“Donaldson believes that we owe it to our companions to respect their boundaries and to remember that some level of aggression is essential for any animal’s survival. I’m not a religious person but I honor and respect the great spiritual leaders who over the millennia have taught that we find our greatest strength when we aid the weakest among us.”īy Bronwen Dickey (journalist and author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon) On respecting our dogs This surely is a brutal morality - a “dog eat dog” attitude to life that ill becomes people or their canine friends.īut there is another concept of strength, and that is the power to help the weak - to support those who are less able to fend for themselves. “There is a movement in our culture today that equates strength, especially but not only manly strength, with exploiting whatever power one has over others – be it physical strength, elite social standing, or financial prowess – at the expense of those who are weaker. What’s more, ignoring their need for love - yes, as I’ll explain shortly, dogs do need love - is as unethical as denying them a healthy diet and exercise.” On strength Acknowledging dogs’ loving nature is the only way to make sense of them. “Yet I have become convinced that, in this regard at least, a hint of anthropomorphism is permissible, even proper. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.”īy Clive Wynne (ethologist and author of Dog is Love) On anthropomorphism He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. “Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?” But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that it can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. “Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. To marry it productively with systematic research is both the challenge and the joy of studying animals.” On behaviorism and animal cognition He saw such intuitive insight as quite separate from the methodology of the natural sciences. “The maestro of observation, Konrad Lorenz, believed that one could not investigate animals effectively without an understanding grounded in love and respect. I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.” Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. “True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. … Serving as a means rather than an end, critical anthropomorphism is a valuable source of hypotheses.” On honoring animals in their own contexts American biologist Gordon Burghardt has called for a critical anthropomorphism, in which we use human intuition and knowledge of an animal’s natural history to formulate research questions. “Anthropomorphism would be a rather empty exercise if all it did was paste human labels onto animal behavior. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals.” “The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. Conversely, the most distant a species is from us, the greater the risk that anthropomorphism will propose questionable similarities.” “The closer another species is to us, the more anthropomorphism will assist our understanding of and the greater will be the danger of anthropodenial. By Frans de Waal (ethologist and author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are) On anthropomorphism
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