Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage, which discusses the links between animals and humans, is adapted from the article "All in the Family?" by Viva Hardigg, which appeared in the November 1, 1993, U.S. News & World Report (©1993 by U.S News & World Report Inc.).

The philosopher Rene Descartes never proclaimed that "Animals think, therefore they are." He reserved the high power of reason for humans.

Scientists have long shared Descartes's aversion to anthropomorphism [attributing human traits to animals], yet the average citizen has never appreciated the intellectual taboo. The success of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's book The Hidden Life of Dogs is evidence of the human desire to peer inside the minds of animals—and to see something of ourselves there. Drawing on 30 years of observations, anthropologist Thomas speculates on the inner lives of canines, from huskies to dingoes. She faces head-on the charge of anthropomorphism, stating in her introduction that "our aversion to the label is misplaced ."

Thomas is not alone in calling for a reevaluation of one of science's most stringent commandments. Some researchers maintain that by bending over back ward to avoid human-centered thinking, they have missed many intriguing aspects of animal reasoning and behavior and ignored continuities that do in fact exist among species as varied as humans, monkeys, birds, and dolphins.

Psychologist Theodore X. Barber sprinkles human simile as freely as birdseed throughout The human Nature of Birds, the fruit of six years of intensive study of avian literature, from anecdotal reports to lab experiments and field notebooks. Humankind, he concludes does not have a monopoly over language. Like "nonliterate humans," he contends, birds "speak" with their eyes, their beaks, and feathers about "important daily events" ranging from rain to offspring. "They can be contented and happy and even ecstatic as well as sad and hopeless and forlorn. They can manifest parental love, close friendships, and erotic love.

Gordon Burghardt, who teaches animal behavior at the University of Tennessee, coined the term and articulated the discipline of "critical anthropomorphism" to permit scientists to gain insight, through human comparisons, into what an animal might be thinking—while remaining ever cognizant of its life history, biology, and ecology. Burghardt's goal is to encourage hard-headed scientific testing of anthropomorphic hypotheses about various animals.

Burghardt is critical of anthropomorphic thinking that begins and ends with anecdotes. He recalls the work of the 19th-century researcher who reported ants carrying other dead ants on their backs and enthusiastically deduced that these were funeral processions to honor the dead. Later research revealed that the dead ants were merely being hauled out to the garbage pit.

Burghardt's cautious approach wins the praise even of usually skeptical animal behaviorists Psychologist Hank Davis, for example, has used this approach to animal cognition in his own lab. Testing the controversial supposition that research animals bond with laboratory scientists, Davis placed a rat in the middle of a long table with a stranger on one end and a person who handled, petted, and fed the rat daily on the other. After the rat investigated the two individuals by sniffing them, she climbed onto the familiar person and nestled under her hair. Davis tested 26 laboratory rats this way, with a variety of sophisticated experimental controls, and found that all chose the familiar person over the stranger. "It was tremendously exciting because the effect was so clear," Davis says. "I don't feel there was a problem with anthropomorphism I report the choice and I stop there. I'm not going to talk about the supposed wishes, hopes, and aspirations of the rats."

Despite the appeal of scientific empiricism, some of the most perceptive observations of animals come from people whose expertise is not scientific—from farmers, animal trainers, zookeepers, and pet owners. Vicki Hearne, animal trainer and author, argues that although animals and humans can share emotions, the conditions that inspire them can be quite different. "The happiness of animals can be appalling and politically incorrect in human terms, "she says, "Your dog wants to chase squirrels and roll in horrible-smelling stuff and bite the mail carrier." Thomas of The Hidden Life of Dogs agrees that it is wrongheaded to impose human values on canines. "Each species has its own version of thoughts and feelings," she says. "Dogs think dog thoughts and sometimes these coincide with humans'. It's wrong to think of a dog as a human on four legs that cant talk. That is implausible anthropomorphism."