Hiya
Sorry am in the middle of moving house so am a bit behind with posting on here - although there's been a lot recently I want to add to!
Here are a few articles that have been posted on ethological ethics recently (or not so recently)....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/health/3653176.stm
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996343
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20040906/chimp.html
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=12954#
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/07/science/07cont.html?pagewanted=print&position=
September 7, 2004
I BEG TO DIFFER
Did the Cat Really Say 'I Vant to Be Alone'? Sorry, It Said Meow
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
ne night, asking his wife about their dinner plans, Stephen R. Anderson, a
Yale professor of linguistics and psychology, got the reply: "I want to go
out."
The next night, he found the cat clawing the rug near the door. His wife
calmed him down by translating: "She's saying, 'I want to go out.' "
So do we conclude, Dr. Anderson asks, that the cat can talk?
The answer, he argues, is no - although, as a human, he could say the same
thing by shaking his head, rolling his eyes or even saying sarcastically,
"Yeah, sure."
Dr. Anderson is the author of "Doctor Dolittle's Delusion," to be
published by Yale University Press in November. The book is a
linguistics-based argument that if kindly John Dolittle of
Puddleby-on-the-Marsh was hearing voices, they weren't coming from Jip the
dog or Gub-Gub the pig.
The idea that animals have all-but-human mental lives, emotions and powers
of communication has become increasingly fashionable, after centuries in
which such notions were considered absurd.
Since the 1970's, as animal behaviorists have trained apes to make
requests by stringing gestures or ideograms together and acousticians have
detected that both whales and elephants make subsonic calls, suspicions
have arisen that animals have more to say than humans realized.
More recently, in June, German researchers reported in the journal Science
that Rico, a border collie, could not only fetch 200 objects by name, but
could learn the name of a new object by inference if it was in a group of
other objects that he already knew.
Dr. Anderson, however, warns against considering any of these behaviors
"language."
Rico is a clever dog, he says, but what he does "is well within the bounds
of what we know animals can do."
Dogs in particular seem to have evolved to pick up clues from humans.
Pointing at an object, for example, means nothing to an ape, a parrot or
even a wolf, but a dog realizes that the item at a distance from the
finger is what a human is naming.
Prodded by humans, Dr. Anderson argues, animals may learn to memorize
symbols or sounds, and to think abstractly - for example, by linking
"banana" to a button, even a button that has nothing curved or yellow on
it. But those talents do not match the complexity of any spoken or deaf
sign language. They are more like the limited vocabulary of commands
transmitted by traffic lights or baseball coaches.
"Chimps do, after a lot of training, learn 200 or more signs," Dr.
Anderson said in an interview from New Zealand, where he is teaching this
year. "But they seem to top out after a few years. Kids' vocabularies just
go on expanding."
Children also perceive that sounds can be joined to form words and
concepts into sentences, he said. It is not clear that animals do.
He gave an example. If a human inserts coins in a candy machine and then
presses B-1-2, he asked, is he really typing the thought "Machine, please
give me M&M's"?
Similarly, if a well-trained ape touches a series of symbol keys - one for
"machine," one for "give," one for "M&M's"- is it talking?
"You can teach pigeons to push a sequence of 6 or 7 buttons to get seeds,"
Dr. Anderson said, "but that's not language."
To linguists, languages are not lists of words, but frames governed by
syntax, the art that gives different meanings to "The murderer believed
Mary to be John's mother," "Mary believed John's mother to be the
murderer" or "To be the murderer, Mary believed John's mother."
Dr. Anderson concedes that animals communicate, often in detail. Waggling
bee dances indicate the direction and distance to a trove of pollen, and
monkeys and squirrels have different alarm calls for different predators.
Animals can even fool each other with sounds. A shrike-tanager may give a
false alarm call to scare other shrike-tanagers away from food it wants.
But birds cannot explain the trick, bees do not reminisce about last
year's honey and apes do not ask their language teachers why they are
captives.
The closest animals come to syntax, Dr. Anderson argues, is that some West
African monkeys emit a low "boom" before an alarm call that - judging by
the reaction of monkeys hearing it - lowers the threat level. That is,
"boom-leopard" seems to mean "maybe a leopard around, but not close."
Dr. Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who has worked with apes for 25 years,
strongly disagrees with Dr. Anderson. Some bonobos she works with at
Georgia State University, she said, have been talked to by humans since
birth and have watched their parents learn charts of symbols. By pointing
to the right ones, Kanzi, the best among the bonobos, can form sentences
like "Sue chase Kanzi" and "Kanzi chase Sue," or can hear the English
words "Get the tomato that is in the microwave" and fetch the correct
tomato while ignoring others.
The apes can even indicate that they are happy or sad or in pain, Dr.
Savage-Rumbaugh said, and can refer to the past by reminding researchers
of rewards promised the day before.
Francine Patterson, who has worked for nearly 30 years with Koko, whom she
met when she was a student at Stanford and Koko was an infant gorilla in
the San Francisco Zoo, said Koko could "in some respects, depending on
what you are looking at, speak as well as a 5-year-old child."
Koko can modulate her vocabulary of 1,000 signs by raising her eyebrows to
indicate questions, by signing at others to indicate agreement, and making
other moves "that would be described as grammatical" by users of deaf sign
languages, Dr. Patterson said.
Linguists have been accused of moving the bar on their definition of
language ever higher, so that it can never be met. They will always deny
that animals can talk, Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh argues, "because it doesn't fit
comfortably in their view of the universe."
Dr. Anderson replies that he has "no desire to deny speech even to the
cockroach," but doesn't think nonhumans have the potential.
Luckily, he only argues the point with humans. Given the literal nature of
ape discourse, the wrong linguistic way to introduce his cat-vs.-spouse
example, of course, would be to say, "Well, take my wife. "
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Washington Post, September 5, 2004
'A Dog's History of America'
By Jonathan Yardley
A DOG'S HISTORY OF AMERICA ~U
How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered, and
Settled a Continent
By Mark Derr. North Point. 380 pp. $25
Mark Derr, who writes intelligently and lucidly about the environment and animals, has set a
daunting task for himself in A Dog's History of America: to show how dogs, who often "do not
even appear in the indexes of early histories" of America, have contributed to the
exploration, settlement and growth of the continent. Daunting, that is, because documentary
evidence of dogs is nonexistent at worst, scanty at best. They were "ubiquitous, and
invisible, taken for granted like beer and rotgut whiskey, cooking pots, the labor of women
and children, the diseases that regularly ravished people and animals, even the lives of
slaves and indentured servants."
Taken almost wholly for granted -- even when they were cherished companions rather than
homeless curs -- they were almost never written about. They probably got to America somewhere
between 12,000 to 35,000 years ago, perhaps crossing from Siberia to Alaska, which is to say
they were well established long before the first white colonists got here, but no records
were kept of their existence and only an occasional bone at an archaeological dig provides
any clue to their existence. Thus for much of the time span this book covers -- from the 16th
century until well into the 19th -- Derr is forced to rely on inference and speculation, and
to tell the human story with dogs playing an almost invisible supporting role.
Considering the obstacles with which he is confronted, Derr does a remarkably good job of
constructing a plausible account of the dog's first three centuries in the Americas. Though
he touches occasionally on the Caribbean and Latin America -- primarily in his account of the
Spanish Conquest -- and less so on Canada, his chief focus is on the British colonies and the
United States. He begins by examining dogs' role as the "sole domesticated animal of many
Native American groups," which "at the least" they served as "companions, fellow travelers
and camp guards," sometimes as transport. They had a "wolfish appearance, although the dogs
were somewhat smaller than the local wolves and had tails that tended to curve over the back,
while those of wolves tended to hang straight."
Indians, like many others, ate dogs. So apparently did the Spanish -- as did many whites who
became desperate for food as they worked their way to the West -- but they had a crueler use
for dogs: They were "specifically bred and trained to hunt down and disembowel Indians," and
the Spanish followed the "practice of bringing along on any campaign chained Indian slaves as
food for the dogs." They were known as "war dogs," and they brought terror everywhere they
went.
None of this makes for especially pleasant reading -- "In desperation, the men slit the
throats of their dogs and drank their blood" -- but it appears to be historically accurate
and, not incidentally, it provides a timely antidote to early-21st-century attitudes toward
dogs, which tend toward the sentimental and romanticized. We tend to forget (if we ever knew)
"that, on the whole, dogs have been poorly treated by humans, treated with such brutality,
abuse, and contempt that even slaves and tortured Indians have found it degrading to be
called a dog." Throughout history there have been people "who recognized that mistreatment of
the dog was abuse of its loyalty," but this conviction took a long time to become widespread:
"During the eighteenth century, a shift occurred in people's perception of dogs and other
animals and of human relationships to them, the ramifications of which are being felt to this
day. . . . By the end of the eighteenth century, the 'sagacious,' loyal, adoring, faithful
dog was becoming a fixture in popular articles; together with the horse, the dog was deemed
far more reliable and devoted than servants or slaves. But unlike the horse, the dog made the
transition into the bourgeois home. This transition was shaped by the same intellectual,
social, and economic forces that were reshaping society itself."
Until this change in attitude, dogs had been used, if not always abused, far more than
coddled. In the slaveholding South, they were used "for hunting, sport, and tracking runaway
slaves." In Puritan New England, "settlers used dogs to guard their homes and manage their
livestock, to kill wolves, to hound Indians." In the West, "cowmen used dogs on their
ranches both to help round up cattle and to manage other livestock, especially sheep." All
along the frontier, the "cur, or cur dog," played innumerable roles. Derr tells this story:
"A young mother was gathering beans in front of a newly built log house when she turned to
fuss at her little dog for its persistent barking and saw that it was holding at bay a cougar
sitting on a stump just twenty feet from her baby. The woman hastily scooped up her child and
ran into the house to wait for her husband. He soon returned with his big dog and immediately
tracked and killed the cougar. He found in its stomach the remains of their brave little
dog."
That took place in the 1830s. Now, nearly two centuries later, dogs and humans have a far
different relationship, but dogs still work for us. Police dogs and firehouse dogs help
protect us. Guide dogs serve as eyes for the blind. In wartime dogs have served "as
messengers -- sometimes actually laying telephone cable -- casualty dogs, sentries, and scout
dogs," sometimes with incredible skill. After September 2001 bomb-detector dogs -- which Derr
argues are far more effective at nosing out explosives than any machines -- are now in "such
high demand" that "a number of incompetent trainers entered the fray, producing poorly
trained and vetted dogs, who at this writing have not yet failed spectacularly, though the
risk is real. Experts worry that a failure could spur a backlash against relying on dogs that
would feed into a long-standing bias among many officials who favor machines over dogs."
Dogs have become celebrities. "For defeating screen desperadoes, Rin Tin Tin received, at
the height of his career with Warner Brothers, $1,000 a week and had his own chef and
chauffeur." A few years later, Lassie enjoyed even greater celebrity. Both dogs greatly
increased the popularity of their breeds -- German shepherds and collies, respectively --
with the result that each "quickly became a poster dog for what happens when too many animals
are bred too quickly from a small gene pool." During the administration of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, the Scottie whom he called "my little dog, Fala," assumed "particular and general
significance" as a result of the genuinely close tie between dog and master:
"Despite people and establishments who refused to welcome dogs, they had made the
transition, like America itself, from the country and the yard into the city and the home.
They had become not just dogs but personages, and their masters and mistresses were
'companions.' Fala was an exceptional dog, of course, and the dog wars are not over to this
day. People continue to abuse and abandon their animals and to breed dogs to satisfy their
own vanity or to make profit. But a shift in perception, long under way, had become fixed in
the collective psyche, as surely as America had changed from a predominantly rural society
through the Depression to an urban and suburbanizing society after World War II."
The popularity of Fala had the perhaps inevitable effect that, while "Roosevelt and Fala
formed an organic unit," the "deployment of subsequent White House dogs has too often
appeared, and in fact been, staged for publicity, a political ploy designed to connect to the
past and to dog lovers in the electorate." Similar motives appear behind the purchase of
expensive, exotic breeds by self-regarding urbanites who see the dogs as useful to the
"personalities" they want to project; sooner or later they discover the dogs are too much for
them to handle and ship them off to animal-rescue shelters, expensive and pitiable victims of
human vanity. These people are not significantly different from those whose dogs are "primped
and preened" and overbred to win ribbons at shows -- ribbons that are meant to flatter the
owners, not their dogs, a point beautifully made in that exquisite little film "Best in
Show."
Fortunately, most people who own dogs -- or who are owned by dogs -- treat them as treasured
companions, as members of their families. Like colonial New England, where "some dogs were
mourned nearly as deeply as if they had been valued members of the community," we have
reached a deeper and kinder understanding of the connection between us and these sublimely
wonderful animals. We often say that a dog in a loving family is a lucky dog, but the really
lucky party is the family. ~U
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.