The long read: A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species
The eye of a hippopotamus seen at Bioparque Wakata in Jaime Duque park, near Bogota, Colombia Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images
In the 21st century, findings such as these are helping to drive a major shift in the way human beings think about animals – and about ourselves. Humanity has traditionally justified its supremacy over all other animals – the fact that we breed them and keep them in cages, rather than vice versa – by our intellectual superiority. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from other living things because only we possess a rational soul.
Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Scientists speak without embarrassment about animal minds and consciousness. In popular writing on the subject, Skinner appears only as a villain. In his 2016 book, primatologist Frans de Waal discusses a mid-20th-century experiment in which researchers at a primate centre in Florida, educated in Skinner’s methods, tried to train chimps the way he had trained rats, by withholding food.
When the first adult returns, where does the child expect she will look for the object? Very young children assume that she will know its new location, just as they do. Starting around age four, however, children start to understand that the adult only knows what she has seen herself, so they expect her to look under the original, now empty cup. “Indeed,” Ball writes, “they will often delight in the deception: in their knowing what others don’t.
The possibility of true interspecies understanding is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s landmark 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, to which every writer on animal cognition pays their respects, sometimes wearily. Nagel, an American philosopher, concluded that humans can never really understand a bat’s inner experience.
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