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The Rights Of Nature
A Legal Revolution That Could Save The World
By David R. Boyd ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2017 David R. Boyd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-966-3
CHAPTER 1
BREAKTHROUGHS IN UNDERSTANDING ANIMAL MINDS
"Given that we now know that we live in a world of sentient beings, not one of stimulus-response machines, we need to ask, how should we treat these other emotional, thinking creatures?"
VIRGINIA MORELL, Animal Wise
Humans often forget, or deliberately ignore, the fact that we are animals. Consider the sign commonly posted on doors at stores and malls: "No animals allowed." If taken literally, this would be catastrophic for business! Or take the expression "behaving like an animal." Well, how else is a person supposed to behave?
As recently as the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom was that non-human animals were automatons that merely reacted instinctively to external stimuli. Then along came Dr. Donald Griffin, an American zoology professor who originally rose to prominence in 1944 when he figured out that bats use echolocation to navigate. In 1976, after decades of observing different species in labs and in the wild, Griffin suggested that scientists should study animal minds and attempt to learn how they think. Griffin maintained that animals are conscious, even if they might think about different things and in different ways than humans. He opened the door to a whole new field of science called cognitive ethology — the study of the minds, awareness, and, yes, even the consciousness of non-human animals.
Since Griffin issued his challenge, there has been an extraordinary proliferation of scientific research about the minds of animals, overturning many of our previous understandings. There are currently more scientists observing and studying more species than at any time in history. Peer-reviewed scientific articles on animal cognition and capabilities are being published at an unprecedented rate. There have been breakthroughs in our understanding of animal brains through the fields of neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and evolutionary biology.
The notion of human superiority that runs from Aristotle's hierarchy of existence through Descartes's erroneous belief that animals were automatons should have been obliterated by Darwin and subsequent discoveries about evolution. But myths about who and what we are die hard. Humans have long resisted acknowledging that we are distant cousins to all other animal species, diverging from common ancestors millions of years ago. Yet recognizing that other species are special in no way detracts from the fact that humans are also special. The qualities that humans have relied upon historically in efforts to distinguish ourselves from other species — the "hallmarks of humanity" — include intelligence, emotions, language, tool use, memory, culture, foresight, cooperation, altruism, and self-awareness. Scientists are systematically demonstrating that we share these traits with other animals.
Intelligence
Scientists believe that the large brains of primates, cetaceans, and elephants evolved for dealing with social complexity — recognizing friends and foes, engaging in lifelong social relationships, cooperating for mutual benefit, and developing unique cultures. Humans were supposed to have the biggest brains, and thus the gold medal, in animal intelligence. Not so fast. The brains of Homo sapiens are outweighed by those of dolphins, elephants, and whales. In our defence, we cunningly deemed brain weight to be an unfair comparison, so we calculated brain-to-bodyweight ratios. Then the tree shrew bests us, so that can't be right. Despite being smaller than whale brains, human brains have more neurons (aha!), but whale brains have more glia, specialized cells used in information processing.
There is no question that dolphins, whales, primates, and elephants are highly intelligent. Dolphins not only have big brains, but possess extraordinary abilities such as sonar or echolocation, with which they send out sound waves that bounce back as echoes, providing extensive information about their surroundings. Echolocation enables dolphins to "see" through solid objects, like a superhero's X-ray vision. For example, dolphins can tell if another dolphin, or a human, is pregnant, using their sonar to detect two separate heartbeats. A few years ago, scientists discovered that dolphin brains contain large numbers of specialized spindle neurons, previously thought to be unique to great apes. These neurons are believed to rapidly transmit important social/emotional information. In fact, dolphins' brains have more spindle neurons than humans'. Dale Peterson writes in The Moral Lives of Animals that dolphins "have excellent memories and high levels of social and self-awareness, are excellent at mimicking the behavior of others and can respond to symbolic presentations, form complex and creatively adaptive social systems, and show a broad capacity for the cultural transmission of learned behaviours." In short, dolphins are really smart.
The phrase "bird brain" has long been employed as a put-down, but may now be seen as a compliment. In 2004, scientists completely renamed the parts of avian brains based on new knowledge about their evolution. The brains of birds, contrary to previous understanding, are structurally similar to mammal brains. Despite having relatively small brains, crows, ravens, and jays — members of the corvid family — have proven to be talented problem solvers and tool users. In one experiment, a New Caledonian crow overcame a series of eight obstacles before acquiring a piece of aluminum and bending it with uncanny accuracy into a hook that it used to retrieve a morsel of food. The crow accomplished this feat on its first attempt.
Intelligence is not limited to primates, cetaceans, and birds. Archerfish can instantly calculate complicated mathematics of distance, speed, and time when blasting their prey with jets of water. They can learn to be better hunters by watching skilled individuals of their species. Many species, from monarch butterflies and humpback whales to Pacific salmon and Arctic terns, undertake amazing migrations every year without map, compass, or GPS.
A variety of different species practise deception, behaving in ways intentionally designed to mislead predators or even members of their own group. In his best-seller The Parrot's Lament, Eugene Linden chronicles acts of deception by parrots, elephants, orangutans, dolphins, and hawks. Some birds feign injury to lead predators away from their nests. Jays will not cache food when other animals are watching, or will subsequently re-cache the food in a different location. Chimpanzees and gorillas will pretend not to notice desired food items when accompanied by more dominant members of their family. The less dominant primates will return later, unaccompanied, to collect the food. The zone-tailed hawk imitates the flying style of a vulture, a scavenger that poses no threat to other birds, then dives to attack unsuspecting birds. These uses of deception suggest that some species may have the ability to understand what other animals are thinking.
Emotions
In her book How Animals Grieve, Barbara J. King defines grief as "when a survivor animal acts in ways that are visibly distressed or altered from the usual routine, in the aftermath of the death of a companion animal who had mattered to him or her." Dolphins, primates, and elephants exhibit behaviour that clearly appears to be grief. According to Jeffrey Kluger, writing in Time magazine, "It's well established that elephants appear to mourn their dead. They will linger over a family member's body with what looks like sorrow, and African elephants have a burial ritual, covering dead relatives' bodies with leaves and dirt. Elephants show great interest — some scientists suggest it may even be respect — when they come across the bones of dead elephants, examining them closely, with particular attention to the skull and tusks." Similarly, great apes will remain close to a dead troop mate for days.
There are stories from Africa and Asia of elephant herds and tigers taking revenge on targeted human settlements or hunters for having slaughtered members of their families, stolen their food, or attempted to kill them. Baby elephants sometimes throw what can only be described as temper tantrums if their mothers deny them milk. In addition to observation, scientists can now use physiological data to track changes in the emotional state of animals. Recent studies have demonstrated that dogs feel elation in their owners' presence.
In the 1970s, a captive killer whale named Orky at Marineland in Palos Verdes, California, ran his rostrum up and down the belly of his mate, Corky, four or five times, in much the same way a doctor might run ultrasound equipment over a pregnant woman's abdomen. Immediately afterwards, Orky slammed his head against the wall of the tank over and over. This behaviour had never been seen before. Two hours later, Corky had a miscarriage. Since orcas have the ability to monitor pregnancies, Orky may have been expressing some kind of anguish or grief.
Language
Humans may be the only species with a written language, but many animals have sophisticated means of communication that greatly exceed our understanding, including the use of sound and sonar. Primates have learned symbol and sign languages. Scientists studying wild chimpanzees have identified at least sixty-six distinct gestures, such as beckoning and waving. Kanzi, a bonobo "owned" by the Great Ape Trust and held at a research centre in Iowa, is famous because he knows some 400 words in sign language. When fed kale, he described it as slow lettuce, because it took longer to chew. When fed pizza, he signed cheese tomato bread. More significantly, he knows words that express emotions and abstract concepts such as happy, sad, be, and tomorrow.
Humpback whales sing songs that travel vast distances across the oceans. Thanks to the release of decades' worth of records amassed by the U.S. Navy as part of its antisubmarine monitoring program in the Atlantic Ocean, scientists have an unprecedented understanding of this communication. In a press release, Dr. Chris Clark of Cornell University said, "We now have evidence that they are communicating with each other over thousands of miles of ocean. Singing is part of their social system and community." New evidence proves that elephants can communicate with each other across huge distances by low frequency rumbling and by stomping on the ground, sending seismic signals that can travel more than thirty kilometres. These sounds are inaudible to humans but are picked up by special cells in elephant feet. Border collies can understand commands and hundreds of words for objects, and dogs generally understand non-verbal human communication such as pointing. Even bees communicate with each other, using a sophisticated code embedded in what entomologists describe as a dance. Bees perform this dance as part of collective deliberations about choosing a new hive site.
Tool Use
For a long time, humans were regarded as the only animals that used tools. Then Jane Goodall made her startling discoveries about chimpanzees that stripped leaves off small branches so they could extract termites from termite mounds. Scientists in the Ivory Coast's Tai Forest observed adult chimpanzees showing young chimpanzees how to use rocks to smash open hard-shelled nuts. The researchers excavated the area and learned that this material culture had been passed down for at least 4,300 years by hundreds of generations of chimpanzees.
Ravens and crows use rocks to break open foods with hard exteriors, from nuts to shellfish. Sea otters balance shellfish on their chests while floating on their back, cracking them open with a rock clutched between their paws. Bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Australia place sea sponges on their rostrums like faceguards when rooting among sharp corals, discarding the sponges when fish dart out from the coral. Alligators and crocodiles have been observed balancing branches or sticks on their snouts and then partially submerging. Herons and other wading birds searching for nest-building materials are lured into the trap.
Orangutans have earned a reputation among zookeepers for their imaginative use of tools to facilitate escapes. The legendary Fu Manchu escaped repeatedly from an exhibit at the Omaha Zoo in Nebraska by using a piece of wire (which he kept hidden in his cheek) to pick locks. In 2016, new scientific studies reported discoveries about tool use by capuchin monkeys, bonobos, and even the California sheephead wrasse (a fish). The sheephead, like otters, uses rocks as anvils to break open and crush sea urchins before eating them. In 2017, bumblebees became the first invertebrate species to demonstrate their ability to use tools to achieve a desired outcome.
Memory
Closely related to intelligence is memory. Despite our prodigious smarts, we've all experienced the frustration of misplacing keys, wallets, and other important items. In that light, consider the memory power of the Clark's nutcracker, a bird with a brain the size of a kidney bean. This small bird gathers seeds from pinyon pine trees in the fall, jams them into a pouch in its throat, flies as far as twenty kilometres to a higher elevation, and hides them in caches of one to fourteen seeds. In total, an individual bird will hide thousands of seeds. During winter and spring, the Clark's nutcracker retrieves them, even when they're buried by snow. Obviously these birds have an incredible spatial memory. Even more impressively, nutcrackers and jays eat cached foods in a particular order, based on anticipation of when the food is likely to spoil.
Then there is the chimpanzee. At Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, a chimp named Ayumu frequently embarrasses its human competition in short-term memory contests. The numbers one to nine are randomly scattered across a computer monitor with touchscreen technology. As soon as you touch the number one, the other numbers are blacked out but you must tap them in sequence. Ayumu can correctly memorize the location of the nine numbers almost instantly, while humans struggle to recall the correct sequence most of the time, even after prolonged efforts to memorize them. As researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa told the Guardian, "No one imagined that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of five — would have a better performance in a memory task than humans."
Culture
Like humans, many other animal species live in social groups that have recognizable and particular cultures. Culture can be defined as separate populations developing different ways of doing things through learning, rather than genetic inheritance. An essential element of culture is the transmission of knowledge to subsequent generations, such as chimpanzees training younger ones in tool use. Mounting recent scientific evidence proves that animals — from ants and bees to elephants and whales — live in complex social systems. Years of painstaking research by Professor Nigel Franks at the University of Bristol revealed that individual rock ants serve as teachers to other rock ants. Some species, including but not limited to primates, strategize politically, form alliances, and reconcile after disagreements.
Elephants possess substantial intellectual and cognitive abilities, demonstrate extensive emotional depth, and have complex social networks. Extended families of up to ioo animals live together, and elephants have been observed feeding those who are sick, injured, disabled, or otherwise unable to use their trunks. They use tools and work co-operatively to solve problems. Long-term studies of wild African elephants revealed the critical importance of elder matriarchs to herd survival because of their knowledge, experience, and wisdom. These older females know other elephants' personalities, landscapes, migration routes, water holes, food sources, and strategies for avoiding or combating predators. Sadly, these are the individuals most targeted by poachers because of their long tusks. Who knows what cultural knowledge is being lost as these female elephants are killed?
Killer whales, like elephants, live in matrilineal family units for their entire lives. They travel together, hunt together, play together, and stay together. Dr. Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University is a pioneer in the study of cetacean culture and has observed that "dolphins and whales live in these massive, multicultural, underwater societies."
Foresight
Humans once believed that we were the only animals with foresight. Yet creatures from blue jays to squirrels cache food for future consumption. If jays or ravens see other animals watching them hide food, they will wait until those animals leave, then move the food. A zoology student at the University of Cambridge — the aptly named Christopher Bird — found that the rook, a member of the crow family, could figure out that dropping stones into a pitcher partly filled with water would raise the level high enough to drink from it. The rooks even selected the largest stones first, recognizing that this would raise the level faster. Aesop wrote a fable called "The Crow and the Pitcher" about a bird that managed precisely the same feat about 2,500 years ago. It took a twenty-first-century scientist to show that the fable was factual.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Rights Of Nature by David R. Boyd. Copyright © 2017 David R. Boyd. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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