by Bees play by rolling wooden balls – like for fun. It seems that the redfish recognizes its own sight in an underwater mirror. Octopuses seem to react to anesthetic drugs and will avoid locations where they are likely to have experienced pain in the past.
All three of these discoveries came in the past five years — signs that the more scientists test animals, the more they discover that many species may have inner lives and be sentient. An amazing range of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.
This has prompted a group of top animal cognition researchers to publish a new manifesto that they hope will change the way scientists and society view and care about animals.
Nearly 40 researchers signed the “New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was presented for the first time at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It is a critical time, with a flood of research into animal cognition meeting debates about how different species should be treated.
The declaration says there is “strong scientific support” that birds and mammals experience consciousness, and that consciousness is a “real possibility” for all vertebrates – including reptiles, amphibians and fish. That possibility extends to many creatures without a backbone, he adds, such as insects, crustaceans (including crabs and lobsters) and cephalopod molluscs, such as squid, octopus and cuckoos.
“When there is a real possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” the declaration says. “We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to guide our responses to these risks.”
Jonathan Birch, professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and principal investigator of the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, is among the signatories of the declaration. Whereas many scientists in the past assumed that questions about animal consciousness were unanswerable, he said, the declaration shows that his field is moving in a new direction.
“This has been a very exciting 10 years for studying the animal mind,” Birch said. “People want to go there in a way they haven’t before and entertain the possibility that animals like bees and octopuses and cuttlefish could have some kind of conscious experience.”
From ‘automata’ to sentience
There is no standard definition of emotion or animal consciousness, but generally the terms indicate an ability to have subjective experiences: to perceive and map the outside world, to have feelings such as joy or pain. In some cases, it can mean that animals have a level of self-awareness.
In that sense, the new declaration defeats years of orthodoxy of historical science. In the 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were merely “material automata” — lacking souls or consciousness.
Descartes believed that “animals cannot feel or suffer,” said Rajesh Reddy, assistant professor and director of the animal law program at Lewis & Clark College. “To sympathize with them, or for them, would be foolish or anthropomorphizing.”
In the early 20th century, prominent behavioral psychologists promoted the idea that science should only study observable behavior in animals, rather than feelings or subjective experiences. But starting in the 1960s, scientists began to rethink. Research began to focus on animal cognition, mainly among other primates.
Birch said the new declaration attempts to “crystallize a new emerging consensus that rejects the view of 100 years ago that we have no way to study these questions scientifically.”
Indeed, a recent boom in results underpins the new assertion. Scientists are developing new cognitive tests and trying existing tests on a surprisingly wide range of species.
Take, for example, the mirror test, which scientists sometimes use to see if an animal recognizes itself.
In a series of studies, the redfish seemed to pass the test.
The fish were placed in a tank with a covered mirror, and they did not show any unusual reaction. But after removing the cover, seven of 10 fish launched attacks towards the mirror, indicating that they likely interpreted the image as a rival fish.
After several days, the fish settled down and tried strange behaviors in front of the mirror, such as swimming upside down, which had not been observed in the species before. Later, some seemed to spend an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror, examining their bodies. The researchers then marked the fish with a brown splotch under the skin, which was intended to resemble a parasite. Some fish tried to rub the mark.
“The sequence of steps that you would never imagine but to see with an extremely intelligent animal like a chimpanzee or a dolphin, they see in the wrasse more clearly,” said Birch. “No one in a million years would expect small fish to pass this test.”
In other studies, the researchers found that zebra fish showed signs of curiosity when new things were introduced into their tank and that the cuttlefish could remember things they saw or smelled. One experiment created stress in lobsters by giving them electrical shocks, then gave them anti-anxiety drugs used in humans. The drugs seemed to restore their normal behavior.
Birch said these experiments are part of an expansion of animal consciousness research over the past 10 to 15 years.
“We can have this much wider canvas as we study it in a very wide range of animals and not just mammals and birds, but also invertebrates like octopus, chipmunks,” he said. “And more and more, people are talking about this idea of insects.”
As more and more species show these kinds of signs, Reddy said, researchers may soon have to reframe their line of inquiry: “Scientists are forced to consider this larger question — not who which animals feel, but which animals do not. ?”
New areas of law
Scientists’ changing understanding of animal sentience could have implications for US law, which does not classify animals as sentient at the federal level, according to Reddy. Instead, laws relating to animals focus mainly on conservation, agriculture or their treatment by zoos, research laboratories and pet retailers.
“The law is a very slow vehicle and follows the views of society on many of these issues,” Reddy said. “This declaration, and other ways to make the public understand that animals are not just biological automatons, can create a base of support for raising protections.”
State laws vary widely. A decade ago, Oregon passed a law recognizing that animals are sentient and capable of feeling pain, stress and fear, which Reddy said is the cornerstone of progressive judicial views in the state.
Meanwhile, Washington and California are among several states where lawmakers this year considered bans on the farming of octopus, a species for which scientists have found strong emotional evidence.
British law was recently amended to consider octopuses sentient beings – along with crabs and lobsters.
“When you recognize that animals are sentient, the concept of humane slaughter starts to become more important, and you need to make sure that the methods you’re using on them are humane,” Birch said. “In the case of crabs and lobsters, quite inhumane methods, such as dropping them into boiling pans of water, are often used.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
