knows" the word's "meaning."

The world-famous Border Collie Chaser could identify over 1000 toys by name.

Chaser

Her trainer claimed she had the "ability to understand sentences involving multiple elements of grammar." But did she actually "understand" the words she recognized?

It's now known that parrots do more than "parrot" the sounds they've learned. They use words in context. The grey parrot Alex is a well-known example:

Alex the Parrot

According to his trainer, he displayed intelligence on a level with great apes and dolphins. Does that behavior imply understanding in the human sense?

In cases such as these, the crucial question is how we define "understanding."

I once read a comment about an ape who "talked" through a computer keyboard, declaring that when she typed, "Computer, please. . ." she didn't know what "please" meant. She was only pushing a button that she'd been trained to use for introducing a request. How does that differ from the way a human toddler uses "please," though? To him or her, it's probably just a vocal noise required to induce adults to listen favorably. (As some parents say, "What's the magic word?")

A traditional hard-line behaviorist (if any exist nowadays) would maintain that nobody, animal or human, "understands" anything in the popular sense of the term. All behavior ultimately arises from stimulus and response, whether on a simple or complex level. Consciousness is a meaningless epiphenomenon. Free will doesn't exist.

If, as most of us believe, consciousness and the ability to choose do exist in humans and some animals, where do we draw the line to say certain creatures do or don't possess these traits? Maybe understanding is a continuum, not a sharp binary.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

The Smartest Animals

Here's yet another list of the supposedly most intelligent nonhuman animals, or at least a selection of them:

11 of the World's Smartest Animals

How is intelligence defined for purposes of this kind of categorization? The article focuses on what scientists have discovered about any given animal’s "self-awareness, self-control, and memory, all of which influence how well a creature processes information and solves problems."

The list intrigues me partly because of a couple of unexpected creatures highlighted alongside the obvious ones. I expected to see animals such as chimpanzees, bonobos, dolphins, raccoons, pigs, elephants, and octopuses, plus birds such as ravens and parrots. But pigeons? Horses? And why don't dogs make the cut? Unlike chimps, they understand what we mean when we point to an object, probably because they've evolved for millennia to live with humans.

Raccoons might be prime candidates for evolving to replace us if we went extinct. Their forepaws, which they use like hands, could give them a technological edge over such potential rivals as pigs or dolphins, which lack manipulative appendages. Incidentally, bears are also good at breaking into locked spaces and opening receptacles such as coolers. The most intelligent animals on the list, chimpanzees and bonobos (formerly known as pigmy chimps) have small, threatened populations, whereas raccoons presently thrive in great numbers in many human-dominated environments. I also like the idea of an octopus-dominated world, though. Granted, their reign would be confined to the aquatic realm, but imagine if they evolved to overcome their main disadvantages, their short lifespans and solitary nature. An octopus species that mutated to survive for many years after procreating instead of dying as soon as they reproduce could pass on accumulated knowledge to their young, a process that might encourage development of social bonds. Has any SF author written about a mainly watery planet with octopus-like inhabitants as the dominant sapient species?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Should Animals Have Human Rights?

I've recently reread Sharyn McCrumb's mystery novel IF I'D KILLED HIM WHEN I MET HIM, which includes a subplot about a woman who wants to marry a dolphin. That character argues that dolphins are intelligent, sensitive beings who should be treated as persons under the law. She also maintains that such a relationship wouldn't be animal abuse because male dolphins are quite -- assertive -- and have not infrequently attempted to mate with their keepers.

The upper intelligence range of some animals, such as dolphins, chimpanzees, octopuses, crows, and parrots, is said to overlap the lowest intelligence range of some human beings. Given this overlap, should highly intelligent nonhuman animals be granted rights equivalent to ours even though they don't belong to our species?

The Treehugger site discusses the concepts of rights and duties; it also distinguishes "animal rights" from the position of animal welfare. It states that animal rights advocates don't "want nonhuman animals to have the same rights as people":

What Are Animal Rights?

It defines the philosophy of animal rights as "the belief that humans do not have a right to use animals for our own purposes."

This page defines the basic tenets of animal rights, discusses specieism, and argues against the uniqueness of the human species:

Basic Tenets

This case from 2015 proposes legal personhood and the right to sue in court for chimps "detained" in a zoo:

Chimpanzee Detention

The article includes several relevant outside links and a timeline of some important animal-related cases in legal history.

Famed utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, author of ANIMAL LIBERATION, goes further than the Treehugger article in some respects but less so in others. (His position allows for meat-eating and animal experimentation in some circumstances.):

Peter Singer

He holds that "the boundary between human and 'animal' is completely arbitrary," a belief that could plausibly be extended to an argument that nonhuman animals should have the same legal rights as Homo sapiens. This debate could gain urgent practical relevance if we ever meet extraterrestrial aliens who don't look anything like us.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Animal Souls?

It's possible that spiders dream. Also octopuses and some birds and fish:

If Animal Dreams Imply Sentience

This article proposes (following the example of WHEN ANIMALS DREAM, a recent book by David Peña-Guzmán) that dreaming suggests an animal is sentient, "a unique individual who experiences life and processes it via thoughts and feelings." The article mentions multiple examples of animals that appear to display emotions and mental states such as joy, sorrow, empathy, gratitude, friendship, loneliness, and self-awareness. Many creatures have been observed coming to the aid of other members of their species, even at personal risk to themselves. The authors of the article go further and propose, "If a creature can feel and express feeling. . . then it is entirely possible that it is a spiritual being."

Clearly, they're using the term "spirituality" more broadly than most people do. For these authors, it seems the capacity for self-awareness, emotion, and response to other living beings constitutes spirituality. The article also suggests animals have souls. By this term, the writers don't mean "soul" as an incorporeal part of the personality that survives death. In fact, they state explicitly that they aren't asserting anything specifically religious. "The stronger capability a given species has for fellow feeling, the more likely it is that members of that species have perceptions we would recognize as spiritual. . . . The ability to emote is, in our estimation, a nascent form of soul." They're advancing a "biophilia view that many sorts of creatures share a connected sentience" on our planet.

Classically, Aristotle propounded a similarly broad definition of "soul" as "intrinsic principles of animal and vegetable life." All living things have souls, in ascending orders of complexity. The vegetative or nutritive soul contains the elements of growth, nutrition, and reproduction. The sensitive soul has the powers of sensation, emotion, and desire. The highest, the rational soul, constitutes the capacity for reason. Plants have only vegetative souls. Animals have both vegetative and sensitive souls. Human beings, in addition, have rational souls. This essay from the online ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA explains the concept in more detail:

Aristotle's Philosophy of Mind

Contrary to the view of animal cognition prevalent until only a few decades ago, contemporary biologists seem to be discovering more and more evidence that "lower" life forms exist on a continuum with us, not separated by a sharp line.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Inner Lives of Animals

I recommend that you pick up a copy of the October 2022 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC if possible. You can't miss it; the cover shows a close-up of a sphinx cat. The lead article, "Minds of Their Own," explores the emotional and cognitive capacities of animals.

Not only some mammals but some birds can pass the "mirror test," recognizing their own reflections. Rats will often free another rat trapped in a plastic tube. Horses respond appropriately to positive or negative emotions as displayed by facial expressions, not only in other horses but also in humans. Sheep can recognize faces. Dolphins sometimes blow water bubbles and play with them. Some animals have been shown to react negatively to other members of their species who cheat. The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC piece mentions other examples, including the famous dog who communicates by nosing symbols on a mat.

For many centuries, mainstream science believed animals didn't have an inner life, nothing resembling emotions or thoughts in the human sense. Famously, 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes declared that animals were mere "automata," machines in principle similar to clockwork, although more complex. Here's an article about that theory and a contemporary of Descartes, Ralph Cudworth, who argued against it. (If you want to read this page, do so in one sitting, because the website allows only a limited number of free readings per month.):

Descartes Versus Cudworth

Cudworth, who (unlike Descartes) maintained that animals had souls, defined "soul" more broadly than Descartes. The defining characteristics of a soul, according to Cudworth, are "self-activity –- the ability of a thing to determine its own movement and action" and "subjectivity," self-awareness and the ability to experience pain or pleasure. Most of us nowadays would agree that animals, at least the "higher" species for sure, have these traits even if we attribute them to biological systems rather than immaterial entities. As the article puts it, "Cudworth noticed and emphasised the animal in the human, and more importantly, the human in the animal."

If the argument that we can't attribute "anthropomorphic" qualities to animals because we have no direct access to their minds (if any) is valid, how could we refute a similar argument about human beings? How can we know, just from their behavior and speech, that our fellow humans share the same inner experiences we have instead of being mere automata? The Marquis de Sade apparently thought we couldn't; one of his characters argues that it's fine to inflict pain on other people, since we feel our own pains and pleasures but have no proof others feel the same things. Most of us wouldn't want to embrace that philosophy, though!

Hard-line materialists might insist recently discovered resemblances between animal and human emotions and thought processes prove we are "only animals," little more than biological machines ourselves. The similarity could be considered from a less reductive angle, though. Maybe what those discoveries demonstrate is that animals, possessing inner lives somewhat analogous to our own, are in many cases closer to human than we've previously believed.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt