by Pa Rock
Dog Servant
Many years ago when I worked in the field of education by day, one of the ways that I supplemented that meager income was by also working in the field of education a couple of nights a week as an "adjunct" instructor for a small community college. The coursework that I taught for the college was varied and interesting, everything from freshman composition to American and world history, geography, government, economics, and even general psychology. It was during one of the general psychology classes that one of my most memorable nights of teaching - and learning - occurred.
On nights when the basics of the lecture had been completed we would dedicate some time to class discussion on various related topics. One night I led off the discussion with this question, "Can animals think?" The class, mostly my age or older, caught fire with that one and the responses were still coming fast and furiously when it was time for the class to end. The unanimous opinion was "Yes, of course they can think!" and the class offered up an enormous supply of fantastic animal tales. We heard about animals, primarily dogs and cats, who solved their own problems, outsmarted their owners, performed complicated and multi-part physical operations, showed empathy, and were just generally all-around smart creatures. Everyone had amazing pet stories to tell!
As anyone who has ever had a long-term pet knows, they quickly learn to understand what their human companions want and expect from them, and they also seem to innately know how to get what they want.
Most of us who have been around more than half a century probably remember Koko, the gorilla, who was taught American Sign Language and promptly used that skill to request a pet kitten which she cared for and loved until the feline was unfortunately run over by a careless driver behind the wheel of a car - and even then Koko used her sign language skills to grieve for her lost companion. Koko learned more than one thousand words in American Sign Language and she was able to show an understanding of two thousand other words which she learned through listening. It would be hard to argue that Koko the gorilla did not possess a great deal of intelligence, the ability to learn more, and the ability to share her thoughts and feelings.
Ranger Bob forwarded a brief video clip of famed primatologist, zoologist, and anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall who has spent much of her life studying and working with chimpanzees in the African nation of Tanzania. Dr. Goodall, who is ninety now and still educating the world on environmental and animal welfare issues, actually met and visited with Koko the gorilla on several occasions. This clip is of Dr. Goodall's response to one question which was posed to her at the Clinton Global Initiative:
Question: "What can we learn from the chimpanzees?"Goodall: "How arrogant humans have been. When I got to Cambridge to do a PhD in 1961, I was told that I couldn't talk about chimps having personalities, minds, or emotions because those were unique to humans, and as a scientist I shouldn't have empathy with my subjects. But fortunately I had a great teacher when I was young who taught me that all the learned professors were totally, totally wrong - and that was my dog, Rusty. He was a mutt, he was just amazing, and, you know dogs are my favorite animals. But we now know (and it's a very exciting time for young people wanting to study animal behavior, you know) we now know the intelligence of chimpanzees and other apes, whales, elephants, as well as pigs, rats and octopuses."
Dr. Goodall's remarks certainly lay the groundwork for the acknowledgment of the intelligence of the little monkeys who escaped their captivity from a lab testing facility in South Carolina last week. Many of them are still free and now there is even some discussion of their potential legal rights as escaped wildlife. (For a look into that subject please see: "43 lab monkeys escaped in South Carolina. They have a legal claim to freedom." by Angela Fernandez and Justin Marceau in the current online issue of Vox Magazine.)
When an "animal" shows clear signs of being smarter than the guy who lives down the road, it feels immoral to condemn it to captivity or slaughter.
Perhaps I have now exhausted this topic, or maybe it has exhausted me. We'll just have to wait and see.
1 comment:
As I see the question of non-human animal intelligence, two areas of resistance are science and religion. One requires a testable form of evidence and the other revealed knowledge.
When I was in an ethology class (animal behavior) about 1973, we were pretty much steered toward the idea that animal intelligence was not scientifically testable and therefore not worthy of consideration. The very same instructor, whom I admired very much, added somewhere near the end of the semester a story about an old dog lying on the front porch of his owner’s house left its comfortable position to rush out into the street. There, it grabbed a much younger dog which was playing in a traffic lane by the scruff of the neck and returned it to the side of the street. This all happened moments before a vehicle sped by in that very lane of traffic. This is anecdotal evidence, not scientific evidence, and no amount of anecdotal evidence is scientific. At best, it can add to a hypothesis. Note here that the communication skills of Koko, the gorilla, were not presented in a scientific manner and was highly questioned in the scientific community. There was no satisfactory way to distinguish between true understanding and reaction to subconscious cues given by the attending human. Was it real or just a convincing show? I think it would be hard to have an encounter with her and not walk away with a gut feeling that you were communicating with a member of another species who might be fundamentally as smart as you.
Religion: while talking with a religious friend last summer, she assured me that my parents were waiting for me in heaven. I told her that if my dog wasn’t there, too, I wouldn’t be interested. My Catholic friend in that conversation didn’t expect my dog to be in their company. Many religions require the concept of a soul, and they don’t extend that to “lower” animals. That’s one good thing about Buddhism. If it is true, I want to come back as my favorite bird, a Mississippi Kite. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
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