As I look into
the dark brown eyes of my dog, Scout, I am deeply moved. She seems to understand me, seems to reflect
back the love and admiration I feel for her.
Is it unreasonable to suppose that she is feeling the same emotions for
me as I am for her, as a recent New YorkTimes Op-Ed piece has suggested?
Yes. And here’s why. Dogs are not people, and should not be judged
in relation to people. While your dog
may love you as deeply as a dog can love a human, to confuse dog love for human
love is to project our own emotional states onto dogs, and at the same time, to
deny dogs their true nature. This
tendency to attribute human-like motives, beliefs, and emotions to other
animals is called anthropomorphism,
and is deeply ingrained in human ways of thinking about non-human things.
While such
anthropomorphic attitudes may be relatively harmless in many everyday
circumstances, it has no place in science.
In my own field of comparative cognition – which seeks to understand how
evolution and experience combine to create complex behavior – anthropomorphism has
long been rejected on scientific grounds.
It simply fails to take account of the remarkably diverse ways in which
different animals are put together – the unique evolutionary adaptations that have
given rise to different sensory and nervous systems that combine to produce
distinctively different perspectives on the world.
Rather than
projecting human-like traits onto other animals, scientists seek instead an
animal-centered view that uses the latest science as a guide to how other
animals perceive, learn, remember, and so on.
Part of what this science tells us is that dogs – perhaps by virtue of
thousands of years of cohabitation with humans – are highly attuned to human
behavior. Dogs have been shown to
respond to subtle facial and gestural cues of humans, and to establish and
sustain eye contact with people in ways that are distinctive among animal species.
This is perhaps
a unique adaptation that has grown out of centuries of shared contact with
humans. But what is not unique to dogs is their attraction to rewarding stimuli
(including food, physical contact, and stimuli associated with them). This tendency is shared by virtually every
species on the planet, from fruit flies to primates (including the human kind). As we’ve learned more about the brain (partly
through MRI studies like those described by Professor Berns), we’ve come to
appreciate some of the ways in which the neural underpinnings of
reward-motivated action are shared across species.
But a brain state
is seldom activated by a single type of stimulus event, and thus to conclude
similar cognitive or subjective states on the basis of similar brain activation
(the main thrust of Professor Berns’ argument) suffers from what
neuroscientists call the reverse
inference problem. That is, we
notice that brain state A (say, activity in the caudate nucleus of a dog’s
brain) is activated by stimulus X (say, an image of food), and that brain state
A has also been shown in other studies with humans to respond to stimulus Y
(say, a monetary reward), we conclude that stimuli X and Y engage similar subjective
states. This is a dubious practice, even
when confined to a single species, and highly questionable when applied across
species.
Even if we were
to accept Professor Berns’ claim that similar subjective states are involved in
dogs and people, what are we to make of his further recommendation to grant
personhood to dogs? Given the
cross-species generality in basic reward learning, and the brain mechanisms
associated with it, should we not also be prepared to grant personhood to other
species in whom reward-based brain changes occur? The list would be long, including fellow
mammals, such as rodents and primates, but also birds, reptiles, crustaceans,
fish, and insects.
The point in
restricting human rights to humans is not to separate humans from the rest of
nature, but to recognize that human rights, such as personhood, are human
constructions that are appropriate to human societies. To extend these to other animals is to
project our own human-centric biases into domains where they don’t belong. This not only runs counter to the latest
science of animal cognition, it is ultimately disrespectful to other
animals. Dogs deserve our respect and
admiration, not because they are like us, but because they what they are – astonishingly
beautiful and intelligent animals with whom we have been fortunate to share
some time on this planet. Shouldn’t that
be enough?
