Animal Facial Expressions

A study at the University of Kansas Medical Center "discovered that cats use nearly 300 distinct facial expressions to communicate with one another":

Cats' Facial Expressions

In contrast, humans have 44 different facial expressions, and I was surprised to read that dogs have only 27. Feline expressions of emotion often involve ear movements and whiskers, however, so it's not so strange that they have more "distinct" expressions than we do. I was also surprised that cats' "facial signals" play such a large part in their communications with each other. As this article points out, cats are more social than people usually assume.

Chimpanzees convey a lot of information to each other by subtle facial movements:

How Chimps Communicate with a Look

Lisa Parr, director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, discusses how small changes in expression can communicate different emotions. Chimps were tested on how well they could distinguish and identify the significance of other chimps' facial expressions. Studying these behaviors in chimpanzees may contribute to better understanding of human nonverbal communication.

Dogs may have developed some types of facial expressions specifically to communicate with us:

How Dog Expressions Evolved

Of course, as this article mentions, a lot of canine communication occurs through body language. Maybe that's why they haven't evolved as many variations on facial expressions as we have. Also, scent plays a vital role in dogs' experiences of the world, a sensory dimension we almost entirely lack compared to canines.

Quora features questions about why animals of the same species tend to look so much "alike," while human beings have distinct individual appearances. Some answers explain, in addition to the human-centered bias that causes us to make finer distinctions among members of our own species, that many animals have less variation in facial appearance than we do because they rely on other senses such as smell to recognize each other.

If intelligent Martians existed, we might think they all look alike, as the narrator of Heinlein's DOUBLE STAR does at the beginning of the novel. On the other hand, the Martians would probably have trouble telling Earth people apart.

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

The Most Intelligent Animals

Well, maybe not THE most in absolute terms, but this page lists six of the top candidates:

6 of the World's Most Intelligent Animals

The only one that surprised me was the pig. While I knew they were smart, I didn't know that in some categories they're thought to rank with dolphins. The other five on the list are the two most obvious, dolphins and chimpanzees, plus ravens, octopuses, and elephants.

Each paragraph on the page includes links to several other sites offering more information about the particular species and how its intelligence has been studied.

Although not mentioned on that web page, other species that would plausibly evolve sapience might include raccoons and bears. Both of them have the ability to manipulate objects and are already smart enough to defeat with ease many human attempts to keep them out of buildings, vehicles, and containers. Until our family bought better-designed garbage cans some years ago, we had to tie the lids on to protect the trash from raccoons. As for bears, you've probably seen photos or videos of them breaking into houses and cars. Scary! Maybe Yogi and Boo-Boo have a basis in fact.

As usual, this topic makes me wonder whether we'd recognize human-level intelligence in analogous alien species if we met them on distant planets. Their languages might not consist of sounds as ours does. (Maybe sapient octopuses would communicate by changing their colors.) Suppose lack of manipulative appendages, as with dolphins, prevented them from inventing material technologies we would recognize as such? What if, like dolphins and octopuses, they inhabited an environment (e.g., water) difficult for us to explore? Also, an ethical question comes to mind: If we don't exercise sufficient respect toward quasi-intelligent species we already know about on our own planet, will be behave ethically toward creatures we've yet to meet on strange new worlds?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt