by Hal Herzog
COGNITIVE SHORTCUTS AND ANIMAL ETHICS
Humans face stumbling blocks even when we do try to think logically. Quick—answer these questions.
A bat and ball, in total, cost $1.10. The bat cost $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Are you more likely to die from a shark attack or being hit by a part falling from an airplane?
If you are like me, you said ten cents for the first question and shark attack for the second one. The correct answers, however, are five cents and the airplane part. The reason that you were probably wrong is that our thinking often relies on quick and dirty rules of thumb that cognitive psychologists call heuristics. Heuristics are efficient, and they usually produce correct solutions to problems. I use heuristics on Sunday mornings when I go up against the New York Times crossword puzzle, and doctors use them when they decide whether an emergency room patient is suffering from a heart attack or indigestion. But these mental shortcuts can bias our thinking and lead us astray.
Our moral thinking relies on similar rules of thumb. Some of these moral heuristics have their roots in evolution; for example, the aversion to incest or to betraying friends. Our predilection for senseless revenge is the result of the inappropriate application of what the legal scholar Cass Sunstein calls the “punishment heuristic.” This principle explains my irrational sense that killing Cookie, the boy-eating crocodile, was warranted.
One of the most important heuristics is called framing. It refers to the fact that the way we think about a problem is affected by how it is posed. Mental frames are influenced by cultural norms and sloppy cognitive habits, and they determine how we view situations. Once we have a problem framed, we don’t consider alternative explanations or solutions. Framing helps explain one of the most troubling of all the paradoxes of human-animal relationships, the Nazi animal protection movement.
HOW THE NAZIS COULD LOVE
DOGS AND HATE JEWS
A bizarre moral inversion occurred in prewar Germany that enabled large numbers of reasonable people to be more concerned with the suffering of lobsters in Berlin restaurants than with genocide. In 1933, the German government enacted the world’s most comprehensive animal protection legislation. Among other things, the law forbade any unnecessary harm to animals, banned the inhumane treatment of animals in the production of movies, and outlawed the use of dogs in hunting. It banned docking the tails and ears of dogs without anesthesia, the force-feeding of fowl, and the inhumane killing of farm animals. Adolf Hitler signed the legislation on November 24, 1933. This was only the first in a series of Nazi animal protection acts. In 1936, for example, the German government dictated that fish had to be anesthetized before slaughter and that lobsters in restaurants had to be killed swiftly.
In announcing restrictions on animal research in a 1933 radio address, Hermann Göring said, “To the Germans, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy and prove to be faithful and attached.” Göring once threatened, “I will commit to concentration camps those who think that they can continue to treat animals as property.”
Hitler objected to killing animals for scientific research and he believed that hunting and horse racing were “the last remnants of a feudal society.” He was a vegetarian and found meat disgusting. As you might expect, contemporary animal activists don’t relish the idea that Adolf Hitler was a fellow traveler, and some activists adamantly deny that he was either a vegetarian or an animal lover. But the anthrozoologist Boria Sax has carefully documented the evidence that many leading Nazis, including Hitler, were genuinely concerned about the treatment of animals. (Needless to say, the fact that Hitler loved animals does not in any way undermine the validity of the case for animal protection.)
The Nazis used framing to construct a perversely inverted moral scale in which Aryans were at the top and Jews were classified as “subhumans”—beings lower than most animal species. While German shepherd dogs and wolves were high on the moral hierarchy, Nazis compared Jews to vermin—rats, parasites, bedbugs. In 1942, Jews were forbidden to keep pets. In one of history’s great ironies, the Nazis followed the legal procedures governing humane slaughter when they euthanized thousands of Jewish pets. But, unlike their dogs and cats, Jews were not covered under German humane slaughter legislation. No, they were sent to concentration camps, where their treatment was not covered by the Third Reich’s animal welfare laws. For the Nazis, Jews blurred the boundaries between man and animal. They were a polluted class, freaks, neither fully human nor completely animal.
To me, Nazi animal protectionism speaks volumes about human moral thinking. A few pages ago, I argued that for a thousand generations, the genetic puppet-masters have murmured into our ears “people over animals.” Hitler’s ability to construct a culture in which dogs were afforded moral status denied to Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals illustrates the fact that with enough social pressures, humans will ignore the whisperings of the genes. Nazi animal protectionism also shows that the ability to resist our biological inclinations does not necessarily make us better people.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM: WHAT WE THINK
ABOUT WHAT ANIMALS THINK
Nazi animal protectionism exemplifies the twisted ways that humans sometimes think about the moral status of people and animals. But nutty thinking about animals can pop up anywhere. A couple of years ago, I was kayaking down the Nantahala River, a popular whitewater stream in western North Carolina. In the summer, it is jammed with rafts filled with paddle-flailing tourists trying to avoid rocks and cross-currents. The river is beautiful and frigid, forty-five degrees all year long. You don’t want to fall in.
I had paddled halfway down the river when I caught a whiff of cigar smoke coming from a raft a hundred yards in front of me. There was a large fifty-year-old man in the raft puffing the offending cigar and guiding his wife and a little brown Chihuahua through the rapids. The dog was not having a good day. She was shivering uncontrollably and looked terrified. And that was before their raft flipped over.
I have to give the guy credit. He kept the cigar clamped between his teeth even after he was dumped out of the raft. The little Chihuahua deserved credit, too. She had the sense to climb onto the nearest large floating object—Cigar Man. That’s how they went down the river, a man with soggy cigar jammed in his mouth, his wife, and a hypothermic dog desperately clinging to the man’s head. I remember wondering what made that guy think a Chihuahua would enjoy running the rapids of a freezing Class III river. The answer is anthropomorphism. Humans are natural anthropomorphizers. It is part of our mental equipment. Psychologists have found that humans will even attribute motivations to animated geometric figures moving around on a movie screen—“Now the red triangle is really pissed at the blue square. You go, girl!”
An example of the human need to project our own desires and emotions and mental states onto other creatures played out in 1999 when the Sony Corporation began marketing a series of interactive robotic dogs named AIBO, a compound of artificial intelligence robot. With its shiny metallic body, AIBO looked to me more like a friendly space alien than a puppy, but it walked like a dog, and it could cuddle and play and respond to sounds. AIBO would even let its owner know if it was happy or ticked off. At about $2,000 per “animal,” AIBO was not cheap, but Sony sold 150,000 of them.
Researchers from the University of Washington and Purdue University compared how children and adults responded to an AIBO versus a real dog. While the researchers eventually concluded that AIBO made a mediocre pet, some individuals became very attached to their robotic puppies. One owner admitted to an online discussion group that he felt embarrassed getting dressed in front of his AIBO. Another wrote, “I love Spaz. I tell him that all the time…. When I first bought him, I was fascinated by the technology. Since then, I care about him as a pal. I do view him as a companion…. I consider him to be a part of my family. He’s not just a toy.
He’s more of a person to me.”
AIBO could also alleviate human loneliness. Once a week for two months, researchers from the Saint Louis University School of Medicine brought an AIBO and a real dog named Sparky into nursing homes to see if interacting with a pet robot could raise morale among the residents. Residents who played with Sparky or with AIBO were less lonely than residents in a control group who did not interact with either the real or robotic pet. In fact, Sparky and AIBO were equally effective in reducing loneliness among the nursing home residents. And the residents became as attached to AIBO as they did to Sparky. (Unfortunately, sales did not meet expectations and Sony put AIBO to sleep in 2006.)
The connection between loneliness and anthropomorphism was also demonstrated by researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago. They asked college students to watch a clip from a movie designed to induce feelings of either isolation and loneliness (Cast Away), fear (Silence of the Lambs), or a control movie segment (Major League). The subjects were then asked to think of their pet and to pick out the traits that best described their animal. The subjects who watched the clip from Cast Away were twice as likely as the other groups to describe their pets in anthropomorphic terms related to social connections such as being thoughtful, considerate, and sympathetic.
THE PROBLEM WITH HAVING A THEORY OF MIND
Our tendency to project ourselves into even a robot’s head is a trait that came along with having a big brain. Evolutionary psychologists argue that the capacity to infer the perspectives of other people, to put ourselves mentally in their shoes, would have been a huge advantage to our ancestors, whose success in the Darwinian race to pass on their genes hinged on the ability to forge political alliances, vie for mates, and figure out who they could and could not trust. The ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling is referred to as having a “theory of mind.” Humans have this ability, but whether even large-brained animals such as chimpanzees and dolphins might have it is hotly debated.
When we anthropomorphize, we are extending our theory of mind to members of another species. This tendency is at the root of many of our moral quandaries with animals. Take, for example, hunting. James Serpell argues that the hunter who can think like a wild pig is more likely to come home with the proverbial bacon. But the hunter who sees the world from the point of view of an animal he is trying to kill would automatically empathize with it and, hence, feel guilty for killing it. My game warden friend Bill lived in an African village where baboons would destroy crops. The villagers would trap them in pits at night and kill them the next morning, but they felt bad about it because their eyes looked so human. They have a saying in Swahili, “Never look a baboon in the eye.” It makes it too hard for you to kill them.
Do the metaphorical roots of original sin lie in two conflicting aspects of human nature: our inclination to empathize with animals and our desire to eat their flesh? Serpell eloquently lays out the moral issues our big-brained ancestors faced: “Highly anthropomorphic perceptions of animals provide hunting peoples with a framework of understanding, identifying with, and anticipating the behavior of their prey…. But they also generate moral conflict because if the animals are believed to be essentially the same as persons or kinsmen, then killing them constitutes murder and eating them is the equivalent of cannibalism.”
Anthropomorphism is the source of much of our guilt over the treatment of animals, but there is another problem with projecting our mentality onto other species. Our interpretation of their behavior is often wrong. The perpetual smiley faces of the dolphins at SeaWorld indicate that animals love to swim endless circles around a concrete tank. Wrong. The yawn of an alpha male baboon means he is bored. Wrong. (He is using the display of his formidable canine teeth to say, “I can rip your face off.”) When Tilly gently rubs her face on my leg, she is showing that she loves me. Wrong. She is scent-marking me with glands on her cheeks, telling the world that she owns me.
Researchers at the University of Portsmouth found that half of British dog owners say their pets feel shame and guilt. You know the look—tail between legs, the sorrowful eyes that won’t look you in the face, saying, “I didn’t mean to poop on the rug.” Dixie, our golden retriever, would break your heart when she gave you what our veterinarian called the tragic look. But does the guilty look, that hangdog expression, really signify that your dog knows that he or she has sinned?
According to Alexandra Horowitz, a psychologist and animal behaviorist at Barnard College, the answer is no. Horowitz devised an ingenious experiment to tell whether dogs get the guilty look when they actually misbehave or when their owners think they misbehaved. In the experiment, owners instructed their dogs not to eat a dog biscuit that was placed right in front of them. Then the owners left the room. In some cases, the experimenter then gave the treat to the dog, in others, she just took it away. When the owners returned, half were misled and told that their dog had disobeyed them when, in reality, the dog had done absolutely nothing wrong. (I know; it seems unjust.) Horowitz found that dogs only gave the sad look when their owners thought they had disobeyed, not when the dogs actually ate the biscuit. The experiment does not prove that dogs lack a moral sense. It does, however, show that we can easily misinterpret their expressions and behavior.
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A SPIDER?
Ethologists are in a tough position when it comes to understanding animal minds. On the one hand, they come home to tail-wagging dogs and know for sure that their puppies are happy to see them. But for good reason, they are uncomfortable when it comes to speculating about the subjective worlds of spiders, octopuses, bats, and elephants that they study.
In a classic article titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that we can never know what it is like to be a bat or any other animal. Not all animal behaviorists agree. I was once sitting in a lecture hall in Kyoto at a session on primate behavior at the International Ethological Congress. There were forty or fifty top researchers in the room. At the end of the last presentation, one of the scientists stood up and asked a strange question. “Before we leave,” he said, “I would like to ask how many of you went into the field of animal behavior because you wanted to know what is like to be a member of the species you study?” I was at the back of the room thinking to myself, what a stupid question. I was completely wrong. More than half the researchers in the audience raised their hands.
Over the last twenty years, a flourishing field of cognitive ethology has developed, among whose intellectual tools are what Gordon Burghardt calls critical anthropomorphism. These days animal behaviorists talk of empathy in mice, negotiations in chimpanzees, and post-traumatic stress in elephants. I recently asked Fred Coyle, an arachnologist, what he thought went on in the minds of the spiders he studies. For example, do they plan out the architecture of their webs? Or are their muscles and glands just mechanically following the dictates of genetically programmed neural impulses? I could tell that my question made Fred uncomfortable. “Hmm,” he said. After a long pause, he told me that he thought of spiders as robots—predatory AIBOs with eight legs.
Fred’s graduate-school officemate, also an arachnologist, did not feel the same way about the minds of spiders. He really did want to know what goes on in their heads. One afternoon, he borrowed a large playpen from a friend and bought yards and yards of stretchy rubber tubing from a hardware store. Then, weaving the rubber tubes around the playpen’s frame, he carefully constructed a huge web modeled on the web-building techniques of the spiders that he studied.
Late one night, Fred unexpectedly returned to their lab to pick up a book he needed. There, in the dark, he found his friend, crouched silently in the middle of the giant web, figuring out what it was like to be a spider.
The bottom line is that there are many reasons why human-animal interactions are so often inconsistent and paradoxical. Thousands of studies have demonstrated that human thinking about nearly everything is surprisingly irrational. And the waters ge
t particularly muddy when we think about other species. Instincts seduce us into falling in love with big-eyed creatures with soft features. Genes and experience conspire to make it easy for us to learn to fear some animals but not others. Our culture tells us which species we should love, hate, and eat. Then there are the conflicts between reason and emotion, our reliance on hunches and empathy, and our propensity to project our own thoughts and desires into the heads of others.
No wonder our relationships with other species are so messy.
3
Pet-O-Philia
WHY DO HUMANS (AND ONLY HUMANS) LOVE PETS?
Assume that animal companions are basically people. You won’t go far wrong.
—M. B. HOLBROOK
Antoine, a young Frenchman in his early twenties, approaches an attractive young woman in a pedestrian mall. With him is a cute dog named Gwendu, which in Brittany means “white and black.”
“Hello,” he says to her. “My name’s Antoine. I just want to say that I think you’re really pretty. I have to go to work this afternoon, but I was wondering if you would give me your phone number? I’ll phone you later and we can have a drink together someplace.”
She hesitates for a second, looks at him and the dog, then says, “Oui,” and pulls a pen from her purse.
The truth is that Antoine is not the man’s name, Gwendu is not his dog, and he is not in the mall looking for a beautiful woman to hook up with. He is actually the confederate in an experiment designed by a pair of French anthrozoologists, Serge Ciccotti and Nicolas Gueguen, who is Gwendu’s actual owner. They are studying the effectiveness of pets as social lubricants. Over a period of several weeks, Antoine, who was selected for the experiment because a panel of women rated him as unusually attractive, approached 240 randomly selected young women. On half of these approaches, he was alone; on the other half, he was accompanied by the dog, who researchers described as “kind, dynamic, and pleasant.”
