Marion Stamp Dawkins (left) is a reluctant revolutionary: you would be hard pressed to find a more cautious and conscientious scientist. Yet her studies of the behaviour of the domestic hen have led her to radical conclusions. In her latest book, Through Our Eyes Only?, she makes a careful case for the conscious chicken, marshalling evidence from years of research into the way chickens behave.
Most people immediately respond: ‘But they’re not very clever, are they?’ In the popular imagination, only big, clever animals – the great apes, maybe whales and dolphins, along with dogs and cats – could possibly have an inner life. But you don’t have to be smart to be conscious, Dawkins argues – just emotional. It has to matter to you whether the world is one way rather than another, and you have to be willing and able to work to achieve your preferred state or situation. Animals that behave in this fashion, like the chicken, are highly likely to have subjective experiences comparable to our own, or so Dawkins believes.
But wait. Can the humble chicken really tell us more about the nature of consciousness than the rarefied outpourings of countless philosophical debates? Dawkins is impatient with philosophical disputations, which in her view often turn on contestable statements of ‘fact’. She has ‘never been terribly helped by reading philosophy’ and much prefers the hard-headed empirical evidence of experiments.
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Her central message is this: if consciousness has evolved, it must provide some advantage, ‘it must make a (detectable) difference’ to how an organism behaves. Consciousness cannot be hidden from us, locked away in some inner stronghold. If you deny that consciousness is observable, Dawkins argues, you are forced to conclude that it serves no purpose – that it is merely a curious byproduct of our neural circuitry – and so has no evolutionary history of its own.
Yet our own experience belies that view. We do many things without being consciously aware that we are doing them. An experienced motorist can drive a car and be mentally ‘miles away’. We may even function better that way most of the time. A concert pianist’s fingers dance across the keys without deliberate direction, but may stumble if the musician suddenly thinks about what she is doing. Yet novices at either skill must focus on the task at hand. We seem to need to be conscious of what we are doing when we learn something new. And even old hands are jolted into awareness when something unexpected happens, forcing us to deal with a novel situation.
If consciousness comes into its own in acquiring skills and dealing with novel or unexpected situations, it is a capability that many nonhuman animals would find useful too. It swings into action when things do not go according to plan – when an organism has to act to save the situation: to escape danger or deprivation, to cope when things have gone horribly wrong.
These are, of course, also the circumstances in which we feel some of our strongest emotions. Consciousness and emotions are deeply intertwined, for emotions ‘provide us with perhaps the most vivid of our conscious experiences’, says Dawkins. A nagging pain or a rush of anger – these feelings are impossible to ignore, and highlight ‘one of the most important features of consciousness – its attention-grabbing, centre-stage quality’, says Dawkins.
This focus on the intimate link between consciousness and emotions complements recent theories of emotion developed by Keith Oatley, now at the University of Toronto, and other cognitive psychologists. In his recent book, Best Laid Schemes, he argues that emotions have evolved as a means of stopping an organism in its tracks when some long-term goal is frustrated, so forcing it to rethink its plans. In this view, it makes no sense to separate thinking and reasoning from emotions, and condemn feelings as irrational. Thought and emotion go hand in hand. Perhaps consciousness evolved in the first place, not so much to enable us to think clever thoughts, but so that we could have emotions.
Dawkins’s perspectives on animal consciousness have evolved not through the study of glamorous animals such as chimpanzees or gorillas, but over decades of research on how birds see the world. She bridles against the mammal-centric view taken by many biologists: birds’ brains are different but by no means inferior. The product of millions of years of parallel evolution independent of the mammalian line, birds have remarkable powers of perception and ‘very, very good memories’, she points out.
As a PhD student with Niko Tinbergen, the Nobel prizewinning pioneer of modern ethology, Dawkins studied ‘search images’, exploring how birds can learn to see cryptic prey, suddenly breaking through their victims’ camouflage.
She stayed at Oxford, determined to study animal welfare in a rigorous way: ‘I wanted to be objective about what is important to the animals,’ she says. This was an unfashionable field in the early 1970s: ‘People thought I was nuts to do it,’ she says. Secure at last as a university lecturer and fellow of Somerville College, she has established a worldwide reputation for her innovative work on domestic hens over the past two decades.
No pain, no gain
Dawkins starts from the premise that if animals have feelings they must be able to act on them. Evolution would hardly construct a creature that suffered but is unable to do anything about it – which explains why plants, rooted to the spot, don’t have pain receptors. ‘There is no point in suffering in silence – pain is the motivation, the prelude to action.’ This line of thought led Dawkins to conclude that an animal’s feelings are not some secret, unknowable essence – rather, they can be detected in the way the animal behaves.
She came up with the novel idea of ‘asking’ an animal how much some resource mattered to it, by making the animal work to achieve it. For instance, she trained her hens to peck a key to gain access to a nest box and then upped the ante, so that the bird eventually had to peck the key 50 times to achieve the same end. In this way Dawkins could find out how hard the birds were willing to work – how much it mattered.
More recently, she and her colleague Norma Bubier have asked hens to squeeze through ever narrower gaps – something they dislike – to show how much they care about what is on the other side of the gap. Even a hungry hen hesitates to squeeze through a 9-centimetre gap, Bubier finds. But put a nest box on the other side and for a short period each day, when the hens are just about to lay an egg, they are very willing to pass through the despised gap. Hens also repeatedly squeeze through the gap to get to floors made of peat, earth or woodshavings, suitable for scratching and dust bathing. The jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, the wild ancestors of domesticated hens, spend hours scratching through the undergrowth in search of a prized delicacy, the seeds of bamboo. Their descendants, incarcerated in battery cages, seem to carry the ancestral memory; birds that have never seen earth before will indulge in an orgy of dust bathing and scratching if given the chance.
Such research has also shown that our hunches about what chickens want most are sometimes wrong. Hens are social creatures, and usually prefer to stay near birds they know, rather than be on their own. Yet Dawkins and Bubier found that hens are not willing to push through a gap to reach flock-mates, although they will to reach litter or nest boxes. So this experiment enables us to construct a hierarchy of gallinaceous desires, based on measures of a hen’s feelings about food, nest boxes, dust baths and companions.
State of frustration
This knowledge has implications for farming practices: chickens want to have access to dust baths and nest boxes. Deprived of suitable material, battery hens go through the motions anyway, apparently ‘pretending’ to take a dust-bath. And the high priority hens put on finding a place to lay, Dawkins says, ‘suggests that, at least once a day, the millions of hens that are confined to cages without nestboxes experience a strong state of frustration at not being able to find one’.
Her work may worry factory farmers, but it has even more unsettling general implications. For if hens can show that they would rather the world were one way rather than another, it seems reasonable to conclude that they have subjective experiences at least partly comparable to our own.
Some commentators have argued convincingly that consciousness evolved to enable us to put ourselves in someone else’s position – so that we can empathise with them, or predict or manipulate their behaviour. According to this ‘social intellect’ theory, consciousness is most likely to be found in animals who are socially clever – the great apes, maybe monkeys. A recent refinement of this idea attributes consciousness only to those creatures who can manage ‘second-order intentionality’ – roughly equivalent to being able to think that Freddie thinks that I think there is chocolate in the cupboard (whereas I know that I ate it all yesterday). Ingenious experiments with captive and free-living primates suggest that while chimpanzees can perform such mental acrobatics, monkeys (and by implication other animals) cannot.
But this ‘criterion’ for consciousness is not only too stringent, it is fundamentally misleading, Dawkins argues. For it puts the emphasis on intellectual problem-solving and social manipulation, to the exclusion of more basic emotional and physical realms.
Dawkins points out that there are other situations in which the ‘self’ may form part of the picture – when damming rivers, catching fish or retrieving objects, for instance. Animals that engage in these activities, although incapable of holding dinner parties, may yet have evolved consciousness as a way of coping better with their environment.
So Dawkins is not ruffled by critics who say: ‘OK, so chickens can suffer, but they’re not conscious, they can’t be self-conscious.’ With Donald Griffin, the leading American advocate of the scientific study of animal consciousness (see ‘I buzz therefore I think’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ, 15 January) she argues that ‘the distinction between self and nonself is very basic’ and so hardly likely to be unique to humans. ‘To be able to move properly, to be able to tell the difference between movements they cause and movements in the world, organisms would have to be able to distinguish self from nonself,’ Dawkins points out. Thus, she argues, the distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness is ‘not the critical distinction’.
Other searchers after the key to consciousness, notably the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, emphasise the uniqueness of human language. This remarkable gift clearly sets people apart from other animals, but that does not necessarily make it a prerequisite for consciousness. As Dawkins points out, language is not the only way we have of finding out what matters to people. Relying on behaviour can be an advantage – for most people agree that it is less easy to lie without words.
Yet the sceptic can still ask if any animals consciously experience emotions such as pain and pleasure, even though they behave as though they do. Dawkins says the answer eludes us, although we have good reason to argue the case from the basis of our own experiences. In support of that claim she recounts the work of a Canadian physiologist, Michel Cabanac, who has found that rats and humans react to the taste of sweetness in similar ways. Both rats and humans find sweetness less appealing when they have just had a meal, compared to when they are hungry. He asked the people what they thought, and assessed the rats’ responses by seeing how much sugared water they drank.
Rats and humans seem to make similar emotional judgments about sweet foods, Cabanac found. ‘Plotting two graphs – one of the human reports of their conscious experiences while drinking and another of the amount of liquid drunk by the rats – produced two lines that were so identical in shape that, if you didn’t know, you would have thought they had been measured in exactly the same way,’ Dawkins writes. ‘This is powerful justification for drawing an analogy between human and rats and saying that it is not just their behaviour that is similar but their conscious experiences too.’
The simplest hypothesis – the one that Dawkins contends needs the least special pleading – is one that holds that rats have some conscious awareness of emotional states: of pleasurable as well as unpleasant or painful states. ‘Each species may have its own sub-divisions of the pleasant-unpleasant axis, some of which may correspond to human ones, others of which may be quite alien to us,’ Dawkins argues. This is something for future research to explore. But what we already know makes it seem ‘quite churlish’ to deny that animals could show the behavioural and physiological side of emotion ‘without there being some glimmer of conscious awareness of what is going on – a stab of pain or a rush of pleasure – as well’.
Could anyone disagree? Isn’t the fact that vets and scientists give anaesthesia to animals before operating on them – instead of just tying them down as Descartes’s followers did – indicate that everyone already agrees that some animals at least consciously experience pain? ‘Well, quite,’ Dawkins responds. Yet Dawkins has among her critics those who claim that this practice of anaesthetising creatures before using them in vivisection experiments, first made law in Britain in 1867, is just mawkish sentimentality or squeamishness.
So argues Peter Carruthers, professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield. In his book The Animals Issue, published last year by Cambridge University Press, Carruthers claims that all nonhuman animals feel pain nonconsciously. Because they do not consciously suffer, in his view, ‘they make no real claims on our sympathy’. We can rationally make rules and regulations about what can and cannot be done to animals only out of deference to the misguided sentimentality of animal lovers. Carruthers argues that ‘cats should not be used as dartboards because people love cats’, said David Lamb recently in the Times Higher Education Supplement. Lamb is a reviewer of Carruthers book, and a philosopher at the University of Manchester.
Reckless anthropomorphism
In the same way the late John Kennedy, a specialist in insect flight and professor of animal behaviour at Imperial College, London, would not have been convinced that any animal has conscious experiences. No matter how adaptive its behaviour, nor how complex its needs and desires, another explanation remains: ‘the power of natural selection to optimise behaviour’, Kennedy argued. ‘Of course one cannot rule out the possibility that one day someone will devise a satisfactory test for feeling in animals,’ he wrote in The New Anthropomorphism, published last year by Cambridge University Press. ‘But there is none in sight and it requires an anthropomorphic bias to be convinced that they have feelings.’
Anthropomorphism – attributing human traits to animals – is also bandied about by Carruthers. But for Lamb, ‘accusations of anthropomorphism are more suggestive of philosophical dogma than lived reality’.
Dawkins remains a reluctant revolutionary. Again and again in Through Our Eyes Only? she slaps down unfounded claims and reckless anthropomorphisms. She found a recent publicity trip to the US, ‘an awful nightmare, a horrible experience’. Why? ‘Because of all the people claiming that their pets understood everything they said. If you start to talk about animal consciousness, people think anything goes.’
Consciousness remains ‘the most profound of biological mysteries’, Dawkins believes. But she remains adamant that ‘consciousness must make a difference’ – it must be discernible in the way an organism behaves.
Her conclusion – that birds and mammals at least experience forms of consciousness rather like ours – threatens to unsettle our conventional exploitative relationships with other animals. But true to her temperament, Dawkins refuses to make any such claim herself. She declines to draw moral lessons for others from her science. ‘It is my job to present the evidence,’ she says. Whether that knowledge alters what can be done to them is up to us to decide.
Through Our Eyes Only? The search for animal consciousness by Marian Stamp Dawkins is published by WH Freeman/Spektrum, Oxford.
