by Mike O’Brien
It has been a busy few months in the field of animal studies. It seems like every month is a busy one for animal studies these days, which is salutary. As a hobbyist follower of this area of study, every time I turn around there is a new line of research to catch up on. All the better for me, as it eats up reading time that might otherwise be spent doom-scrolling through the latest outrages and tragedies. Save me from myself, you heroes of scholarship.
The first item of note is the honouring of Lori Gruen as “Distinguished Philosopher of the Year” by the Eastern division of the Society for Women in Philosophy, an American organization that has been supporting and promoting women philosophers for over fifty years. Gruen is a prolific and influential figure in the ecofeminist tradition, focusing mainly on environmental and animal ethics as well as on the ethics of incarceration, and has published extensively over the last three decades. She has also been a mentor, collaborator and co-author with many other people in the field, and I have come across her work several times over the last few years while reading through other researchers’ bibliographies.
I haven’t read enough of her work or ecofeminist work generally to have a well-informed opinion of it, but my not-well-informed sense is that it leans towards normative ethics and elaborating the entailments of posited moral facts, which is outside of my preferred meta-ethical wicket. (Once the worm of Nietzschean critique gets into your brain, it becomes difficult to find any enthusiasm for the discovery or analytical definition of moral facts). I also have some general misgivings about the essentialist bent of much of the ecofeminist work that I’ve encountered (e.g. relational ethics is feminist, empiricist science is patriarchal), which has kept me from engaging with that literature more than incidentally. I nevertheless remain open to the possibility that these impressions are mistaken and, given that most of the targets of ecofeminist critique are certainly real and disastrously powerful, I am glad that they have their oars in the water, paddling in roughly the right direction. This is a common muddle in normative ethics, where some things are so obviously wrong (animal cruelty, systemic racism, environmental destruction) that a very wide swath of viewpoints can converge on a common conclusion despite profound disagreements about facts, values and methods.
Coincidentally, Gruen co-authored an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the Wikipedia of academic philosophy) on “The moral status of animals” with another animal philosopher who has been in the news of late. Susana Monsó, whom I have mentioned in earlier columns owing to her co-authorship with Kristin Andrews of several works, has been hitting the interview circuit to discuss her book “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death”, newly translated to English. The book explores the experience and understanding of death among non-human animals, using examples from wild and captive creatures to argue that many animals do in fact have a concept of death.
It rejects an anthropocentric view that awareness of death entails a human-like conception of one’s own death and the familiar emotional and ritual responses to the deaths of others. One of the examples employed by Monsó is the Virginia possum, famous for faking death (“playing possum”) to avoid being eaten by predators. That the appearance of death dissuades predators is a sign that these predators have a concept of death which figures in their decisions about hunting and feeding, argues Monsó. I have not read the book, although I have read several interviews, essays and articles by Monsó on this topic, and am sceptical of the use of word “concept” here, rather “category”. Having a concept of something transitional and transformative like death seems unnecessarily complex, whereas having categories of “alive” and “dead” would presumably be less cognitively taxing and equally useful for choosing prey. This presumption may well be false, for instance if the cognitive nuts and bolts of maintaining categories turns out to be more demanding than the functional underpinnings of having a concept like “death”.
Still, it is useful to be challenged by thinkers who are more credulous about animal capacities than am I, lest I become complacent in one-sidedly criticizing those labouring under Descartes’ dead hand, who believe rather too little in animal minds. I have a particular quirk that makes me impatient of speculative philosophy when the world is threatening and aggravating, and it leads me to unfairly dismiss work that begins by assuming rather more than I would countenance (like moral subjecthood for certain animals) in order to explore the consequences that would follow. Since the world is unlikely to get less threatening or aggravating any time soon, I suppose it’s on me to overcome that quirk, so as to give more speculative philosophers like Monsó their due, and to benefit from a deeper engagement with their work. Monsó has also published several academic works about the sentience and moral standing of insects, particularly in the context using insect protein to displace the eating of vertebrate species, and I look forward to diving into that literature soon. Her work on the morality of predation (positing that some non-human predator species are moral agents, in addition to their prey being moral patients) also looks rather interesting, and promises to get into the weeds with the problem of wild animal suffering (compounding it with a new problem of wild animal wrong-doing).
Another quite prominent researcher in animal cognition and its ethical implications, Jonathan Birch, popped up in my media diet unexpectedly as a guest on Sean Carroll’s excellent “Mindscape” podcast, discussing his latest book “The Edge of Sentience”. It was a good pairing of interviewer and interviewee, as Carroll is usually a generous but carefully critical host, and Birch is a fastidiously evidence-based advocate for the consideration of animal cognitive capacities, and the moral considerations entailed thereby. Birch is also quite a consequential figure in this realm, being the lead author of the “Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans”, which led to an amendment of the UK’s “Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act” to include these animals in the scope of its protections. Birch is also a co-author of the 2024 “New York Declaration On Animal Consciousness”, affirming the empirically supported plausibility of consciousness in all vertebrates and many invertebrate species, and calling for strong precautionary safeguards to avoiding harm to them. The declaration is signed by hundreds of academics in related fields, including a who’s who of current animal cognition research. His new book is animated by this same precautionary spirit, exploring evidence of sentience across human and non-human animals, as well as emerging issues in artificially intelligent systems. In a boon to the field and to readers like myself, it is offered as a free PDF by Oxford University Press.
I also recently came across a paper by Lara Nellissen, a primatologist previously unknown to me. A co-author of several recent publications on curiosity, attention and learning in orangutans, this latest paper is entitled “Vocal consensus building for collective departures in wild western gorillas”, published in the October 2024 edition of “Proceedings of the Royal Society B” (which, along with “Philosophical Transactions B” is quickly becoming one of my favourite sources of fascinating biological research). The researchers observed several small (5 members or fewer) groups of western gorillas as they went about their day foraging, resting and venturing out to other foraging sites. These groups were composed of a single silverback male accompanied by a mixture of adult females, non-silverback males, and immature gorillas. Dependent on fruit rather than leafy plants for food, they have to travel to find sufficient fare, and individual members might have different preferences regarding where to look next, and when to depart. The researchers recorded various behaviours relating to these collective choices, principally the use of grunting vocalizations that increased markedly around five minutes prior to a departure and declined just as quickly as the movement got underway. Using statistical tools, they investigated how social rank and antecedent behaviours predicted the likelihood of an individual initiating a departure, successfully recruiting the other group members to the direction and timing of their departure, and dissenting or following the departure initiative of other group members.
The researchers assigned social ranking scores (“elo-rating”) based on observed interactions between group members (e.g. initiating or backing down from a confrontation). This dominance score was considered separately from silverback status, and the results show that silverbacks per se are not so influential as we might assume in determining group decisions, when adjusting for their elo-rated rank. Interestingly, they found that the silverback males did not call for departures much more often than other high-ranking members, nor were they much more successful in initiating departures than other high-ranking members. They did, however, seem to serve as arbitrators when two or more other group members disagreed on the direction of travel. High rank was correlated much more strongly with determining the direction of travel than the timing of departure, while timing was strongly correlated with vocalization “votes”, hence the “vocal consensus building” in the title of the article. The data shows that vocalizing gorillas were 2.66 times as likely to depart as silent ones, and almost 4 times as likely to depart when other group members were vocalizing. Slicing the results further, the lowest-ranking members were 5.83 times as likely to depart when other members vocalized, while highest-ranking members were 1.99 times as likely. The authors note that chimpanzees also vocalize in relation to group movements, but calls are typically only given by one member, and signal a desire to stay rather than change locations. However, chimpanzees also use a variety of visual signals to propose travel, so their use of vocalization may be less important in this context.
One goal of Nellissen et al.’s paper was gather empirical data to test hypotheses about how social animals reach a quorum on group decisions. Earlier works in this area, such as “Group decision making in animals” (Conradt & Roper, 2003), “Consensus decision-making in animals” (Conradt & Roper, 2005), and “Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move” (Couzin et al., 2005), use mathematical models to predict certain thresholds and inflection points in group behaviour. This largely takes the form of game theoretical modelling of individual actors navigating trade-off spaces, where the cost of following erroneous or non-preferred group choices (“synchronization cost” or “consensus cost”) is balanced against the cost of group splitting. These models predict a sudden increase in recruitment for some action, or in the accuracy of some choice, depending on the size of a group and the proportion of its members “voting” for or leading some action. In a small group where preference and risk of error are closely balanced, and all members can communicate directly, the inflection point is around 50%, with the likelihood of group action rising sharply below that and rising more slowly above it. (In larger populations, especially where whole-group communication is difficult or impossible and decisions are led by a expert sub-group, the absolute number of members “voting” is more important than the proportion of the group “voting”. This is due to the way that the chance of error drops sharply as multiple better-than-chance estimates are pooled. Of course, in order to benefit from this statistical fact, a species has to have evolved leader-following behaviour, as most social animals cannot read articles about game-theoretical modelling and would not reach this strategy deliberatively.)
The data in Nellissen et al.’s study bears out the “quorum” hypothesis, showing that the probability of departure rises in a faster-than-linear fashion as the proportion of “voting” gorillas rose to 50%, then increased in a slower-than-linear fashion afterwards (an “S” curve), suggesting (arguably) that majority agreement is an important condition for group action. Dissent did result in a temporary group split in only a small minority of cases. I still don’t know how much weight should be put on the causal power of this “voting” to instigate and determine group actions; presumably the communicative behaviour also serves some “go along to get along” function that maintains social bonds, and I think there is an important distinction to be made between contributing to a group decision as a self-recognizing group member, versus expressing a personal preference. Many such questions could also be asked of human actions within highly developed deliberative systems, and we might wonder whether any level of cognition beyond mere preference selection (probabilistic betting, deontic rule-following, whole-system thinking) need be invoked to fully explain participants’ behaviour. These perennial correlation-is-not-causation quibbles aside, the observations and statistically elaborated data in Nellissen et al.’s work provides a more useful resource than any speculative fluff or armchair sniping I might offer. I’ll be reading her work on orangutans next, the poor overlooked cousins among the great apes, who increasingly seem like they might be the more cognitively interesting ones. I’ve read other accounts (from Kristin Andrews, if I recall correctly) that they tend to take more time with experimental tasks given to them, and don’t seem terribly fussed about satisfying researchers’ expectations. It might just be vanity speaking, but as a fellow time-taking, non-fussed person, I’d like to believe that this is a sign of higher intelligence.
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