My front garden is overrun with slugs in late spring. Their glossy slime trails blanket our driveway, and a few dozen of them take shelter near my car each morning. My daily ritual now involves a slug check, moving them out from under my tires. I cannot imagine simply wantonly driving over a slug. To me, that feels like the behavior of a sociopath.
This has always been my lot in life. I grew up in a home where my mother was a friend to all animals. When I was a small boy, I remember her breaking up a crowd of people who were threatening to step on a bat that was floundering on the sidewalk in front of the drugstore. My mother, who could have been awarded the Nobel Prize for timidity, yelled at everyone to get back. She found a cardboard box, scooped it up, and rescued it.
Whether I inherited my mother’s animal empathy mindset or learned by watching her interact with animals is immaterial. I, too, am consumed by a crippling empathy for the living creatures around me. My daughter has been late for school on more than one occasion due to my insistence on morning slug checks. And I don’t tolerate squishing bugs, which has resulted in many awkward (and sometimes confrontational) conversations with arachnophobes and fly-bashers over the years.
My academic interest in animal cognition was a logical extension of my upbringing. But it was also constrained by the values and norms I learned during those years. I have only ever conducted observational—not experimental—research on animals. I’ve never collected data from captive animals. Something deep inside me finds the idea of captivity problematic. Intellectually, I can produce numerous arguments as to why captivity is sometimes necessary and even good for some species. Some captive facilities are doing good work, thanks to their stellar research output and focus on animal welfare with an eye toward conservation. Other facilities, where entertainment overshadows welfare, are just gross. But either way, I feel weird about it. My colleagues have known this about me since my career began, and it has not prevented me from conducting research on dolphins in the wild, or (I hope) contributing something useful to the field.
I do, however, make an exception for mosquitoes, which I do kill. To me, violence is justified in the interest of self-preservation. And this is where the hypocrisy of one’s convictions steps into the light. If I were a utilitarian, who believed in maximizing pleasure for all creatures, then not only should I not kill mosquitoes, but actually allow them to drink my blood. My body could probably withstand many thousands of bites before it became a serious problem, and it would bring pleasure to thousands of little mosquito minds. But this seems absurd to me. And I don’t want to do it.
We all have individual ideas about how animals should be treated. But most of our ideas are not particularly well considered or derived from some complex ethical calculation. Most of us learn to treat animals from the culture around us, be it societal or familial. We live by unexamined norms. In most of Canada, for example, we eat pigs but not dogs. But there is no law barring the practice. In fact, if you raise dogs specifically to eat them, you are free to turn them into sausages or soup or whatever. Nonetheless, there is no widespread dog eating in Canada. It’s just a norm we abide by.
When I was conducting research in Japan, a colleague of mine asked if I wanted to try a burger made from whale meat. I declined. After a protracted discussion about why I won’t eat whale, I asked him if he would consider eating a burger made from dog meat. He wouldn’t. The Japanese consider dogs pets, not food. It was an absurd idea to him. I explained that the cultural taboo for eating dog meat in Japan was the same taboo many North Americans feel when it comes to whale meat. I didn’t need to invoke any arguments about whale intelligence or population levels or cruel fishing practices or any of that. Because the reason most non-Indigenous North American people like me don’t eat whale is because they have no (recent) cultural history of eating whale. It’s a cultural taboo. The ethical arguments often follow from this taboo like a slime trail following a slug.
It’s all so terribly arbitrary. My own convictions don’t make much sense on paper. For example, I am not a vegetarian. Despite spending so much of my time caring for my chickens and trying to maximize their health and happiness, I would still eat a chicken burger. I justify it because the chicken has already been turned into a patty. It’s simply too late to worry about their happiness levels. Of course, I would never eat one of my own chickens if it should die; we give them a funeral and a proper burial. Crazy, right? I have no uniformly consistent moral framework that outlines my relationship to animals across the board. At times, my convictions are in direct conflict, and seemingly hypocritical.
And I am not alone in being logically inconsistent. In the United States, mice, rats, and birds bred for research are not considered animals according to the Animal Welfare Act, which is how research labs can sidestep welfare rules concerning their treatment.1 As many as 95 percent of animals used in laboratory research in the US are exempt from federal law that would otherwise ensure their welfare. That’s a loophole based not on ethical arguments about animal suffering, but legal arguments concerning the value of these animals to medical science and/or financial stakeholders.
Science gets embroiled in ethical discussions once we go looking for facts about the nature of animal minds to help us determine the extent to which animals suffer. This book is filled with fun facts about animal minds that I hope introduce you to new ways of thinking about the animal kingdom. But if you were hoping to read something that showed once and for all that it’s either okay or not okay to, for example, drive over slugs, then you are sure to be disappointed. The science of animal minds cannot, on its own, tell you anything about the morality of your behavior.
I hope I have convincingly argued that all animals have consciousness: subjective experience that helps them make decisions and generate behavior. Animals understand something about the passage of time and make plans for the future—often just moments ahead, but sometimes a few days down the road. Animals understand something about death. They learn how the world works by accumulating associative information about what happens when, although probably not why. Animals do not produce behavior through inflexible instinct, but by a combination of in-built propensities and expectations modified by exposure to the environment and learned information. Animals can be deceptive. Animals have intentions and goals. Animals have norms that guide their social behavior, giving them ideas about what’s fair and how they (and others) deserve to be treated. All these cognitive skills have helped nonhuman animals thrive for millions of years. The additional cognitive sprinkles that help humans do what we do (e.g., language, theory of mind, causal inference, death wisdom, etc.) are relatively new additions, and have yet to prove themselves all that valuable to the great arbiter of usefulness: natural selection.
Knowing what we know of animal cognition, am I that crazy for saving the slugs in my driveway each morning? This comes down to two questions, both of which are meaningful to me. First is, how do slugs experience the world? The second is, what does that tell us about how we should be treating them?
Slugs experience the world in ways that give them desires and goals, as well as conscious sensations of pleasure, pain, contentment, etc. I save slugs because it just seems sad to me to take away those things. To be indifferent to a mind that has miraculously sprung into existence after billions of years of nonexistence. What a miracle to exist here and now and have the capacity to experience this world. I want to do my part to make sure I am not the reason a slug’s life prematurely ends.
I hope this book will help readers entertain the idea that animals have little qualia-filled minds that are worth taking into consideration. And that your mind is not quite the end all and be all of awesomeness, as if our perceived intellectual superiority justifies indifference to animal suffering.
Is the maximization of pleasure the ultimate goal of life? I think so. Or maybe maximizing the amount of love. I know, bringing up the L-word is uncomfortable when you’re trying to think like a scientist. But don’t judge its appearance in a book about animal cognition too harshly. Love is just pleasure writ with a fancier pen. Its biological value is obvious. I love my chickens, and they might love me in return, and that makes all of us not just happier, but healthier. It’s the happy and healthy animals that pop out the best babies, and that’s all that evolution cares about. Evolution values love because we value love, even if the universe has no real use for it. “Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil,” wrote Nietzsche.2 Now that’s a sentiment I can get behind, my friend.