Anyway, he said it made him more of a vegetarian. He became vegetarian for health reasons (before we met) and I became vegetarian for animal reasons. We met because we had vegetarianism in common, something uncommon in Las Vegas. He said he now thinks eating animals is morally equivalent to eating babies! Wow. I never imagined that change would occur in him so quickly and so organically… all because we have four cats! There’s nothing quite like keen observation and real life experience.
Some people criticize animal lovers for anthropomorphizing them. But more and more science is revealing how similar animals are to humans, something animal rights activists have been saying all along.
ABC recently reported about personality in non-human animals:
“What’s particularly puzzling to biologists is similar traits, like aggression or shyness, are found in very dissimilar species, like fish and birds, but not in every member of the species, and those traits persist over a wide range of circumstances and over a long period of time. That is the very definition of personality— consistent behavior over time and in different situations.”…
“‘There are examples where you can see this rigidity in a personality is not always a very good thing,’ he [Sander van Doorn, an evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico] said. ‘There are studies of spiders, for example, where some spiders are more aggressive than others when they defend their territories. But those spiders are also more aggressive to their own offspring. Sometimes, they eat them.’”
“Other studies have shown that animals are more like people than was once thought, at least in terms of personalities. Members of the same species that are about the same age and size and sex can behave vary differently, even under similar circumstances.”
The Chicago Tribune reported the results of an experiment that showed some complex decision-making in dogs that resembles human infant decision-making.
“The findings come amid a flurry of research that is revealing surprisingly complex abilities among dogs, chimps, birds and many other animals.”
“‘Every day, we’re discovering surprises about animals and finding out animals are far more intelligent and far more emotional than we previously thought,’ said Marc Bekoff, an animal behaviorist who recently retired from the University of Colorado.”"The study was inspired by research with human infants. …’The behavior was very similar to the children who were tested in the original experiment,” said Zsofia Viranyi, of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who helped conduct the experiment, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Current Biology.”…
“‘What’s surprising and shocking about this is that we thought this sort of imitation was very sophisticated, something seen only in humans,’ said Brian Hare, who studies dogs at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. ‘Once again, it ends up dogs are smarter than scientists thought.’”
The New York Times recalls personality experiments with octopuses:
“‘How do we even define what an emotion is in an animal?’ I recalled Roland Anderson [a scientist at at the Seattle Aquarium] asking earlier that day. ‘And why do they even have these different temperaments?’”
“It was back in 1991 that Anderson and Jennifer Mather, a psychologist from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, first decided to undertake a joint personality study of 44 smaller red octopuses at the aquarium as a way to begin to codify and systematize what they thought they had been observing. Using three categorizations from a standard human-personality-assessment test - shy, aggressive and passive - their data would ultimately show that the animals did consistently clump together under these different categories in response to various stimuli, like touching them with a bristly test-tube brush or dropping a crab into the tank.”
“‘The aggressive ones would pounce on the crab,’ Anderson told me. ‘The passive ones would wait for the crab to come past and then grab it. The shy animal would wait till overnight when no one was looking, and we’d find this little pile of crab shell in the morning.’”…
“As Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who first discovered rat laughter, has pointed out: ‘Every drug used to treat emotional and psychiatric disorders in humans was first developed and found effective in animals. This kind of research would obviously have no value if animals were incapable of experiencing these emotional states.’”
AnimalBlawg comments on this new trend of non-human animal behavioral studies:
“Similarly, animal activists have long had allies in the scientific community. Jane Goodall and others have argued for animal rights for decades. Now, however, I believe animal activists are at a critical point, much like environmental activists in the early 90s. The scientists are on the verge of shifting the debate; even the moderate masses will have to confront the personhood of animals. Not just their pets, their food.”
This post was crossposted at my personal blog.
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