Tits details vary, but it’s basically the same story, which has been popping up every few weeks for about a decade now. The revelation – and it’s always presented with a dramatic flourish – is this: animals are a lot more like us than we thought.
Last week it was that dogs could remember the names of their old toys – even when they haven’t seen them for two years. Language acquisition, that “uniquely human” thing, is affected, the researchers said: dogs can store words in their memory. Last month it was what horses could do strategies and planning aheadwhich overturns the assumption that they “simply respond to stimuli in the moment”. And in April it was that there was a “realistic possibility of consciousness” in reptiles, fish and even insects – according to a statement signed by around 40 scientists. One of the studies supporting the claims recorded bumblebees playing with wooden balls. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, the authors thought. It was for fun.
The spiritual realm that we can claim to be “uniquely human” is shrinking at an alarming rate. Horse bees can distinguish faces, dolphins call each other by name, pigs use tools, zebra finches dream, parrots go on Zoom, and lobsters sometimes get anxious. Chimpanzees, meanwhile, exist in complex cultures, rather like ours, with fashion trends. In one recorded case, a high-ranking female chimpanzee started carrying grass in her ears. Within a week, all the chimpanzees did.
Does it seem obvious? This was done by Darwin, who along with other naturalists once assumed that animals, like us, were individuals with some form of consciousness. “Can we feel certain that an old dog with an excellent memory and some imagination, as shown by his dreams, never reflects on his former pleasures of the chase?” he wrote in The descent of man.
But Darwin’s successors were more skeptical, and at the beginning of the 20th century came a chorus of demands for hard evidence for this position. Opinion changed, and “anthropomorphism” became a sin in the natural sciences. For many scientists, it is still a word that means you have made a mistake – you are guilty of sentimentality and intellectual failure.
This piece of wisdom has filtered outward from academia to policymaking, and to the general public. The idea that it is a stupid thing to attribute human motivation to animals is deeply ingrained in us. In a recent article in Psychology Todaythe author worries that children become learned to anthropomorphizewhat he takes for granted is a mistake.
The British government did not recognize animal sentience in law until 2021. But the more we learn about our fellow creatures, the more the evidence sways behind devoted dog owners, Beatrix Potter readers and Disney lovers. We may in fact be guilty of the opposite bias – obstinately looking the other way while animals demonstrate guilt, pain, happiness and theory of mind; to overestimate ourselves and underestimate the rest of the animal kingdom. It is revealing of the scientific culture that this bias does not have a common name. But the late primatologist Frans de Waal called it “anthropodenialism”.
If so, this is an important mistake to correct. First, because there is a clear connection between cruelty and the belief that your victims are not, like you, capable of deep suffering. It was not until 1987 that the medical profession recognized this newborns can feel pain (they couldn’t tell us after all). Babies were therefore routinely operated on without anesthetics or any type of sedation. Mothers recorded evidence of trauma in later life – these children would tremble and vomit when visiting a hospital.
De Waal has a mid-20th century experiment where chimpanzees were denied food, but the staff at the primate center revolted and began secretly feeding the animals. The chief scientist lamented his “tender-hearted colleagues” for failing to reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation.
If animals are more like us, it’s worth knowing – especially for those who campaign in their favor. When naturalists trying to protect elephant herds from poachers moved from raw statistics and aerial photographs to creating elephant “celebrities” – with biographies and photographed in high-fashion style portraits – support poured in. Kindness to animals, it seems, often depends on recognizing that they are similar to us.
Anthropomorphism has its limits. The eccentric biologist George Romanes, who had studied under Darwin, claimed to have recorded a group of terns that tried a cheetah, and a pet snake that died of shock after its owner fell ill.
Humans compulsively anthropomorphize – we are able to assign human motifs to almost anything – a cloud, a missing pencil, a stubborn door. The task of science is to treat such instincts with skepticism, and to proceed only on the basis of evidence. But the evidence is mounting in the other direction. This may be why biologists are more, rather than less, inclined to anthropomorphize their subjects as they gain experience.
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Since our instincts to anthropomorphize conflict with our beliefs that we shouldn’t, we must be wary of another kind of bias. We end up only empathizing with the animals we know well, such as our pets. At the height of anthropodenialism, in the 19th century, experiments on dogs caused major protests by anti-cruelty leagues, but the plight of other animals attracted little interest.
This hierarchy of cuteness continues. We have an abundance of laws against pet cruelty, but continue to mistreat farm animals. Earlier this year, footage at a Devon farm showed pigs kept in filthy conditions with untreated wounds, reduced to cannibalism to survive. Last month, the BBC found a rise in “mega farms”, where cows can be kept indoors for their entire lives.
It is not only dogs and cats that deserve our empathy. Animals are much more like us than we thought.
