Could Kingdoms Other Than Animals Ever Become Intelligent

Barbara J. King - photo credit Stephen Salpukas/ College of William and Mary

For anthropologist Barbara J. King, life is a residue betwixt recognizing human differences and acknowledging the importance of all animals.

By Barbara J. King

In my work, I walk a tightrope. My training as an anthropologist tells me that our species, at 200,000 years former a virtual newbie on Globe, expresses its intelligence and emotions in ways unique in the beast kingdom. We cooperate with each other on an unprecedented scale, experience love and grief beyond time and space, and create works of art and scientific discipline that transform the world for expert and sick.

My work over many years with non-homo animals, on the other hand, tells me that the thinking and feeling capacities of many species are exquisitely developed. Our abilities aren't superior to theirs: we're just adapted to different physical and cultural environments.

My chore as a science communicator, then, is to walk that tightrope in lodge to present an accurate residuum. Even while acknowledging human uniqueness, I aim to convey what I intendance nigh well-nigh deeply: the primal, and often profoundly moving, continuity betwixt how we humans and other animals negotiate the globe using our heads and our hearts.

Sometimes, the vital inner lives of other animals are pretty piece of cake for us to recognize. As a society, we revel in learning about the cultures of the body of water, the networks among whales and dolphins through which everything from songs to hunting techniques are transmitted; the intimate and joyful ceremonies of wild elephants reuniting on the savanna after a menstruation of separation; and the resourcefulness that enables chimpanzees and some monkeys to utilize rock or wooden hammers to open up hard-shelled nuts and to share their techniques with others. Accordingly, many people are moved to care about wild-animal conservation or piece of work towards changing our readiness to confine these animals for our entertainment in theme-park shows, circuses, and zoos.

Just after years of focusing on these examples to convey the flaws in an approach steeped in human exceptionalism, I came to a revelation: I as well was guilty of bias. In this example, information technology wasn't a bias of a homo standard, it was a bias toward looking at large-brained mammals and against looking closer to dwelling house—or more than precisely in our homes, at the animals who occupy many millions of people'southward plates two or iii times a day.

Why was I so passionate almost the inner lives of elephants, dolphins, whales and primates, yet not looking harder at the thinking and feelings of animals like chickens, pigs, cows, goats, fish, and octopus?

Chickens have their beak trimmed on farm, Vietnam 2013

Well, now I have. In Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals Nosotros Consume I have written about chickens who memorize a hundred different faces, and who display personalities ranging from the kind to the obnoxious. Pigs who learn to distinguish big wooden blocks marked with X'south or O's then go on to distinguish X's and O'south turned into ii-dimensional symbols on T-shirts. Moo-cow mothers who mourn when their offspring are taken away from them fourth dimension and again and then they can be impregnated again to produce more than milk. Goats who remember how to solve a 2-stride learning task for 311 days. Fish who play and fish who team upwardly with other fish to hunt cooperatively. Octopus who turn coconuts into portable shelters and who wink their moods on their skin.

Chickens live in crammed conditions on a farm in Vietnam

Now, after the book'south publication, I'm coming to encounter how badly uncomfortable it makes many of us to take that kind of hard look at who we eat.

It'south not that my book hasn't found a readership. Through newspaper and magazine reviews and discussion of oral fissure, information technology has. Nonetheless repeatedly, two kinds of comments come my way. The kickoff goes something like this: "I'1000 a meat-eater considering our species was designed to eat meat. What I do is no different from what cheetahs, wolves, orcas, and raptors practise when they eat other animals. It'due south nature's way."

There's an irony at work here. This perspective does recognize human continuity with other animals, but just with predators! And it misses a big function of the equation, that remainder I mentioned at the commencement. We humans did evolve to exist dissimilar: that'due south the way evolution works, after all. No species is quite like another. The acquisition of meat in our evolutionary past starting around 2 million years ago (before our ain species emerged) helped to fuel the evolution of our lineage's unusually large brains. Now we now have the risk to use our unique brains to think about who we eat – and well-nigh the future of our food systems and environmental sustainability – in a way that cheetahs, wolves, orcas, and raptors just do not.

The 2nd comment rail is a little different. This one isn't based on a certainty that meat-eating is okay. It's quite the contrary: "Information technology'southward just too painful for me to read about how all those animals suffer. I'thou an animal lover only I eat meat and I just can't" – can't read, can't share with a book club, just can't become there.

I think we need to dig deep and notice the courage non to look abroad from the suffering of animals. Every bit terribly hard as it is to wait total-on at the bears held on bile farms and feel their pain, empathy is the offset step to helping the bears – this is a lesson Animals Asia teaches u.s. all, and and then it is too with "food animals".

Moon bear Shanti in cage on Ty bear bile farm

This message isn't new, but it comes now with new science. And it comes at a time when more and more than people are joining the reducetarian motion. I have besides: I eat no meat, much less dairy than I always take earlier, and an occasional fish.

The rise of alternative diets – from reducetarian to vegetarian to vegan – shows it is possible to take a stand against the strong cultural pull of the bulletin that animals are here for our palates. And make no mistake at how ubiquitous that message is: walk into almost any restaurant, turn on the TV, and in that location information technology is.

Vegan meal at Animals Asia's canteen at CBRC

Accept the example, also, of the message sent past world-renowned astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, whose piece of work in science communication I have long admired, to eight one thousand thousand twitter followers in Baronial: "A cow is a biological machine invented by humans to turn grass into steak."

Talk about irony! If I could have a conversation with Tyson, I'd tell him it's the scientific discipline (as well every bit a moral world view) that tells us how very limiting information technology is to look at animals in a one-dimensional way.

Nosotros can, collectively, exist expansive in our outlook. We tin can utilize the science of farmed animal cognition and emotion to support what we see if we look with our optics wide open. Farmed animals have minds and hearts too. How we act towards them should be based on that knowledge.

Barbara J. King is emeritus professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary and a freelance science writer with a focus on animals. Her recent books are Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat, and How Animals Grieve.

Personalities on the Plate cover