IT IS VIRTUALLY impossible to emerge from a training program in the biological or biomedical sciences without having developed a well-honed skepticism about and distaste for anthropomorphic attribution of mental states to animals. Equally suspect to the biology graduate is the attempt to evidence such states by appeal to anecdotal information of the sort routinely accepted by ordinary common sense.
The inculcation of this skepticism into nascent scientists is a major part of what I call the common sense of science, or scientific ideology, the set of foundational or philosophical assumptions taught as fact along with the empirical material constitutive of the scientific discipline in question. In the case of animal mentation, this philosophical stance may be epitomized as follows: Science can only deal with what can be directly observed or what is subject to experimental verification. It is argued that failure to mark this precept historically led to science fraught with speculation, metaphysics, and even theology—witness the élan vital of Bergson, the entelechies of Driesch, and various theological teleologies that have perennially attempted to capture biology, from William Paley to Creationism. It is evident, the argument continues, that thoughts, feelings, concepts, desires, and intentions in animals are not the sorts of things that can be either perceived or explored experimentally. Thus such material is not a legitimate object of study. This position, implicit in some versions of positivism, found clear expression in Watson’s formulation of behaviorism, and it exerted major influence even on positivist thinkers otherwise inimical to behaviorism, such as Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. (Thus, the 1948 volume Instinctive Behavior [Schiller, 1957], which chronicles the first encounter between behaviorists and ethologists, stresses the absolute concord between the two groups regarding the methodological need for eschewing talk of animal mentation. The two factions in fact agreed on little else.)
Clearly, anecdotal anthropomorphism, like all other forms of argumentation, is subject to abuse. For example, I cited the case of my wife’s coworker who believed that her dog was capable of knowing when his birthday was and also of celebrating it. And indeed, there are many examples in the history of science of the excesses of anthropomorphism. For example, one of my cherished possessions is an early nineteenth-century, voluminous textbook of entomology, William Kirby and William Spence’s Introduction to Entomology, written in elegant, belle-lettristic prose characteristic of an era far more literate than ours. In addition to describing the biology and behavior of a great variety of insect species, the chapters are sprinkled with bits of poetry descriptive of the insect’s life form. Most bizarre perhaps is that the authors included moral teachings drawn from insect behavior, such as behavior depicted as exemplifying moral virtues such as thrift, timeliness, industriousness, and so on. While striking us as ridiculous, there is a certain charm in recalling an era where morality was juxtaposed with science in the same book. Many biological textbooks took the same form, and they are legitimately described as subject to the excesses of anthropomorphism. It is clearly a logical error to move from a condemnation of unbridled anthropomorphism to a righteous condemnation of any anthropomorphism.
Although, as we saw earlier, Charles Darwin saw anthropomorphism as an inevitable consequence of phylogenetic continuity of mentation, subsequent scientific ideology is considerably less astute and dismisses anthropomorphic reasoning as fallacious. In addition, Darwin collected voluminous amounts of anecdote illustrating animal mentation, which, as mentioned earlier, he later turned over to his secretary, George Romanes, who edited them into two volumes, Animal Intelligence and Mental Evolution in Animals. Romanes was scrupulous in his criteria for accepting anecdotes.
It is high time, Romanes tells us, that we realized that “the phenomena which constitute the subject-matter of comparative psychology, even if we regard them merely as facts in nature, have at least as great a claim to accurate classification as those phenomena of structure which constitute the subject-matter of comparative anatomy” (1882, vi, my emphasis). The phenomena of animal mentation are the subject matter of facts, facts that have been common coin throughout human history, facts that are in principle no more problematic than any other kind of facts. We can know them as we know the facts of human mentation. There are no epistemological chasms to be bridged or metaphysical barriers to be scaled. The data pertaining to animal thought has been accumulating since the dawn of humanity; the methodological problem is separating the wheat from the chaff, the same sort of problem that exists in all areas of human knowledge. Fresh impetus has been given to this enterprise, Romanes says, by the advent of evolutionary theory, which gives greater credibility to these facts of common experience, explains them theoretically, and points to the high probability of “genetic continuity” (1882, vi) between human and animal intelligence.
But if what ensues is simply the chronicling of anecdotes relating to animal mentation along the phylogenetic scale, how does Romanes differ from the anecdote-mongers whom he deplores? In the first place, he would doubtless say, in seriousness of purpose, and second, in attempting to place his anecdotes within the context of evolutionary theory. But third, and more to the point, he differs in the care with which he provides criteria for selection of the facts that he addresses. As he puts it, “Considering it desirable to cast as wide a net as possible, I have fished the seas of popular literature as well as the rivers of scientific writing” (1882, vii). Initially, Romanes had intended to countenance as facts only what had been reported by observers known to be competent; but soon he realized that this was too rigorous since the probability of the more intelligent individuals among animals happening to fall under the observation of the more intelligent individuals among men was extremely low. So instead, he looked to other, less restrictive principles:
First, never to accept an alleged fact without the authority of some name. Second, in the case of the name being unknown, and the alleged fact of sufficient importance to be entertained, carefully to consider whether, from the circumstances of the case as recorded, there was any considerable opportunity for malobservation; this principle generally demanded that the alleged fact, or action on the part of the animal should be of a particularly marked and unmistakable kind, looking to the end which the action is said to have accomplished. Third, to tabulate all important observations recorded by unknown observers, with the view of ascertaining whether they have ever been corroborated by similar or analogous observations made by other and independent observers. This principle I have found to be of great use in guiding my selection of instances, for where statements of fact which present nothing intrinsically improbable are found to be unconsciously confirmed by different observers, they have as good a right to be deemed trustworthy as statements which stand on the single authority of a known observer, and I have found the former to be at least as abundant as the latter. Moreover, by getting into the habit of always seeking for corroborative cases, I have frequently been able to substantiate the assertions of known observers by those of other observers as well or better known. (Romanes, 1882, viii–ix)
What is one to say of this method of Romanes, which to a working laboratory scientist would appear to be not much of a method at all? Where are the controlled experiments? Where are the hypotheses and tests thereof under controlled conditions? Where is the distinction between the observations of trained scientists and those of laymen? Where does Romanes come off making the dubious assumption that animals have mental traits at all, rather than merely being complex mechanisms? Hearsay! Anthropomorphism! Anecdote! Not to be taken seriously!
Some of these objections are dealt with rather presciently by Romanes himself. Responses to others can be extrapolated from the logic of his position. However, none are terribly difficult to deal with once we have deduced the consequences of his assumptions.
One of his assumptions is that, given evolutionary theory, it is hard to see how one can avoid postulating continuity of mental traits between humans and animals. Second, common sense across all ages and all cultures has seen and explained animal behavior in terms of mentalistic attributions. Romanes even has an argument to this effect, namely, that if we do not allow appropriate animal behavior to count as evidence of feeling and mentation, what right do we have to allow appropriate human behavior to serve as such evidence? The only consciousness to which we have direct access is our own, the minds of other people being as inaccessible as those of animals. If we can argue by analogy in the one case, we can surely do so, mutatis mutandis, in the other. But if we choose to be skeptical about animal minds because we have no direct access to them, we must extend our skepticism to the minds of other people as well. And not only to other people, but also to the external world, for, in the final analysis, all we have are our own perceptions, which do not certify the existence of an external world existing intersubjectively and outside perception. But in that case, physical science is no more coherent conceptually than mental science; so the science of bodies is no more defensible than the science of minds. Insofar as ordinary common sense disregards this sort of skepticism as idle chatter, it must do so for mind as well as for body, animal or human. Romanes puts it this way:
The only evidence we can have of objective mind is that which is furnished by objective activities; and as the subjective mind can never become assimilated with the objective so as to learn by direct feeling the mental processes which there accompany the objective activities, it is clearly impossible to satisfy any one who may choose to doubt the validity of inference, that in any case other than his own mental processes ever do accompany objective activities. Thus it is that philosophy can supply no demonstrative refutation of idealism, even of the most extravagant form. Common sense, however, universally feels that analogy is here a safer guide to truth than the sceptical demand for impossible evidence; so that if the objective existence of other organisms and their activities is granted—without which postulate comparative psychology, like all the other sciences, would be an unsubstantial dream—common sense will always and without question conclude that the activities of organisms other than our own, when analogous to those activities of our own which we know to be accompanied by certain mental states, are in them accompanied by analogous mental states. (1882, 6)
So much, then, for metaphysical objections. But what of the other questions today’s scientist might raise? Even if we grant that there are facts of animal mentation, surely they are best studied by controlled experiment, not by sifting through anecdotes.
Is Romanes’s anecdote sifting scientifically invalid? Does it require that we weaken and suspend ordinary canons of proof? Quite the contrary. What Romanes recommends that we do with the vast hodgepodge of data relevant to animal mentation is to apply to it the same sort of reasoning we employ when we reconstruct historical events, write biographies, assess people’s motives or their guilt and innocence in trials, defend ourselves against accusations, make judgments about people of whom we hear conflicting stories, and so on. In all these cases, what we do is to measure data against standard rules or canons of evidence and plausibility. Does the data violate known laws or established evidence, as in the case of the parrot reported by Locke to be able to hold conversations? Does the source of the data have a vested interest in telling a certain sort of tale? Does the source have an axe to grind? Does the data accord with other data from totally independent sources across time and space? In short, weighing data on animal mind is no different from weighing any other data, for example, data pertaining to the personality of some historical figure. Thus, we discredit Frau Hitler’s assertion that Adolf was a nice boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. If you start out with the a priori assumption that no data is relevant vis-à-vis the existence and nature of animal thought, then such a method is absurd. But if you begin with the common-sense (and evolutionary) view that the existence of animal pain, suffering, guilt, planning, fear, remorse, loyalty, and other mental states is self-evident, and that what needs to be done is to sort out the scope and the limits of such states, then this method is not only plausible, but, given a sea of data, inevitable, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
But surely, says today’s scientist, such random observations must lack the credibility of data garnered by trained observers under laboratory conditions. This, at least, we must surely concede, the scientist says. Not at all—no more so than we must concede that laboratory experiments provide a better guide to human motivation and human nature than ordinary experience. No controlled experiment will provide me with better evidence that one of my friends is a lecher or that people will cut corners to make money than does my ordinary experience. Laboratory experiments on animal thought (or behavior) tend to focus on abnormal animals under highly abnormal conditions. Though the laboratory rat and the cat are among the most highly studied subjects in twentieth-century psychological research, much of the data pertains to their behavior under the most unlikely conditions imaginable, as when they are being shocked, frightened, or presented with inescapable painful situations designed to create “learned helplessness”; or are crowded, blinded, confined, and so on. It is hardly surprising that little has come from all this that even begins to describe—let alone explain—“normal” cat behavior. In a key sense, all laboratory examination is by definition extraordinary and likely to miss an organism’s normal behavior and is concomitantly unlikely to help us understand telos.
Given the formidable arsenal of arguments arrayed against talking anthropomorphically of mental states in animals and buttressing such claims anecdotally, one can understand scientists’ reluctance to countenance such talk, and it is indeed the case that such talk virtually disappeared from scientific literature during most of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the issue has once again been thrust forward into the scientific arena. Why has this occurred? There are a multiplicity of historical vectors that have militated in favor of softening the positivistic/behavioristic skepticism about animal consciousness. But one in particular is worth recounting here: ordinary common sense, as distinct from the common sense of science, has of course never caviled at mentalistic attribution to animals; indeed, as Hume points out, few things are more repugnant to ordinary common sense than skepticism about animals’ mind. But until recently, ordinary common sense cared little about the implausibility of scientific common sense; if scientists wanted to believe that animals have no mind, so what: scientists believe many strange things.
A major clash between these two competing common senses has arisen only in the last few decades, for it is only in that period that ordinary common sense has begun to draw any significant moral implications from the presence of thought and feeling in animals. Although ordinary common sense certainly never doubted that animals could feel pain, fear, and so on, it drew no moral conclusions from this, largely because animal exploitation was invisible to daily life in virtue of the nature of animal use. Science, on the other hand, insulated itself from the moral implications of its own activity with animals not only by the denial of animal mentation but by the other mainstay of scientific ideology, the claim that science is value-free and thus can make no moral claims and take no moral positions, since moral judgments are unverifiable.
Of late, however, ordinary common sense has grown increasingly conscious of our moral obligations to animals and increasingly unwilling to let science go its own way. The reasons for this change in public attention to animal treatment and to science’s agnostic attitude thereto are largely moral ones, growing out of profound changes in animal use that have arisen in the past sixty years. Prior to World War II, and indeed for virtually all of human history, the overwhelming use of animals in society was agricultural—animals were reared for food, fiber, locomotion, and power. The key to successful animal production was husbandry, an ancient term derived from the Old Norse word husbondi, meaning “bonded to the household.” Husbandry meant putting one’s animals into the optimal environment in which they were biologically suited to thrive by virtue of natural and artificial selection, and further augmenting their natural ability to survive and flourish by provision of medical attention, provision of protection from predation and extremes of climate, provision of food and water during times of famine and drought, and so forth. Husbandry was in essence keeping animals in ways acknowledging and respecting their teloi. Indeed, so powerful is the husbandry imperative in human history that when the Psalmist seeks a metaphor to schematize God’s relationship to humans, he draws upon the archetypical husbandry role, that of the shepherd:
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside still waters, He restoreth my soul.
The husbandry imperative was thus an almost perfect amalgam of prudence and ethics. It was self-evident that “the wise man took care of his animals”—to fail to do so was to harm oneself as well as one’s animals. Husbandry was assured by self-interest, and there was thus no need to place heavy ethical emphasis on proper care of animals. The one exception was the ancient prohibition against overt cruelty and outrageous neglect, designed to cover those rare sadists and psychopaths unmoved by self-interest.
Proper treatment of animals, then, for most of human history, was not heavily stressed in social ethics since it was buttressed by the strongest of motivations—self-interest. Husbandry-based animal agriculture—the overwhelming majority of animal use in society—was about putting square pegs in square holes, round pegs in round holes, and generating as little friction as possible while doing so. Animal agriculture—historically virtually all animal use—was thus a fair contract between humans and animals, with both sides benefiting from the ancient contract represented by domestication.
This ancient and fair compact changed dramatically in the mid-twentieth century with the rise of high-technology agriculture. With the advent of what I call “technological sanders”—antibiotics, vaccines, hormones, and so forth—one was no longer constrained in one’s agriculture by the animals’ biological natures. One could now force square pegs into round holes, round pegs into square holes, with the attendant animal suffering irrelevant to profit. The connection between animal welfare and animal productivity was severed. Similarly, with the rise of massive amounts of research and toxicity testing on animals beginning at approximately the same time, animal use could benefit us while harming them in unprecedented ways—inflicting disease, wounds, burns, fear, pain, and so forth on animals so we could study them, with no compensatory benefits to the animal subjects. For the first time in history, the welfare of animals used by humans became a moral issue. By the late 1970s, Europeans and North Americans were demanding that animal use be modified in research and agriculture so that suffering would be mitigated and animal well-being would be assured.
In this way scientific ideology, agnostic about animal consciousness, clashed with ever-increasing social concern about animal treatment. This new social tendency to concern itself about animal welfare forces upon science what I have described as “the reappropriation of ordinary common sense” about animal thought and feeling. Thus, for example, in the face of federal law that mandates control of pain and suffering in laboratory animals, it is obviously inappropriate for scientists to express total skepticism about our ability to know what animals think and feel. Thus scientific ideology is now threatened and must bend to accommodate ordinary common sense.
Take, for example, the symposium on animal pain and suffering convened by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in 1987 and its attendant panel report (American Veterinary Medical Association, 1987). The report acknowledges that animals do feel pain, pointing out that pain research that is extrapolated to humans is after all done on animals, which presumes that they feel pain. (Traditional scientific common sense had explained pain research as research into pain mechanisms and behavior, and had ignored any talk of the subjective experiential dimension.) Indeed, the report continues quite reasonably, all animal research that is used to model human beings is based in a tacit assumption of anthropomorphism; and if one can in principle extrapolate from animals to humans, why not the reverse as well?
But a hard-line proponent of the common sense of science would very likely remain unmoved by our discussion, and he or she might respond as follows: Granted that political pressure forces upon us the need to behave as if animal consciousness is scientifically knowable and assumable. But in fact, it is not, for the reasons detailed above.
A bitterly amusing example of such scientific recalcitrance was related to me by Robert Rissler, the US Department of Agriculture official charged with interpreting the 1985 federal laws aimed at furthering the welfare of laboratory animals. In addition to mandating the control of pain and suffering through proper anesthesia, analgesia, sedation, and euthanasia, the laws required that nonhuman primates used in research be provided with environments that “enhance their psychological well-being.” Rissler, a veterinarian, knew little about primates and even less about their psychological well-being, having himself been trained under agnosticism about animal mentation. Nonetheless, he was charged with writing regulations giving operational meaning to the psychological well-being of primates. Somewhat naively, he approached the American Psychological Association’s Primatology Division, seeking their counsel on defining this obscure notion. “Don’t worry,” they assured him. “There is no such thing.” “Oh, but there will be after January 1, 1987 [the date the laws took effect], whether you help me or not!” replied Rissler tellingly.
Science is, of course, our vehicle for knowing about the world. If science denies our ability to access animal mentation through anecdotal data and anthropomorphic locutions, it removes itself from answering or helping to answer the key ethical questions about animal well-being that have emerged in society. To address questions of animal treatment, welfare, acceptable environments, pain and suffering, and so forth, we must be able to make meaningful claims about what animals experience and feel.
To do this, we must in turn be allowed to use anthropomorphic locutions based in our ordinary empathetic experience of animals’ lives. My animal agriculture students, when taught animal behavior by a mechanistic teacher who refused to use mentalistic locutions about animals, reported ignoring the professor’s teachings when they went home to their ranches. “If I can’t say that the bull is pissed off today,” said one such student, “I won’t live real long.” Our ability to work with animals, anticipate their behaviors, and meet their needs rests foursquare on such locutions. Scientific common sense’s agnosticism about such locutions therefore in essence removes questions of animal welfare from the realm of legitimate empirical investigation.
It is necessary to point out that the skepticism discussed above, if systematically adhered to in science, would render doing science impossible. For in actual fact, presuppositional to scientific activity are certain assumptions that flagrantly violate the claim that everything in science must be observable or subject to direct experimental confirmation. Consider the following: Science assumes that there is a real, public, intersubjectively accessible world out there, existing independently of my perceptions, and accessible to other humans and to other scientists in particular. It also assumes that other scientists perceive the public world and think more or less as I do, and that one can distinguish veridical and falsidical scientific reports about experiences of that world. It also assumes that there really is a past, even though we cannot experience it directly, and that it is not the case that the universe was created three seconds ago, fossils and all, and us with all our memories. The key point is that none of those beliefs can even in principle be confirmed by observation or directly tested by experiment. Yet few scientists are disposed to reject them, even though they conflict with what is entailed by the assumptions of scientific common sense. If they did reject them, they could not do science. (What would solipsistic science be like? Why publish?) Thus, the hard-line skepticism discussed above must be tempered, else it destroys science altogether.
The obvious response is that it is wildly implausible to embrace solipsism, to deny other minds or an external world, or to treat the history of the world as being three seconds in length. And to this I fully agree. And, in my view, it is equally implausible to deny mentation to animals. Philosophically, as soon as one has given up a hard-line verificationism that admits only direct observables into science, and one has admitted that certain nonverifiable beliefs are admissible on the grounds of plausibility (e.g., belief in an external world independent of observers and commonly accessible), one has replaced a rigid logical criterion for scientific admissibility with a pragmatic one, in which one needs to argue for exclusion of certain notions from science rather than simply apply a mechanical test. And, of course, this is what has in fact occurred in the history of science—science has talked of all sorts of entities and processes that are not directly verifiable or directly tied to experiment, from gravitation to black holes. Indeed, contemporary physics, traditionally cited as the hardest of hard science, has positively proliferated notions that violate the common sense of science. Such theoretical notions are accepted, of course, because they help us understand reality far better than we do without them.
Talk of mind in animals has a similar justification. We have already mentioned psychologist David Hebb’s point that we could not interpret animal behavior in ordinary life without imputing such notions as pain, fear, anger, and affection to animals, all of which have a mentalistic component in addition to a behavioral one. For saying that “when a dog is in pain that means only that the dog is exhibiting a certain range of behaviors or responses” does not explain its cringing or loss of appetite unless we also assume that it is feeling something—“hurt”—which is functionally equivalent to what we feel when we hurt. This assumption is, in fact, as the AVMA panel report on recognition and alleviation of animal pain said, presuppositional to doing pain research and analgesia screening in animals and extrapolating the results to people. What we are interested in is a feeling common to both, not merely similarity in plumbing and groaning.
I have thus far attempted to establish that the traditional scientific skepticism about animal mind is wrong-headed. Furthermore, using the example of pain, I have argued that, in at least some cases, scientific attribution of mentation is inevitable and based in anthropomorphism as presuppositional to its intelligibility.
It is now relevant to reintroduce the notion of anecdote as a source of information about animal mentation and to assess its relevance to science. An excellent place to begin, for it retains the simple case of pain we have been using, is a famous article by David Morton and P. H. M. Griffiths that appeared in the Veterinary Record in 1985. This article was one of the first papers addressing the recognition and alleviation of pain in animals. It is noteworthy that while the authors do provide criteria for assessing pain and its degree in animals, they stress that the best sources of information about animal pain are farmers, ranchers, animal caretakers, trainers—in short, those whose lives are spent in the company of animals and who make their living through animals. Given the plausibility criterion discussed earlier, the advisability of seeking information on pain from animal caretakers is patent. Whereas scientists could get on perfectly well in highly artificial laboratory situations professing agnosticism about animal pain and other mentation, those who live with and depend on animals could not. If you fall into the latter class and do not recognize pain, fear, anger, and so on in your animals, you will lose your livelihood, be highly vulnerable to injury, and be unable to control or train your charges, among many other negative outcomes.
Thus, given that science specifically disavowed the reality of animal thought and made no attempt to study it, it is perfectly proper to look to those who have been compelled to understand animal thought for millennia. To be sure, such information will be “anecdotal,” that is, not obtained in laboratory experiments and not analyzed, but that does not mean it is illegitimate.
Thus we have seen that, in the simple case of pain, the common sense of science is wrong, and that one can talk of what animals experience; that one must use a measure of anthropomorphism, even as we use our own individual experiences as a guide to understanding those of other humans; and that one must depend, at least currently, on anecdotal information. Indeed, an even more striking argument could be made regarding the concept of suffering, which does not appear in the scientific literature even with regard to humans, let alone animals.
One can also buttress these arguments with others. Similar physiological mechanisms for pain in humans and animals, similar behavioral responses, similar neurochemistry, and the plausibility of phylogenetic continuity all militate in favor of attributing felt pain to animals, as does the fact that humans who do not feel pain, for congenital or acquired reasons, do not fare well.
One could respond to the argument we have developed thus far in this way: As long as one focuses on simple, fundamental, primitive mental experiences like pain, one’s argument is unexceptionable. But as soon as one leaves sensation and begins to talk of higher mental processes in animals, one cannot accept anecdotal anthropomorphic evidence. Ordinary common sense and its discourse are far too disposed to exaggerate animal intelligence, planning, reasoning, and emotional complexity and to jump to unwarranted conclusions by seeing animals as furry humans. Indeed, it was precisely romantic, unbounded anthropomorphism and exaggerated anecdotes’ abounding in the nineteenth century that in part led to the behavioristic/positivistic reaction against animal thought.
How does one reply to such an objection? In the first place, one might argue (as did F. J. J. Buytendijk in Pain: Its Modes and Functions) that the ability to feel and respond appropriately to pain bespeaks mental sophistication beyond mere sensation. Pain in and of itself would be of little value if it were not coupled with some ability to choose among alternative strategies of response, for example, fight or flight, hide, evade, and so on. Thus, the evolutionary utility of pain consists in the organism’s ability to respond to a noxious stimulus not only with motivation to alleviate it but with strategies to deal with it as well. It is in fact this insight that led pain physiologists Ralph Kitchell and Michael Guinan to conjecture that animals may well suffer more from pain than humans do. Since animals lack the cognitive abilities possessed by humans to understand the sources of pain and to formulate strategies for its relief or for its mitigation, Kitchell and Guinan (1990) suggest that the motivational dimension of pain, that is, the hurting and the correlative drive to escape it, may well be more profound in animals than it is in humans, and thus their experience of pain may be, in balance, worse than ours. As I have pointed out elsewhere in this regard, it has often been argued that in lacking the tools for transcending the here and now provided by linguistic capacity and concepts, animals correlatively lack the suffering occasioned in us by anticipation of pain and other noxious experiences. However, if this is the case, they also lack anticipation of the end of pain and thus have no hope. In a terrible way, they are their pain; there is no light at the end of the tunnel for them.
Be that as it may, I should rather respond by affirming that the argument and strategy we have constructed for using anecdotal and anthropomorphic information to identify pain is in principle no different from using the same approach to understand higher (or other) mental processes. The relevant distinction is not pain (or sensation) versus thought (or higher mental processes)—it is rather good versus bad anthropomorphism, reasonable versus unreasonable anecdote.
Once again, the key notion for our analysis is plausibility, the same sort of measure we use when we attribute thoughts, plans, feelings, and motives to other humans, be it in daily life or when serving on a jury. Let us recall that we do not experience other people’s mental states and that language can be used to conceal and deceive. How, then, do we judge other humans’ mental states? What we do is use a combination of weighing of evidence and what we might call “me-thropomorphism”—extrapolations from our own mental lives to others’. In other words, for example, if a friend of mine who has evidenced a normal propensity for jealousy suddenly finds his wife, whom he has loved deeply, running around flagrantly with another man, and tells me he bears her no ill will, I am skeptical. I can in principle be convinced that he feels no jealousy, but this would require very extensive observation and interaction with him to trump my plausible interpretation. On the other hand, if he tells me that he is jealous and angry, or behaves that way, it is certainly reasonable to assume that he is, for the motivation for that response is what I know of myself and others. Although we would be hard pressed to articulate them, we all have canons for judging the plausibility of anecdotes about other people and of explanations of their behavior. The female student who tells me that a male professor obviously has a crush on her and cites as evidence the fact that he ran into her twice in one week at the grocery store and said “Hi” may reasonably not be taken seriously. While I can understand how a person could take such events to mean something, and while the student’s conclusion could in fact be true, in my consideration of the evidence given in this anecdote, I would likely decide that it is not. In fact, the vast majority of our knowledge of human behavior does not come from scientific research but from our evaluation of life experience and what would be dismissed by the common sense of science as “anecdotal.”
My claim, like that of Darwin’s secretary, George Romanes, is that anecdote is, in principle, just as plausible a source of knowledge about animal behavior as it is about human behavior, provided it is tested by common sense, background knowledge, and standard canons of evidence. Thus, when a child says that there is someone on the street giving away money to everybody who wants it, we suspect either misunderstanding or swindle since, by and large, people do not do such things. By the same token, when someone interprets his dog’s restlessness as evidence that the dog knows it is his birthday, we can dismiss that since we have no reason to believe that the dog has, or even can have, a concept of birthday. On the other hand, if the person telling the anecdote explains the dog’s excitement by saying that he has learned that when his owners cook and clean all day and frequently look out of the window, guests are coming, that is consonant with what we know of dogs’ abilities.
More difficult cases occur when the anthropomorphic anecdote concerns a species of animal with which we do not enjoy the familiarity we do with dogs, though here the problem is in principle no different from when we deal with people who come from cultures significantly different from ours. When they belch loudly after a meal, we may label them as rude people out of ignorance of their culture wherein such an act is a polite compliment; we can make the same mistake looking at unfamiliar animals. Witness the child or urban adult who reports equine sex play as fighting. Thus it would seem to me that once one has in principle allowed the possibility of anthropomorphic, anecdotal information about animal mentation, one must proceed to distinguish between plausible and implausible anecdotes, the latter of which may nonetheless turn out to be true, though we are right to be skeptical, and likewise between plausible and implausible anthropomorphic attributions. The fact that many people tell outrageous anecdotes or interpret anecdotes in highly fanciful or unlikely ways, and even publish such nonsense, should no more blind us to the plethora of plausible anecdotes, and reasonable interpretations thereof, forthcoming from people with significant experience of the animals in question, than should the presence of outlandish stories about or outrageous interpretations of human behavior cause us to doubt all accounts of human behavior.
Anecdotes and their interpretation may obviously be judged by many of the sorts of principles Romanes relates in his classic introduction to Animal Intelligence. Does the anecdote cohere with other knowledge we have of animals of that sort? Have similar accounts been given by other disinterested observers at other times and in other places? Does the interpretation of the anecdote rely upon problematic theoretical notions? (Cf. imputing a grasp of “birthday” to the dog.) How well does the data license the interpretation? Does the person relating the anecdote have a vested interest in either the tale or its interpretation? (Penny Patterson’s stories of Koko the tame gorilla in her fund-raising letters naturally excite some skepticism.) What do we know of the teller of the anecdote—is it Konrad Lorenz or Baron Munchausen? One can—and we do—set up plausible rules for judging anecdotal data, be it about humans or about animals. The alternative is to create total, nihilistic skepticism about the commonsense experience that has given us most of our social knowledge of the behavior of people and animals.
One fascinating point that has escaped notice is that anecdotes are logically no worse off than reports of scientific experiments and their interpretation; in some ways the latter may be more suspect. As we know from the rash of reports of data falsification, fraud, and dishonesty in scientific publications, scientists are as human as anyone else. Given a “publish or perish” system for science, scientists feel the pressure to produce or else they must effectively give up their careers. If this is so, then researchers have a strong vested interest in obtaining results, which in turn should excite our natural suspicion of their results. It is true that scientific reports are replicable in principle, but there is little money for such replication as long as a result coheres with data in the field. Anecdotes are, of course, also replicable in principle, either by experiment or by observation. In the final analysis, any report of an experiment is by definition an anecdote, not a confirmed hypothesis. The following questions should be mulled over by anyone interested in these issues: Is it more unreasonable to trust the account of a disinterested lay observer or that of a scientist who must get results to survive? Is the multiplicity of theoretical biases that scientists carry in virtue of their training any less, or any more, or equally pernicious to their observational capacity than the theoretical biases built into a nonscientifically trained but intelligent observer?
Let us conclude with, appropriately enough, an anecdote that is very interesting to laypeople and to students of animal behavior. The story was in fact reported, in detail, on Denver television, accompanied by videotaped pictures of the events described. In the story, an African elephant at the Denver Zoo had gone down and refused to get up, a condition known to lead to fatality if not corrected. All efforts to get the elephant to stand up—including bringing in a hired crane—had failed. By chance, the Asian elephants were herded past the afflicted elephant. The Asian elephants broke ranks, approached the fallen elephant, and nudged and poked him until he stood up. They then supported him until he stood on his own.
Thus far, we have an anecdotal narrative, with little or no theoretical bias obtruding and no interpretation offered. As data relevant to the study of elephant behavior, the story is surely relevant. Although the TV station has a vested interest in dramatic stories, it filmed the events and its account was buttressed by other observers, so falsification of the events is unlikely. The commonsense interpretation of the data offered by the station, and by the average observer, was that the elephants were altruistically helping another elephant, albeit a different species. Such an interpretation is more problematic than the simple reportage of the events, since “help” is ambiguous and speculative. The events are certainly open to other interpretations. When, however, one juxtaposes that story with the many other stories of elephants’ showing helpful behavior to other elephants, together with the extensive data we have on the problem-solving ability and the social nature of elephants, the interpretation gains in plausibility.
To preclude data on (and interpretations of) animal behavior a priori simply because the data was not garnered in laboratories (which constitute in any case highly unnatural conditions for animals) or was not observed by “accredited scientists” is against the spirit of what science should be. To be sure, common sense is “theory-laden” with often problematic categories and interpretations, but so too is science. It is at least as hard to see how intelligent, educated scientists bought whole-hog into behaviorism for most of the twentieth century as it is to see how ordinary people can buy into astrology today. As twentieth-century philosopher Paul Feyerabend suggests, science should be democratic in its admission of data sources but stricter in the theories or explanations it graduates.
Mentalistic attribution to animals provides a very plausible theoretical structure for explaining and predicting animal behavior. Anthropomorphism, if tested against reasonable canons of evidence, is another plausible—and indeed inevitable—theoretical approach to assessing animal behavior. And finally, since there are and always have been far more ordinary people out observing animals than there are scientists engaged in the same activity, it would be a pity to rule out anecdote, critically assessed, as a potentially valuable source of information and interpretation of animal behavior. In fact, ever-increasing social-ethical concern about animal treatment essentially requires information about what matters to animals as the raw material for formulating social policy. Since the common sense of science has morally castrated the language it uses to describe animal behavior, eschewing, for example, morally laden descriptions of animals as expressing pain in favor of “neutral” locutions like “vocalizing,” the gap must be filled by the language of ordinary common sense, replete as it is with morally relevant locutions about animal experience.
In sum, we may now affirm that, for ordinary common sense, emerging animal ethics dovetails with, and indeed follows from, our social-consensus ethic, by way of telos. We have also seen that judging telos, and what matters to animals, is not problematic to ordinary common sense and that one can mount strong arguments against the skepticism emerging from scientific ideology.