Plea for the Animals

The intelligence, empathy, and altruism present in the human species are the fruits of millions of years of gradual evolution. Consequently, it is very much in line with what we should expect when we observe precursory signs of these human emotions, indeed even equivalents, among animals. That was Darwin’s idea when he wrote The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex: “If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be clearly shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind.”¹

An overall vision of the evolution of species makes it possible to understand more clearly that the question of emotions is one of diversification and degrees of complexity. Following in the footsteps of Darwin, who devoted an entire work to this subject—The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals²—a number of ethologists have highlighted the richness of the mental and emotional life of animals. As Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal, and many others have observed, the elementary signals that we use to express pain, fear, anger, joy, surprise, impatience, boredom, sexual excitement, and many other mental and emotional states are not at all unique to our own species.

According to Gilles Boeuf, director of the Natural History Museum of Paris, biologically we profoundly resemble animals. We have the same cells, the same type of DNA, and so forth. There are 7.7 million species of animals on earth, and another million species of plants, fungi, and protozoa. Around 6.5 millions species are found on land and 2.2 million dwell in the oceans. Among the 1.3 million species who have been described, 5,000 are mammals, 10,000 are birds, 35,000 species are fish, and 1.1 million are insects; of the insects 80,000 are coleopteran (beetles).⁴ “If God exists,” Boeuf comments, “He loves coleoptera.” We have 24,000 genes, only twice as many as the housefly. “It takes only a second to crush a fly,” Boeuf adds, “but it took billions of years for the fly to be able to exist.”⁵

On the genetic level, 50 percent of the fly’s DNA is identical to ours; but with the chimpanzee the degree of genetic similarity reaches 98.73 percent. We have certainly accomplished marvels with the 1.27 percent that is ours alone, but from the point of view of evolution, only a few steps separate us from the common ancestor we share with the great apes. According to the data in our possession, the evolutionary lineage of ancestors that we share with the great apes separated from the lineage of the lesser apes about 10 million years ago. Humans share ancestors with the contemporary great apes that we have no knowledge of. So the genome of humans differs from that of chimpanzees by only 1.27 percent and by only 1.65 percent from that of gorillas. These calculations lead us to estimate that our lineage separated from that of chimpanzees about 5 million years ago, and from that of gorillas about 7 million years ago.

Even if, as Darwin explains, there is a considerable gap between the intellectual faculties of a lamprey eel and a primate, this gap is filled by innumerable gradations that make it possible to retrace the history of gradual and continuous complexification both on the physiological level and on the level of abilities to interact with the surrounding environment. In the end Darwin comes to this conclusion: “Certain facts prove that the intellectual faculties of animals considered very inferior to us are more elevated than we ordinarily think.”7 Thus we are quite far from the peremptory assertion of Buffon, who told us, “The chicken knows neither the past nor the future and is mistaken about the present.”⁸

Furthermore, as the philosopher and ethologist Dominique Lestel points out in his Les Origines Animales de la Culture (Animal Origins of Culture), “We still experience great difficulty in accepting the idea that animal behavior can be extremely complex even if this complexity is not of the same nature as the complexity of human behavior. Animal intelligence is not a human intelligence that is less evolved than that of humans, but simply a different intelligence.”⁹

The fact that consciousness is eminently useful for survival inevitably leads us to think that it must be present in many animal species just as it was in our ancestors. As the animal physiologist Donald R. Griffin explains, “The better an animal understands its physical, biological, and social environment, the better it can adjust its behavior to accomplish whatever goals may be important in its life, including those that contribute to its evolutionary fitness.”¹⁰ Griffin also points out that in “accepting the reality of our evolutionary relationship to other species of animals, it is unparsimonious to assume a rigid dichotomy of interpretation which insists that mental experiences have some effect on the experience of one animal species [i.e., us humans] but none on any other.”¹¹ And the ethologist Stephen Stich concludes: “In the light of the evolutionary links and the behavioral similarities between humans and higher animals, it is difficult to believe that psychology could explain human behavior but not animal behavior. If humans have beliefs, then animals do too.”¹²

Alex, a parrot from Gabon, fluently used a hundred words and understood a thousand. It understood ideas such as “bigger than” and “smaller than,” “the same as” and “different from.” When the ethologist Irene Pepperberg, who worked with Alex for thirty years, showed this parrot an object, it could correctly describe its form, its color, and the material it was made out of.¹⁶ It understood, for example, what a key was, and correctly identified this object, no matter what its size and color were. It identified what differentiated it from another object.¹⁷ One day it asked what color it itself was. This was the way it learned the word “gray,” after Pepperburg repeated it six times.¹⁸ The last words of Alex to Pepperburg, when she was leaving it for the night, were: “Be well. See you tomorrow. I love you.”

The ethologist Richard J. Herrnstein clearly showed that pigeons were capable of assimilating the general idea “human being.”¹⁹ He showed the pigeons a large number of photographs, some of which showed humans, others animals or objects. The pigeons received food if they pushed a button with their beak that was in front of the photo of a human and nothing if they pressed the button in front of a photo showing something else. The humans in the photos were of both sexes, all races, all ages, in different postures, naked or dressed. The pigeons very quickly learned to accurately recognize the presence of humans in the photos. This shows, that even though they had no language, they were capable of forming general concepts, such as “human being.” He tells us that the pigeons could also recognize particular human individuals, as well as trees, water, fish under water, and others. This indicates that they had the capacity to distinguish particular as well as general characteristics. Even better, during an experiment by Shigeru Watanabe, pigeons were able to successfully recognize paintings according to their style. For example, they distinguished paintings by Picasso from paintings by Monet. They were even able to make generalizations and to recognize “families” of style, Picasso and Braques on one hand, Monet and Cézanne on the other!20

The Japanese primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa showed that the short-term memory of chimpanzees is better than that of adult humans. Chimpanzees were placed in front of a screen where—in random order and for two-tenths of a second each—numbers from one to nine appeared inside empty squares. The chimpanzees were then able to place the correct numbers in the empty squares with an error rate of only 10 percent, which was an error rate half of that of humans. The chimpanzees knew how to count (they could add and subtract simple numbers), and using a keyboard, they could write complex series of words, such as “three red pencils.”²¹

Rainbowfish learn after five tries to find an opening that allows them to escape from a net, and more surprising still, they succeed in the exercise on the first try eleven months later.²² To this day, more than six hundred scientific studies have already been carried out on the learning capacity of fish.

Stanley Curtis of the University of Pennsylvania taught pigs to play a video game utilizing a joystick modified so they could manipulate it with their snout. Not only did they really learn to play, but they did so significantly faster than a trained dog and as fast as a chimpanzee, thus demonstrating an amazing capacity for abstract representation.²³

Kenneth Kephart, professor emeritus at the same university, reports that pigs are as capable as dogs of lifting a latch in order to get out of their pen, that they often do it two at a time, and that they go so far as to open the pens of other pigs to let them out.²⁴ Suzanne Held from the University of Bristol in England has also shown that pigs are able to form an idea of what one of their fellow animals can or cannot see and thus adopt the point of view of the other animal when they are competing with each other in trying to find food.²⁵

A number of similar observations have been made of hippopotamuses coming to the aid of animals being attacked by predators. One gripping scene was filmed in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. In the film you see an impala attacked by a crocodile while drinking at the water’s edge. The reptile drags its victim into the water and holds it firmly in its jaws while trying to drown it. The impala tries desperately to hold its head above water. Suddenly a hippopotamus that had been on the riverbank rushes into the water at a gallop and charges the crocodile, which lets go of its prey. Severely wounded, the antelope succeeds in heaving itself onto the shore, but collapses after a couple of steps. The hippo follows it, and far from trying to harm it, nuzzles it gently with its snout, licks its wounds and, several times, takes the head of the dying animal into its gigantic mouth, as though trying to breathe new life into it. But the impala’s wounds were too deep, and it finally dies. It is not until then that the hippo finally moves away.²⁷ For Tom Regan, a great number of animals resemble humans:

Again, in 1970 Richard Ryder, a psychologist at Oxford, introduced the concept of speciesism in a brochure that he circulated on the campus of the university. He explained his thought process as follows: “Since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no ‘magical’ essential difference between human and other animals, biologically-speaking. Why then do we make an almost total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum, then we should also be on the same moral continuum.”³⁰

In a collective essay published the following year, Ryder wrote: “If it is accepted as morally wrong to deliberately inflict suffering upon innocent human creatures, then it is only logical to also find it wrong to deliberately inflict suffering on innocent creatures belonging to other species. The time has come to act in accordance with this logic.”³¹

Writer and animal rights advocate Joan Dunayer argues that, if speciesism is our failure—on the basis of species membership or species -typical characteristics—to accord all sentient beings equal consideration and respect, we should not be content to call for rights only for a relatively few nonhumans who seem the most human-like (great apes, in particular). Dunayer holds that it is fair, logical, and empirically justified to give all creatures with nervous systems the benefit of the doubt regarding sentience and accord them basic rights such as the right to life and liberty.³³

Martin Gibert is of the opinion that “Speciesism is a form of human supremacism, which is analogous to white supremacism, for example. It postulates that belonging to the human species in itself confers on humans an intrinsic value and a moral superiority over the other species. There we have the idea that would allow us to give priority to human interests over the interests of other species, even if those interests were such pointless ones as foie gras, fur, or dogfighting.”³⁴

These explanations of speciesism seem clear enough. However, some people have made use of different interpretations of the term to file unjust suits in court and at the same time to attack the cause of animal liberation. The analogy with racism and sexism ought to clarify the issue. Thus, not being a racist or a sexist does not imply that we deny or ignore the differences between the races and the sexes, which would be absurd. In the absence of these differences, racism and sexism would have never existed. The use of these two terms is justified when differences of any kind are being used to support an egotistical discrimination based on belonging to a group—the white race or the masculine sex, for example—as well as the perpetuation of a hierarchy of power and the exercise of this power for the purpose of oppressing those belonging to the other group.

Melanie Joy teaches psychology and sociology at the University of Massachusetts. Each semester, she devotes one of her courses to helping students explore their relationships with animals. She begins by asking her students to make a list of the characteristics of dogs and pigs. For dogs, the most frequently used adjectives are faithful, friendly, intelligent, fun, protective, and, occasionally, dangerous. The pigs, on the other hand, are characterized as dirty, stupid, lazy, fat, ugly, disgusting. After this exercise, the discussion takes a form more or less like this:

Let us consider this statement for a moment. We send one species to the slaughterhouse and give our affection to another for the sole reason that “it’s just the way things are.” The unreasonableness of this jumps out at us. “Many of us,” Melanie Joy remarks, “spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of us don’t spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone.”³⁷ As Aymeric Caron humorously writes in No Steak: “Another bizarre point is that in the family of gastropod mollusks, we of course eat escargots, but not slugs. The fact that they don’t have their houses on their backs is apparently suspect. No to homeless gastropods! Is that something that really makes sense? . . . With animals we act like schizophrenics, capable of both the worst and the best.”³⁸

As ethologist Marc Bekoff argues, the drawing of lines between individuals belonging to different animal species is bad biology in view of the evidence for evolutionary continuity. It results in the establishment of false boundaries that have dire consequences for species deemed to be “lower” than others, such as ants, fish, birds, or rats. Most conservation efforts are directed at “higher” and charismatic animals such a whales, polar bears, elephants, or tigers. Speciesism, conscious and unconscious, is the main culprit in our interactions with other animals. It reinforces the status of nonhuman animals as chattels and undermines our collective efforts to make the world a better place for all beings. Bekoff pleads for a “deep” ethology, studies of animals that take us not only into their minds but also into their hearts, as a beginning of expanding our “compassion footprint.”³⁹

It is absolutely true that anti-speciesism is a human phenomenon, just like all other forms of reflective and deliberate categorization. Only humans are capable of making into a dogma that one race is inferior and the world would be better off if it did not exist. But also humans alone are capable of opposing dogmas of this kind and showing the shameful quality of them. Being capable of sustaining complex moral concerns relating to a large number of individuals, including persons who are distant in time and space (future generations, for example), and even extending this to other species is, without a doubt, a human characteristic. Only a human can become a speciesist, and only a human can also understand that he or she ought not to be one, since it is indefensible to instrumentalize other species for the sole reason that they are not human, if that is the justification that is advanced for it.

This position does not require that the objects of our moral concerns be capable of manifesting reciprocity toward us. Future human generations are obviously incapable of doing anything for us, but even so, would it be ethical for us to wreck the planet they are going to inherit?

Some people maintain that it is morally acceptable to kill animals if you do it painlessly, because they really do not have a “life plan” and are not conscious at normal times of their finitude, nor are they preoccupied by their ultimate demise. In one of his novels, J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, answers them as follows: “You say that death does not matter to an animal because the animal does not understand death. . . . If this is the best that human philosophy can offer, I said to myself, I would rather go and live among horses.⁴³

To make full use of the potential of existence, an animal must enjoy a certain degree of freedom. Martha Nussbaum, professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, has established a list of abilities that, in her view, must be respected in animals. Life itself is number one. All animals have the right to continue to live, as well as to preserve their health and their physical integrity. After this come the abilities animals have to experience their senses, their imagination, and the exercise of their capacity for thought. For that, it is necessary to make sure that animals have access to the sources of their pleasures, that is to say, freedom of movement in an environment that is pleasing to their senses. We must also respect the ability of animals to feel emotions. To this end, they must have the freedom to associate with other animals and take care of them. Consequently, it is unacceptable to force them to live in isolation.⁴⁵

A number of these potentials can only be guaranteed by also respecting the environments of the animals. Cetaceans are disturbed by the noise of the motors of the boats that crisscross the seas; pollution is harmful to the eyes and skin of fish; the accumulation of mercury in their flesh poisons them. Everywhere wild animals are suffering from the gradual disappearance of their natural habitats.

In fact, many academics still refuse to apply terms to animals that make reference to mental states like anger, fear, suffering, affection, joy, or other emotions similar to ours. As Bernard Rollin tells us, in their effort not to apply terms to animals that also describe human emotions, many researchers do not speak of fear but rather of “retreat behaviors”; they do not speak of the suffering of a rat placed on a hot burner but count the number of its somersaults and convulsions; they do not speak of moans or cries of pain but of “vocalizations.”⁴⁷ The obvious vocabulary is replaced by a jargon that is more an expression of denial than scientific objectivity. The psychologist Donald Olding Hebb and his collaborators tried for two years to describe the behavior of the chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center near Atlanta while avoiding any description that could be qualified as anthropomorphic. The result was an interminable series of verbose descriptions from which no meaning could be derived.⁴⁸ By contrast, when the researchers allowed themselves to use “anthropomorphic” descriptions for emotions and attitudes, they could rapidly and easily describe the particularities of each animal and come to an unambiguous agreement on the fact that such and such an animal, for example, was angry or affectionate. Darwin followed this approach when he wrote: “Dogs shew what may be fairly called a sense of humour, as distinct from mere play; if a bit of stick or other such object be thrown to one, he will often carry it away for a short distance; and then squatting down with it on the ground close before him, will wait until his master comes quite close to take it away. The dog will then seize it and rush away in triumph, repeating the same manoeuvre, and evidently enjoying the practical joke.”49

So it is not more anthropomorphic to postulate the existence of mental states in certain animals than it is to compare their anatomy, their nervous system, and their physiology to ours. When an animal is visibly joyous or sad, why not call things by their names?

The biologist Donald Griffin coined the term “mentaphobia” to designate the obsession that certain scientists manifest in denying any form of consciousness to animals. Griffin’s opinion was that this was a scientific error and that “the intense fervor with which numerous psychologists and biologists insist on the fact that non-human consciousness is a totally inappropriate subject is so profound and emotional that it borders on irrational aversion or mentaphobia.”⁵⁰

In Contre la Mentaphobie (Against Mentaphobia), David Chauvet shows how this denial of consciousness in animals serves as an excuse for exploiting animals without feeling guilty about the serious abuses we commit toward them. As he sees it, “consciousness was very definitely substituted for the soul in attributing to humans an ontological value that distinguishes them from the rest of living beings.”⁵¹ Asserting that animals do not have consciousness thus is nothing other than the continuation of the Christian and Cartesian idea according to which animals do not possess a soul.

This kind of stubborn resistance goes against common sense and shows a misunderstanding of the very nature of evolution, which implies that psychology, in the same way as anatomy, developed in a gradual fashion. Frans de Waal describes this stubbornness in reserving for humans the monopoly on certain emotions as “anthropocentric denial”:⁵²

In the West, multiple cultural factors have contributed to this anthropocentrism. Among these are the tenacious remainders of the Judeo-Christian idea according to which only humans possess a soul. In this elegy to La Fontaine, Hippolyte Taine denounces the prejudices of Descartes and his contemporaries:

The contempt of the thinkers of the seventeenth century, for whom the animals were no more than “automatons of flesh,” can in a way be seen again today in the anthropocentric pride that refuses to place humans within the continuity of the evolution of animals, thinking that it would represent an insult to human dignity because it would be an attack on the superiority of human being as something beyond reason’s measure. Élisabeth de Fontanay deconstructs this pretension with elegance and lucidity:

There is without doubt another reason for which many of us are strongly attached to the idea of an uncrossable frontier between humans and animals: if we were to recognize that the animals are not fundamentally different from us, it would force us to forbid treating them like instruments, utensils, purely serving our interests. The proof of this is what a research worker told Bernard Rollin: “It makes my work so much easier if I act as though animals hadn’t the least consciousness.”57 Very fortunately, today a growing number of researchers recognize the presence of emotions and complex mental processes in animals.

In 2012, on the occasion of the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals—an international group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists, including Philip Low, Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, and Christof Koch—issued The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, in which they stated:

The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

In particular they remarked that:

Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.

Different Cultures

For about the past twenty years, ethologists have been talking about “animal cultures.” As Dominique Lestel, who teaches cognitive ethology at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, tells us, we must “think of the cultural phenomenon in an evolutionary and pluralist perspective and once and for all stop being driven by the desire to single out ‘the unique quality of man.’ We must stop thinking about culture in opposition to nature; instead we should become aware of the plurality of cultures that exists among creatures of very different species.”58

In the case of human beings, the American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber puts forward six conditions required for speaking of “culture.” New behaviors have to emerge; they must be disseminated in the group, starting with the inventor; they must become standardized; they must last; and they must be diffused by the intermediary of traditions.⁵⁹ He affirms that the chimpanzees studied by Jane Goodall fulfill all these conditions. A synthesis of studies by several groups of researchers who worked on seven particularly well-studied sites and accumulated 151 years of experience in the field, enumerated 65 categories of behaviors, of which 39 were considered to be cultural.⁶⁰

According to Dominique Lestel, the notion of animal culture rests on three pillars: “Individual innovation, the social transmission of it to the rest of the group, and the imitation or social apprenticeship that makes it possible.”⁶¹ The cultural behaviors generally cited by philosophers and anthropologists to distinguish humans from animals—the fact that certain groups adopt customs unknown in other groups and that parents teach certain techniques to their offspring—are much more widespread than previously thought among animals. The examples run from chimpanzees to the crows of New Caledonia, and go on to include whales, bears, wolves, and even fish. Thus there are many animal cultures, even if they are different from the cultures acquired by human beings.

In the 1960s the great ethologist Jane Goodall was the first to describe the fabrication and use of tools by chimpanzees.62 Her incredulous colleagues did not accept the evidence for this until she showed them corroborating film footage. Before starting out to “fish for ants,” a chimpanzee fabricated a kind of probe out of a branch by cutting it to an appropriate size and removing the leaves. Then, carrying the tool in its mouth or at times under its armpit, it went to an anthill and began enlarging the entrance to it. Then it inserted the probe in the hole and drew it out covered with ants, which had grabbed onto it spontaneously. Then all the chimp had to do was lick the probe stick in order to eat them. Sometimes it also shook the stick vigorously in the hole and, in other cases, banged on the trunk of the tree in which the ant’s nest was located in order to get the ants to come out. Once it had had enough to eat, it yielded its place to another chimp, which patiently awaited its turn, sometimes for quite a while.⁶³ The young chimpanzees began to catch ants or termites in this manner at around the age of three. However, being still awkward and having not yet gotten the hang of it, they generally choose sticks that are too short or too thick.⁶⁴

It sometimes also happens that the chimpanzee uses several tools in the same task—for example, inserting a sponge made of leaves into a hole in a tree filled with water, then using a stick to pull out the soaked sponge and refresh itself—or also one tool for several different tasks. Observations were made of a female chimp that used four tools in succession to extract honey from a hole in a tree.⁶⁵ Moreover, when a chimpanzee discovers a new effective technique, this technique spreads quickly within the group, in this way creating a culture unique to this group.

Jane Goodall enumerated ten different ways in which chimpanzees use tools. By now, forty have been identified. It turns out that more than one hundred animal species use tools.⁶⁶ The chaffinch of Galápagos uses a twig to help it expose the larvae that hide under the bark of trees, and the sea otter uses a stone to open oysters.⁶⁷ The New Caledonian crow makes two types of tools to capture its prey: a twig that naturally has the form of a hook and a pandanus leaf, which it cuts and then fashions into a fish hook shape. Once these instruments have been prepared, it uses them to rummage around under the bark of trees. Between uses, the crow stows them securely near its roost, then it carries them around in its beak to be reused as it flies from one place to another.68

Observations have also been made of mother chimpanzees who facilitate their offsprings’ learning process by providing them with good tools for breaking nuts and by showing them how to go about doing it. A mother was seen taking away a nut that her offspring had badly positioned on a big root that was serving as an anvil, cleaning the anvil, then placing the nut back on it in a good position. The young chimp then worked on the nut successfully under its mother’s attentive regard.⁶⁹ In the Taï Forest in the Ivory Coast, when the coula nut season comes, the chimpanzees spend at least two hours a day cracking nuts. Once they have collected enough of them, they transport them to one of the anvils they are in the habit of using and strike them with varying weights of stones according to the hardness of the nut. It takes several years to complete learning this technique perfectly.⁷⁰

Nobuo Masataka and his colleagues observed that the long-tailed macaques that live freely in Thailand use human hairs or an equivalent material as dental floss to clean the spaces between their teeth. It turned out that the mother macaques spent twice as much time using the dental floss when they were being observed by their young. It thus seems that they deliberately prolong and accentuate the use of the floss so as to make it easier to teach the skill to their offspring.⁷¹

Animals also use means of communication that can be very rich, even if they are not based on language as we understand it. The dance of bees, which was brought to the world’s attention by the great entomologist Karl von Frisch, is of great complexity. By means of dancing in different figures in different ways, a bee indicates to its fellows the direction to take to find pollen (indicated by a particular dance) or nectar (indicated by another dance) and the distance that they will have to travel to reach it.⁷²

Whales perform chants that last from fifteen to thirty minutes, that contain two to seven themes, and that cover seven octaves in pitch. These chants are entirely renewed over the course of five years.⁷³ When a whale adopts a new chant and new themes, these are copied by other whales and quickly spread through the whale population over distances of thousands of miles.74 Even though the meaning of these chants is not fully understood (by us), they certainly play an important role in the communication between individuals and in the maintenance of social relations. In 1957 the German ethologist and evolutionist Bernhard Rensch reported the case of an elephant that was able to distinguish twelve musical tonalities and could remember simple melodies even if they were played on different instruments and at different pitches. It was still able to recognize these melodies a year and a half after having first learned them.⁷⁵

Chimpanzees also know how to send precise messages to other members of their group who are out of sight. The ethologist Christophe Boesch has shown that, by drumming in a fast and varied manner on the trunks of several trees for around ten minutes, one male member of a tribe can indicate to other chimpanzees the place where his group is located, the direction it has decided to go in, and that the group is going to stop at a certain point to take a rest. Boesch, who spent months recording and deciphering these drummed messages, observed groups of chimpanzees suddenly and silently change direction after having heard these sound signals containing spatial and temporal information.⁷⁶

Play, dancing, chanting or singing, and the aesthetic sense are also part of animal cultures. For instance, Rensch has been able to show that fish prefer irregular forms while birds on the other hand are more inclined toward regular, symmetrical forms, toward rhythmic repetition of motifs, and toward brilliant and saturated colors, especially blue and black.⁷⁷ The bower bird, to seduce his mate, frequently “repaints” his nest with bright colors using colored barks (with a clear preference for blue). He also brings back all sorts of colored objects to his nest.⁷⁸ And of course many kinds of animals like to play. In winter, kea parrots make snowballs, which they push ahead of themselves obviously with the sole purpose of entertainment.⁷⁹ Sea mammals also play a great deal with each other. Even play between different species has been observed: for example, between crows and wolves in the great northern regions of Canada where wolves do not eat crows,⁸⁰ between a sled dog and a polar bear, as well as among different species of monkey. Jane Goodall has described the playful dance that chimpanzees sometimes engage in for half an hour when a big rain starts to fall.81

Some monkeys, and also elephants, like to draw.⁸² Two chimps in captivity, Alpha and Congo, made hundreds of drawings, which they afterward colored in. They held the brush correctly and did not try at all to get rid of it. They concentrated on their work and the appropriate manipulation of the brush. Their sense of composition got better day by day. After having finished a drawing, Congo handed it to ethologist Desmond Morris and asked with a gesture for another piece of paper.⁸³

Dominique Lestel rejects two positions concerning human and animal cultures: the view according to which these cultures are different by nature and the view according to which the differences between them are only a matter of degree. He defends a third point of view that he considers more realistic: “Animal and human cultures have a common origin, but they are separated by intrinsic differences of the same nature as those that separate a society of ants from a society of chimpanzees. The differing features of the two cultures participate in the same evolutionary logic, but they have characteristics that are radically foreign to each other.”⁸⁴

Thus the continuum of living beings is not organized in the manner of a hierarchy that leads to the absolute superiority of the human species. It simply reflects the thousand pathways that the innumerable species that populate our planet have followed step by step. This continuum reflects the way in which natural selection has favored the emergence of diversity, complexity, and efficiency in life forms that have become increasingly better adapted to their environment. One cannot help but agree with the following remark of Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Never more than at the end of the last four centuries has Western man been in a position to understand that by granting himself the right to radically separate humanity from animality by attributing to the one everything it refused to the other, he created a vicious circle; and that the same boundary, constantly moved back, would serve to divide humans from other humans and claim for the benefit of a constantly more restricted minority the privileges of the corrupted humanism that instantly arose out of having borrowed from vanity and self-love its principle and idea.⁸⁵

From humans to the great apes, passing by way of the birds, the insects, the fish, and the sea mammals, species of all kinds have used their different faculties to form their own appropriate cultures that reflect the best way each of them can survive and be the “subjects” of their lives. It is this diversity that we must recognize and respect, while of course continuing to appreciate fully the particular qualities that are our own.

As the philosopher Patrice Rouget points out, “In the dialogue of Plato called ‘The Statesman,’ one of the speakers judiciously remarks that if one took the point of view of cranes in deciding which species surpasses all the others and should enjoy a separate status, no doubt one would reply ‘cranes.’ Now take us, us human cranes—because we possess the faculty of rhetoric and we know how to be hypocritical, we have replied: ‘humans.’”86

The Human Exception?

Most species have unique abilities that show their remarkable adaptation to their environment. Bats and dolphins and other cetaceans are capable of directing their movements perfectly in the most complete darkness. If we ask ourselves what the main abilities are that especially distinguish humans, we immediately think of the mastery of complex languages: written, spoken, mathematical, symbolic, artistic, and so on. We think, of course, of our extraordinary intelligence and our great emotional refinement. To those things, certain philosophers add that humans are also the only beings capable of scientific knowledge.⁸⁷

At this point, however, without in the least belittling the genius of the human mind, I would like to make the point that animals, in a more limited fashion, are also capable of acquiring complex knowledge. Some wild chimpanzees recognize as many as two hundred species of plant. They know the function of each one of them (in the case of medicinal plants), the places in the forest where they grow, and the time when some of them bear fruit.⁸⁸ Moreover, humans are not the only ones capable of moral conduct; the foundations of morality and ethics were acquired in the course of evolution and are already present in certain animals.⁸⁹ But it is true that humans can in addition reflect on the morality of their behavior, both by thinking about it individually and by communicating about it with others; and they are capable of forming an “ethical community” that might possibly be able to be extended to the whole of humanity.

According to the philosopher Francis Wolff, although some animals have “conscious” perceptions, these perceptions only engender knowledge and thoughts “of the first degree.” By this he means perceptions of the type “here, a predator,” “there a sexual partner,” beliefs that present themselves as “immediate data about the world.” One of the unique characteristics of the human, he adds, “is that he can access a second degree of knowledge, a belief about his belief.”90 A human has the ability to question him- or herself about the truth or falsity of his or her beliefs.

Although it may be the case that an animal equipped with an elementary nervous system—an earthworm, for example—perceives only “immediate data” about the external world, data about food or danger, this does not seem to hold true for animals endowed with more complex faculties. A dog might experience fear or aggression in relation to a stuffed animal, but it modifies its first assessment after closer examination. It inspects this strange being from a distance, cautiously comes closer, sniffs it, and finally comes to the conclusion that it is nothing to fear.

In a similar vein, Kant and many other philosophers have expressed the view that only a human being can produce judgments. But knowledge acquired by today’s work in ethology tends to invalidate this idea. A study by Shinya Yamamoto and his team has been able to demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable of precise assessments of the needs of other chimpanzees.⁹¹ Two chimpanzees who know each other are placed in contiguous cages. A small window makes it possible to pass objects from one cage to another. The first chimpanzee receives in its cage a box with seven objects in it: a stick, a drinking straw, a lasso, a chain, a string, a big flat brush, and a belt.

Then the second chimpanzee is put in a situation where it needs a specific tool, which, depending on the arrangement of the experiment, could be a stick for getting at a piece of food or a straw to drink some fruit juice with. The second chimpanzee signals to the first, either through gestures or voice, that it needs help. The first chimpanzee looks over, evaluates the situation, and nine times out of ten chooses the right tool out of the seven possible ones, then passes it to its fellow through the window. The first chimp itself receives no reward.

If the field of vision of the first chimpanzee is blocked by an opaque panel, it still wants to help when it hears the other one ask, but unable to see in order to evaluate the precise help needed, it passes through any one of the seven objects it has at its disposal. This experiment was repeated with several different chimps, and in at least one case, the chimp that was asked for help went to look through a small hole that it noticed near the top of the opaque panel in order to evaluate the situation of the other chimp and to pass it the right tool!

Similarly, Thomas Bugnyar observed that, when a big crow approaches one of its own food caches, it attentively looks around at the other crows. If it sees another crow that might have seen it store something there, it rushes to the hiding place to be sure to get there to get the piece of food before the other crow. If it sees only other crows that it knows do not know where the cache is, it takes its time.92 Thus there is surely an evaluative faculty present, and a judgment is surely made about what another crow knows or does not know. Recognizing that other animals possess these kinds of abilities in no way makes less of the fact that we humans possess exceptional abilities that confer on the human experience a richness that we would not trade for anything in the world, be it the sonar of bats, the salmon’s sense of smell, or the speed of the leopard. Nevertheless, this richness does not raise us above the animal kingdom, not any more than the ability to fly six thousand miles orienting itself by the stars, by the polarization of light, or the earth’s magnetic field raises the migrating bird above the animal kingdom.

According to Patrice Rouget, a philosopher who holds a point of view completely opposite to the one that humans are above animals:

The quest for the unique quality of man as a proof of his irreducible ontological distinction has been a constant preoccupation of philosophy since the beginning. More than a preoccupation, it is a kind of obsession, a challenge that has been transmitted from one generation to the next; and each new thinker has been encouraged to take it up and propose his own personal solution. A hot potato. . . . Regarding this unfortunate question, it seems that we humans have run into greater difficulties than we ever imagined initially. Nevertheless, we should credit ourselves with the merit of perseverance; the quest has never been given up and from time to time it still produces another worthy discovery. . . . But it is to be feared that there is little hope left. Such constant application accompanied by such regular failure, the very prestige of those who have put forth positions (which proves that we have put into the issue the very best that we have in the way of brain power)—these things should put us on alert: isn’t this question in danger of leading nowhere? Wouldn’t it perhaps be a good idea to consider stowing it away in the storeroom reserved for the accessories of idealism? Biology, ethology, zoology, palaeontology—all the sciences of living things have brought us to a point where the idealist position has become really hard to maintain. It is perhaps time for the followers of metaphysical humanism to take heed.93

We often hear that humans have “extracted themselves from nature.” But is it possible to extract oneself from a totality of interdependence with which we are intimately enmeshed? Can I extract myself from my own body? Can clouds extract themselves from the atmosphere? To quote again from Rouget: “Metaphysical humanism really ought to go ahead and extract man from nature. Of course, there is every likelihood that the result of this extraction will be catastrophic, both for everything human and everything non-human. Here again, animals demand our attention—their suffering, the hell that they have been living for such a long time and which is only getting worse, should serve as a healthy warning to us.”⁹⁴

Even if he is not a believer, the metaphysical humanist and human supremacist succeed neither in dissociating themselves from the religious tradition in which the fate of animals has no intrinsic importance—the sole reason animals to exist being the use that humans can make of them—nor in taking into account the consequences of the theory of evolution.⁹⁵ If human beings do enjoy a “special” ontological status, this privileged status could only result from (1) a supernatural cause; (2) a finalistic (teleological) process, activated by an “anthropic” principle—that is, an organizing principle that would determine the initial conditions of the universe with perfect precision in such a way that life and consciousness (human in particular) would arise in it; or (3) a major discontinuity in the process of evolution that would relate only to the human species among 7.7 million other species.

The first hypothesis is purely a matter of faith. The second is no more than a way of invoking a “first cause” endowed with qualities similar to those that religions attribute to the Creator. As to the third hypothesis, there is no known scientific element that could possibly provide a basis for it. Quite to the contrary, the multiplicity of species of hominids that preceded Homo sapiens shows the unfailing continuity of a process that nothing suggests has reached its conclusion.

If, on the other hand, we share a common origin with our co-citizens in this world, if we are all infinitely varied products of the evolution of life, following the same principles of causality that produced and continue to produce a variety of species, then, while continuing to marvel at our own excellent qualities, we can only render due appreciation to the other species as well, and make every effort to live in such a way as to do them the least possible harm.