Bees play by rolling wooden balls – apparently for fun. The cleaner wrasse looks recognize your own face in an underwater mirror. Octopuses look like react to anesthetic drugs and they will avoid environments where they have likely experienced pain in the past.
All three of these discoveries have occurred in the last five years – indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they discover that many species can have inner lives and be sentient. A surprising variety of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish, and some crustaceans.
This has led a group of top researchers in animal cognition to publish a new statement that they hope will transform the way scientists and society view – and care for – animals.
Almost 40 researchers signed “The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness,” which was first presented at a conference at New York University on Friday morning. It marks a pivotal moment as a flood of research into animal cognition collides with debates over how various species should be treated.
The statement states that there is “strong scientific support” that birds and mammals have conscious experience, and a “realistic possibility” of consciousness for all vertebrates – including reptiles, amphibians and fish. That possibility extends to many creatures without backbones, he adds, such as insects, decapod crustaceans (including crabs and lobsters) and cephalopod molluscs, such as squid, octopus and cuttlefish.
“When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal,” the statement says. “We must consider risks to well-being and use evidence to inform our responses to those 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 statement. Although many scientists in the past assumed that questions about animal consciousness were unanswerable, he said, the statement shows that his field is moving in a new direction.
“This has been a very exciting 10 years for the study of animal minds,” Birch said. “People are daring to go there in a way they have never done before and to consider the possibility that animals like bees, octopuses and cuttlefish could have some form of conscious experience.”
From ‘automaton’ to sentient
There is no standard definition for animal sentience or consciousness, but generally the terms denote an ability to have subjective experiences: to feel and map the outside world, to have the capacity for feelings such as joy or pain. In some cases, it may mean that animals have a certain level of self-awareness.
In this sense, the new declaration resists years of orthodoxy in historical science. In the 17th century, French philosopher René Descartes argued that animals were just “material automatons” – without souls or consciousness.
Descartes believed that animals “cannot feel or cannot suffer,” said Rajesh Reddy, assistant professor and director of the animal law program at Lewis & Clark College. “Feeling compassion for them, or empathy for them, was kind of silly or anthropomorphizing.”
In the early 20th century, prominent behavioral psychologists promoted the idea that science should study only observable behavior in animals, rather than emotions or subjective experiences. But starting in the 1960s, scientists began to reconsider. Research began to focus on animal cognition, particularly among other primates.
Birch said the new statement attempts to “crystallize a new emerging consensus that rejects the 100-year-old view that we have no way of studying these questions scientifically.”
In fact, a wave of recent discoveries supports the new statement. Scientists are developing new tests of cognition and testing pre-existing tests on a wider range of species, with some surprises.
Take, for example, the mirror mark test, which scientists sometimes use to see if an animal recognizes itself.
In a series of studies, the cleaner wrasse appeared to pass the test.
The fish were placed in a mirror-covered tank, to which they did not show any unusual reactions. But after the lid was lifted, seven of the ten fish launched attacks toward the mirror, signaling that they likely interpreted the image as a rival fish.
After several days, the fish calmed down and experimented with strange behaviors in front of the mirror, such as swimming upside down, which had not been observed in the species before. Later, some appeared to spend an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror, examining their bodies. The researchers then marked the fish with a brown spot under the skin, intended to resemble a parasite. Some fish tried to erase the mark.
“The sequence of steps that you would imagine seeing in an incredibly intelligent animal like a chimpanzee or a dolphin, they see in the cleaner wrasse,” Birch said. “No one in a million years would expect tiny fish to pass this test.”
In other studies, researchers found that zebrafish showed signs of curiosity when new objects were introduced into their tanks and that cuttlefish could remember things they saw or smelled. An experiment created stress for crayfish by applying electric shocks to them, then gave them anti-anxiety medications used in humans. The drugs seemed to restore his usual behavior.
Birch said these experiments are part of an expansion of research into animal consciousness over the past 10 to 15 years.
“We can have a much broader picture where we study a very wide range of animals and not just mammals and birds but also invertebrates like octopuses and cuttlefish,” he said. “And more and more people are talking about this idea in relation to insects.”
As more and more species show these types of signs, Reddy said, researchers may soon need to reshape their line of inquiry entirely: “Scientists are being forced to consider this broader question — not which animals are sentient, but which animals are not. ?”
New legal horizons
The shift in scientists’ understanding of animal sentience could have implications for U.S. law, which does not classify animals as sentient at the federal level, according to Reddy. Instead, animal laws focus primarily on conservation, agriculture, or their treatment by zoos, research laboratories, and pet retailers.
“The law is a very slow vehicle and really follows the views of society on many of these issues,” Reddy said. “This statement, and other ways to make the public understand that animals are not just biological automatons, could create a groundswell of support for increased protections.”
State laws vary widely. A decade ago, Oregon passed a law recognizing animals as sentient and capable of feeling pain, stress and fear, which Reddy said formed the basis of progressive judicial opinions in the state.
About that, washington It is California are among several states where lawmakers this year considered banning the farming of octopus, a species for which scientists have found strong evidence of sentience.
British law has recently been changed to consider octopuses, sentient beings – along with crabs and lobsters.
“Once you recognize animals as sentient, the concept of humane slaughter starts to matter, and you need to make sure that the type of method you are using on them is humane,” Birch said. “In the case of crabs and lobsters, there are very inhumane methods, such as throwing them into pots of boiling water, which are widely used.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
