Where do you draw the line?
ska-ana brought up a really interesting point in a reblog I think deserves it’s entire own thread.
An interesting concept, but there has been something on my mind recently regarding anthropomorphizing animals, and that is: where do you draw the line?
Complex mammals like whales, dolphins, primates, elephants, etc. have been known to ‘grieve’ and express emotional distress, form alliances (friendships?), among other behaviors that might only be interpreted through our own human lens. It’s especially prominent with these mammals, as we begin to see so much of ourselves in them, and so much of the animalian side in ourselves. Some mammals are right up there with us (maybe surpassing us) in terms of mental capability, which again begs the question: with anthropomorphizing, where do we draw the line?
As far as I can tell, this is a question that various fields of animal science argue over constantly. Wikipedia summarizes the question of considering animal sentience pretty well:
Beginning around 1960, a “cognitive revolution” in research on humans[16]gradually spurred a similar transformation of research with animals. Inference to processes not directly observable became acceptable and then commonplace. An important proponent of this shift in thinking was Donald O. Hebb, who argued that “mind” is simply a name for processes in the head that control complex behavior, and that it is both necessary and possible to infer those processes from behavior.[17] Animals came to be seen as “goal seeking agents that acquire, store, retrieve, and internally process information at many levels of cognitive complexity.”.[18] However, it is interesting to note that many cognitive experiments with animals made, and still make, ingenious use of conditioning methods pioneered by Thorndike and Pavlov.[19]
The scientific status of “consciousness” in animals continues to be hotly debated. Serious consideration of conscious thought in animals has been advocated by some (e.g., Donald Griffin),[20] but the larger research community has been notably cool to such suggestions.[21]
Personally, I feel like how much anthropomorphism is okay really depends on the situation and the context. When talking about your pet dog, whom you have observed for a long time and whose body language and behavior you’re familiar with, it’s probably okay. When doing education in a zoo or aquarium, probably not (because it communicates incorrect information) except in carefully constructed metaphors that aim to enhance the learning outcomes of the interaction. When talking colloquially about animal science or writing a media piece, I would honestly say just no because of how easily misinformation travels. When doing research? Never.
Ska-ana brings up a really good point that many of the more complex mammals exhibit behaviors that appear analogous to human grief as well as other emotional states, and that those are hard to not interpret from human lens. As far as research is concerned, that’s currently one of the big debates about how to interpret. I had professor explain it to me thusly: we know from various studies that many animals are capable of experiencing physical states that appear chemically analogous to human experiences: e.g., stress, fear, and pleasure. What we don’t know is if, when they appear to be experiencing more complex emotional states such as grief, they’re experiencing it in the same way that humans do. That would likely need to be tested on a physiological level as well as a behavioral one to be able to safely hazard that they’re analogous states. Until that sort of research exists, the best thing we can do to accurately describe the experiences of these animals is to say that they ‘appear to be experiencing a state similar to the human experience of x’ and not that they’re ‘doing x’ - because it’s very unlikely that a whale or an elephant has any similar internal state to a human due to evolutionary and individual history, and immediately assuming an anthropocentric approach to their internal state is likely to lead us to completely misunderstand their actual experience.
I once had a professor say that the scientific study of animal cognition cannot be approached through philosophic arguments about sentience or sapience, because philosophy is inherently anthropocentric. Once you attempt to interpret an animal’s experience through the human umvelt, you’ve immediately removed all scientific validity because you’re studying a non-human animal with a non-human umvelt.
Followers, what do you think about anthropomorphism and where the line is drawn?
I think it’s crazy that anyone still thinks that humans are the only animals with elaborate social needs and corresponding emotional and psychological states. I think it’s wrong to label as anthropomorphism any attempt to recognize the similarity we have with our fellow animals. Any social animal, i.e. one that depends up on living in groups or pairs will have some form of cognition that is similar to ours, and probably will have more than one. For example, why is anyone surprised that horses, lions, and elephants seem able to recognize each other after years apart? Ability to know who is part of your group and who isn’t over long periods of time is a highly adaptive trait for social animals that is undoubtedly favored by evolution.
The feelings of safety that must come from being around members of your own group probably cultivates an overall satisfaction or contentment with life. It might be anthropomorphizing to call this “happiness”, because we have no way of knowing if it’s the same emotion that humans experience, but that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing it in the animal as a distinct kind of emotional state. The same should go for grief, frustration, anger, etc. The more dependent animals are on social behaviors and relationships, the more important and elaborate these sorts of things become. I suspect that in long-lived animals, like chimps, gorillas, elephants, and dolphins, we will find rich, complex relationships between individuals and the emotions to accompany them, as we do in humans, although naturally, they will be different from those of humans in important ways. Decades of fieldwork with chimpanzees, for example, has shown pretty much beyond all doubt that they experience many forms of cognition and emotion that are very comparable to those of humans. It’s not anthropomorphism to say that. It’s recognizing a continuum between ourselves and our close relatives.
Basic cultural relativism can help us to view animal intelligence and emotion for what it is, to appreciate it in its own right, without having to compare it to humans or rank it on some kind of scale where “more human-like” means “superior” or “smarter”.
Anthropomorphism is when people project a human intention or feeling onto animal behavior because their actions or appearance recall the way a human would look or act in a similar situation, without any other evidence to suggest that is the case, or even when the animal is actually experiencing the exact opposite of what the human projects onto them.
Bringing this discussion back because it’s really important. An addendum now:
What’s important about making sure that we view animal intelligence and emotional experiences as non-analogous to human experience is that it’s disingenuous to assume that human experiences are the pinnacle of possible experiences - doing so devalues whatever animals are experiencing before we can even learn about them.
The only “special” things about humans are our thumbs and our freakishly huge prefrontal cortices. That’s it. If other animals are a bunch of P-zombies that only exhibit behaviours that mimic the appearance of emotions without feeling anything, because their behaviour is purely the result of complex neurological input/output algorithms, then so are we. Souls aren’t real, and humans are just a bunch of biological automatons like the rest of the animal kingdom. Thinking otherwise is just anthropocentrism. Emotions are a very useful adaptation to evolve because emotions are fantastic motivators.
Of course, it’s also anthropocentrism to assume that other animals experience the world in a human or human-but-diminished way. For example, I am a large apex predator (a human) living with a small prey animal (a chinchilla). We did not evolve under the same pressures and we don’t respond the same way to the same stimuli or express ourselves in the same ways. Her play behaviour with me looks nothing like a human, dog, cat, or rat’s play behaviour. She expresses joy, friendliness, and trust in very non-human, chinchilla-y ways, which I have had to learn because they are not intuitive to me. She does not appreciate being cuddled the way most domestic animals I’ve interacted with do. She actually does not even like having her fur touched much, because humans are covered in “gross” skin oils and she bathes in super-fine volcanic dust to keep her fur properly dry, so she isn’t as receptive to physical affection as my human instincts insist she ought to be. It’s my job to recognise that what works with humans doesn’t necessarily work with her, and respect her strange-to-me boundaries.
