Animal Wise: “the ants come home with us”
If you read enough animal ethology (the study of animal behavior), you will find yourself not only amazed at the complexity of animal thought and emotion, but you will be equally amazed at how utterly (absurdly?) cautious scientists can be about calling animals thinking and feeling beings.
In the face of what most of us would consider incontrovertible evidence of conscious and situational decision making—a consciousness inseparable from feelings—scientists have learned, as one woman put in Virginia Morell’s book Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (2013), ”to be careful.” Acknowledging those thoughts and emotions can land an ambitious scientist in professional hot water. Many of them, legitimately concerned about their reputations as non-sentimental and “objective” researchers, have practically given themselves double hernias to stress to their colleagues that what they are finding could still be the result of preprogrammed instinct. Can’t be too sure, you know?
Some, thankfully, place intellectual integrity ahead of peer approval and professional advancement. Some are so convinced that what they are witnessing when they study animals is evidence of emotive cognition that they refer to their subjects as “persons.” The most compelling example of professional convention-breaking comes from the English scientist Nigel R. Franks. What makes Franks’ convictions about his subjects’ status as thinking and feeling creatures noteworthy is that he’s not studying chimps or dogs or parrots—animals most commonly associated with the possibility of advanced cognition–but ants. Little brown ants. As Franks sees it, the ants he has spent decades studying possess more than just sentience (which is enough to warrant moral consideration), but they use it to teach other ants how to behave. When Franks published this claim in a leading journal, the famous zoologist E. O. Wilson condescendingly called it “a charming metaphor.”
If you have read Marc Bekoff, Jonathan Balcombe, or Marian Stamp Dawkins—or even Steven Wise or Bernard Rollin— there’s not much in Animal Wise that will strike you as original. The book’s value, however, is in Morell’s reportage of scientists at work. Through this boots-on-the-ground approach, we discover that Franks, instead of killing his ants (which can live for five years) when their work in the lab is finished, takes them home and keeps them in his garage. Morell writes that Franks and his wife “safely truck the ants in their petri dishes into shoeboxes and take them home. They store the colonies in their garage and care for them, replenishing their supplies of food and water. Their garage now holds so many shoebox ant-condos that Franks said, blushing, ‘We certainly can’t get the car in anymore. But I like it that the ants come home with us.’”
Now that’s charming.
Tomorrow: the hidden dilemma in Nigel Franks’ work with ants.
” . . . you will be equally amazed at how utterly (absurdly?) cautious scientists can be about calling animals thinking and feeling beings.” ~ James
Absurd is the word, alright.
Last night, while reading aloud to a friend the little bio of a Cape Cod female quail misnamed Robert,* we came across this sentence:
“Sally Carrighar, in her delightful book Wild Heritage [copyright 1965], attributes to certain animals and birds the ability to make decisions, to feel and show affection, to play and to plan. She even goes so far as to suggest that some of them recognize property rights, fair play and so on.”
I stopped, went back, and replaced “certain” with “all” and “even goes so far as to suggest” with “and they all recognize . . . .”
I’m no animal ethologist, but I am sure that the wholly intelligent, fully conscious, perpetually operating, completely sane Mind that made each and every creature in the universe did not — COULD NOT — create a single idea unlike itself.
*The book is That Quail, Robert, by Margaret A. Stanger, copyright 1966 (the author is not to be confused with Margaret H. Sanger).
I thought I was the only one who had a copy of Carrighar’s book on my shelf. She really is an old school pull no punches observer who was not shy about linking her observations to inductive inferences. A great read. I’ll see you that and raise you a Hope Ryden book!
I generally dislike science writers who would share a little world of wonder with us all as not contributing anything. And yet the genre remains popular. Seriously, the best book I have looked at in awhile is the Anthropologist Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia — it is actually too beautiful to read in less than a years’ time — it must be savored. It seems more about an introspective look at human culture in relation to insects than field ethology and to some degree (possibly inadvertently) turns the tables on the supposed question of animal thought. Jussi Parika’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology is also fascinating but (the reader is warned) more theory. I loved it.
E O Wilson’s work is certainly less respected now than 20 years ago and the struggle against anthropecentric bias as opposed to Wilson’s concerns with anthropomorophic bias remains a cornerstone of post Humanism.
As to Franks, that vignette is both charming and disturbing. Responsibility for insect instruments of experiments is good, but creating little artificial Umwelts and pretending that approximates a full expression of the social and experiential life an ant may live is a peculiar construct of humans which has given rise to an imposed environmental ontology. In that scheme, Zoos exist for animals and humans are divorced from the Natural and interpsecies Social. Maybe Sting should be paraphrased here about what to do if you love someone.
As someone who’s getting a degree in evo bio, I’m at turns impressed by Franks’ willingness to follow the evidence, and disturbed by his paternalism. Why not just release the ants into a suitable habitat and let them live their lives as their nature enables them?
Preponderance of the evidence and Occam’s razor require, in my book, the conclusion of animal sentience, consciousness and agency. There are some indications that the rest of the scientific community is coming around on this, too, as the Cambridge Declaration indicates. I think the heart of the conflict lies not in accepting the conclusion, but in its implications for institutionalized research that’s economically and emotionally invested in exploiting animals. If the conclusion is true, it will necessarily force a change in policy and ethics.
Well I say Maher’s Rule of Unintended Consequences applies to pervert Occam’s Razor. The change in policy and (maybe) ethics you note will also provide the opportunity basis among grant administrators for new neural research designed to exploit research opportunities concerning affective states in critters. I think of the Cambridge Decl. as a proto-NIH grant which will send money chasing “similarities” in consciousness, suffering be (both quantified and) damned.