1The Sentient Mind: Skills and Strategies
I think I could turn and live with animals…I look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake at night and whine about their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied. Not one is demented by the mania of owning things.
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
From Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
1
Setting the Scene
Some years ago, I took part in a late night, ‘bear‐pit’ style television debate on the rights and wrongs of fishing. My role was to present scientific evidence as to whether fish can experience pain and fear. In brief, the evidence shows they can. After I had outlined the results of this work, a member of the audience got up and said ‘This is all rubbish. These scientists don’t know what they are talking about. I have been fishing all my life and I know for certain that fish don’t feel anything’. He then added ‘What sort of fish were they anyway? and when I said ‘carp’ he said: ‘Ah well, carp are clever buggers’. These four words encapsulate the need for this book. We sort of assume animals have minds. We may even think we understand the meaning of sentience but most of us don’t give it much thought, because, for most of us, most animals don’t much matter.
Figure 1.1 Cordelia at play. (from Webster, 1994)
This book is written for those for whom it matters a lot. My central aim is to equip you to seek a better understanding of the minds of sentient animals. To this end, it will not only give an outline review of existing knowledge relating to the mental processes that determine animal behaviour and welfare but also offer suggestions and guidance on how to approach subjects where we know little or have been relying on easy preconceptions. Those of us who embark on the scientific study of animal welfare, their needs, their behaviour and their motivation, are cautioned to avoid the fallacy of anthropomorphism: the fallacy of ascribing human characteristics to other animals. However, I suggest at the outset, that it is valid to apply a principle of reverse anthropomorphism that asks not ‘how would this chicken, cow, horse’ feel if it were me but how would I feel if I were one of them?’ As we shall see, thought experiments based on the principle of reverse anthropomorphism provide the basis for most studies in motivation analysis.
This voyage into the minds of sentient minds is going to be quite a journey. The nature of sentience is far too complex to be encapsulated within a one‐line definition, such as ‘the capacity to experience feelings’. Chapter 2 examines in detail the meaning and nature of consciousness and the sentient mind within the animal kingdom. To keep this enquiry as simple as possible, I shall consider the animal mind almost entirely as an abstract concept, within the brain and powered by the brain (mostly), but as an intangible compendium of information bank, instruction manual, filter and digital processor of incoming sensations and information. It is not too far‐fetched to make the analogy with the digital computer and describe the brain as the hardware and the mind as the software. The neurophysiology involved in driving the hardware has its own beauty, but that is another story.
Through evolution by natural selection, animals have acquired behavioural skills appropriate to their design (phenotype) and natural environment. All animals are equipped at birth with a basic set of mental software: instructions genetically coded as a result of generations of adaptation to the physical and social challenges of the environments in which they evolved. This, which I shall hereafter refer to as their mental birth‐right, is instinctive and hard wired. In some species that we may define as primitive, their responses to stimuli may always be restricted to invariant, hard‐wired, pre‐programmed responses to sensations induced by environmental stimuli. According to one’s definition, this alone may be sufficient to classify them as sentient. However, throughout the animal kingdom, from the octopus to the great apes, we find overwhelming evidence of species that exhibit sentience to a higher degree. They build on this instinctive birthright and develop their minds. They learn to recognise, interpret and memorise new experiences in the form of feelings, good, bad or indifferent, and develop patterns of behaviour designed to promote their wellbeing measured, in all cases, in terms of primitive needs such as the relief of hunger and pain and, within the deeper, inner circles of sentience, feelings of companionship, comfort and joy. The ability to operate on the basis of knowledge acquired from experience, rather than pure instinct, enriches the physical and mental skills the sentient animal can recruit to cope with the challenges of life and promote an emotional sense of wellbeing. It also carries the potential for suffering when coping becomes too difficult.
The physical and mental skills and resources present at birth are those acquired through adaptation of their ancestors to the ancestral environment, because these were the skills that mattered the most. Animals that demonstrate deeper degrees of sentience have the capacity to develop these inborn, instinctive skills throughout their lifetime and teach these new skills to subsequent generations. Differing demands of differing environments mean that each species exhibits a portfolio of skills most appropriate to their special needs. It follows that, in our eyes, individual species may appear to be brilliant at some things and dumb at others. Raptor birds that hunt by day develop an exquisite visual ability to locate their prey whereas bats that hunt at night use radar based on ultrasound. The albatross can navigate its way home to its nest across the barren expanses of the Southern Ocean but will fail to recognise its chick if it has blown out of the nest. Domestication distorts the process of natural selection in two ways. We compel these animals to adapt to an environment largely determined by us, and this may be very different from that of their ancestors. We also introduce the entirely unnatural business of breeding: we tinker with the physical and mental phenotype of our animals to suit our needs for food, fashion, recreation or unqualified love.
We cannot observe animals through our eyes and conclude that any one species is better, or more highly developed than another. Each species adapts to meet its own special needs and the skills required to meet these needs vary in their nature and complexity. Pigs are good at being pigs, sheep are good at being sheep. Rats are very good at being rats because they have had to develop the physical and mental skills necessary for survival in a complex and frequently hostile environment. Sharks are very good at being sharks but, because they have thrived for millennia in a food‐rich, stable environment, they have never really had to think. Many dogs are not very good at being dogs because they have not had the chance to grow up in an environment of dogs.
Human Attitudes to Animals
Most of this book is devoted to an exploration of the minds of sentient animals, their feelings, thoughts and motivation to behaviour seen so far as possible, through their own eyes. Human attitudes to animals would be irrelevant were it not for the fact that our actions, based on our attitudes, can have such a profound effect on their lives. In an earlier book, ‘Animal Welfare: A Cool Eye towards Eden’ (76) I wrote ‘Man has dominion over the animals whether we like it or not. Wherever we share space on the planet, and this includes all but the most inaccessible regions of land, sea and air, it is we that determine where and how they shall live. We may elect to put a battery hen in a cage or establish a game reserve to protect
