Four years ago, ethologist and animal advocate Marc Bekoff wrote an op-ed for LiveScience titled “After 2,500 Studies, It’s Time to Declare Animal Sentience Proven.” In this essay, Bekoff points out that the ample empirical evidence supporting animal sentience (over 2,500 studies at the time he was writing and many more than that now) still wasn’t stopping skeptics from continuing to question—and even deny—what research had already proven.
What puzzles me is why science didn’t start off with a different principal for how we view self-awareness in animals, one closer to that used by the American criminal justice system, which holds innocence as the presumption unless guilt is proven. Instead of needing proof of self-awareness in animals, we could instead assume that an animal is self-aware unless proven otherwise. After all, this assumption better reflects our observations of and experiences with animals, who certainly behave as if they are self aware.
But the skepticism lingers. . . And this is why we owe a debt of gratitude to all the scientists who continue to design ingenious ways of demonstrating that animals are self-aware, experience emotions, and have incredibly cognitive abilities.
Continue reading →