Book Review

Rogers, Lesley, Minds o f Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in

Animals, 212pp., Allen and Unwin, St.Leonards, New South
Wales, 1997.

o say of someone that they have a 'mind of their own' is

T usually to praise them, to imply that they can- think

independently. We take the minds of other humans for
granted, we assume that they have a mind in the first place,
which can become one's own: but we rarely make such
assumptions for nonhuman animals. Nonhumans are all too
often assumed to be mindless automata. 'Minds of their own' is
thus a title aiming to challenge persistent cultural beliefs about
other species.

Lesley Rogers is a biologist, whose research focuses on animal

behaviour. Her particular challenge is to the assumptions made
by many of her fellow scientists. Those of us trained in the
science of animal behaviour have been taught not to
anthropomorphise - that is, we should never generalise from
human thoughts and feelings to animal behaviour. The trouble
with consciousness and the notion of mind is that they can't be
observed, only inferred; hence, we should not attribute
consciousness to animals, the argument goes.

This scepticism remains a strongly held conviction among many

scientists. But, Rogers notes, there are increasing numbers of
biologists who question it, who do seek to find ways to ask about
animal minds. Her book explores many of the recent findings,
moving through issues of self-awareness, deception and
intentionality, questions of intelligence and memory, and the
relationship between brain size and consciousness. Throughout,
she gives the benefit of doubt to the animals studied.

Western culture, Rogers points out, is heavily invested in

defending a boundary between intelligent humans and
(nonintelligent) other species. Scientists continue this tradition,
tending to prefer interpretations of behaviour that deny self
awareness or consciousness. But the boundaries are arbitrary; we
include humans in consciousness even if they lose the capacity

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for language, yet when nonhumans learn some features of
human language we search for ways to dismiss their abilities.

Rogers gives many examples of this boundary maintenance. She

cites, for example, one scientist who insists that even other apes
cannot access memories independently of triggers in the
environment. He is not convinced by the many studies of sign-
language acquisition in apes, even when Koko the gorilla
expressed past sadness at the death of her companion kitten.

'In the absence of evidence', suggests Rogers, such

people 'who categorically state that all animals are
locked into thinking about and responding only to the
immediate environment, are expressing their attitudes
to animals, not scientific evidence' (p. 75).

Those who want to maintain a boundary seek all kinds of fence

posts. Language is one (though challenged by sign-learning
chimpanzees); tool use is another (also challenged by a range of
species which use tools). Yet, in her careful analysis of both
animal abilities and the evidence of early hominid evolution,
Rogers can find no fences:

'If there is a discontinuity between Homo sapiens and

other living species', she concludes, 'it does not lie in
the exclusive possession of any one of these traits'.

We may be better at some things (tool using for instance) but

there is no evidence of traits exclusive to humans. There is even:

'a continuity of human speech with the brain structures

that are used for vocalisations in animals. Both stone
and wooden tools were being used well before humans
evolved and planning ahead is essential to the survival
of many species. No single feature on its own makes us
special' (pp. 163-4).

Not only do prevailing cultural beliefs about the stupidity of

nonhumans enter scientific interpretations, but the experiments
themselves are often designed to support them. Can we really
conclude animal stupidity when we compare humans to animals
who have spent all their lives in highly impoverished
environments? It would hardly be surprising if a laboratory-
reared chimpanzee failed to solve some of the problems it was set;
so would a human child reared in such dire surroundings.

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The riposte of some scientists is that, to draw proper conclusions,
we must have properly controlled conditions. On those grounds,
they reject the interpretations offered by people who have raised
chimpanzees to use sign language. This, Rogers points out, is:

'a double bind. On the one hand, the rearing and testing
conditions must be controlled completely or the
complex cognitive abilities that animals display will not
be believed. On the other hand, if the rearing and testing
conditions are controlled completely, the environment
becomes so sterile that animals raised in it will be less
able, or willing, to display complex cognitive abilities,
language abilities and consciousness' (p. 171).

Controlling conditions also means losing the individual.

Animals become groups in experimental protocols. By contrast,
those of us who live in close companionship with specific
individuals of other species - as Rogers does with her Rhodesian
ridgebacks - know how variable and different they are. Each has
her or his own personality. I may be a scientist, but I don't need
science to tell me whether or not my dogs or horses have
consciousness or understand what I say. My answer comes from
my own individual experiences with those animals.

Lesley Rogers clearly shares that belief that she is communicating

with a conscious and aware being when she interacts with her
dogs, or with the orangutans she has studied in East Malaysia. But
she does not generally argue from that personal experience; on
the contrary, she is very careful to examine the evidence from the
science itself and to question the conclusions of many scientists.
We could just as well start from the premise of animal awareness,
she believes, as starting from the prevailing belief in its lack.

Giving nonhuman animals the benefit of the doubt in such ways

should extend beyond simply interpreting data. If we start from
the premise that (at least some) animals can be aware, then we can
allow that some species might be aware of the suffering of their
fellows. Koko the gorilla, suggests Rogers, exhibited empathy
toward another gorilla who was crying, apparently to be let out.
Yet how often is that possibility of empathy ever taken into
account by those who work with (use) nonhuman animals? Like
Rogers, I too have often seen other scientists killing rats in front
of their cagemates; like her, I have wondered, with pain, what

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those other rats were experiencing. Many animals in laboratories
or farming environments might suffer because of their awareness
of the suffering or death of their fellows. As Rogers notes:

'None of the present guidelines for animal welfare take

this into account' (p. 188).

Lesley Rogers makes a persuasive case. At the very least, she

urges, nonhuman animals should be given the benefit of the
doubt, not assumed a priori to have no consciousness or minds.
Her book is, moreover, written accessibly, avoiding the overly
complicated language beloved of so many scientists. There is a
great deal invested in maintaining the boundary between 'us
humans' and 'them', and much of the science is devoted to fence-
building. But even within that science there is growing interest in
animal minds, and growing resistance to the idea that animals are
merely clockwork machines.

If we posit other species as mere machines, what does that say

about ourselves? What does it say about our relationships to
those other species? Among other things, it limits our
understandings. Rogers concludes her book:

'By ignoring the most interesting attributes of the

behaviour of animals we not only diminish our own
experiences but also diminish the existence of animals.'
(p. 195).

Other species are adapted to quite different environments to us,

requiring different skills to negotiate - not lesser, just different.
And to do that they must have minds of their own.

Lynda Birke

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Book Notes
D ennett, Daniel, Kinds o f m inds, x + 244pp., Phoenix, L o n d on ,
1996.

Dennett takes up the question of animal minds. Do animals have

subjective states or are they merely capable of (sometimes) doing
clever things. His answer is curiously dogmatic. They have no
subjective states, hence they have no minds. Yet in the same
breath -the book can be read in almost one breath- he
acknowledges our ignorance about animals and their capacities.
The argument appears to be: if we are unsure of the capacities of
animals then we should say they have no subjectivity, no minds.
He claims that language gives humans a unique advantage in the
development of subjectivity but this is not a good argument
unless we have established that other animals do not have
'languages'. We do not know this and Dennett does not even
refer to the studies with dolphins and bonobos which purport to
show that they have language. This is a profoundly disappointing
book because a great deal of it simply restates the dogmatisim of
past philosophy concerning the uniqueness of humans.

Hoeg, Peter, The Woman and the A pe, 229pp. H arvill Press,
London, 1996.

Two thirds of this book is a wonderful, witty novel full of attacks

on meat eating, zoos and animal experimentation but with a very
soft touch. There is a very clever and constant use of animal
analogies, e.g. 'There is nothing pleasant about abandoning the
protection afforded by hopes and daydreams and Madelaine
shrank from it like a hermit crab forced to leave its whelk shell'
(p.75). It is only after a while that you realise that when an analogy
is drawn it nearly always involves an animal.The last third of the
book is a sexual/social fantasy straining all credibility. An ape
whisks a woman away to a supposedly idyllic garden. Realizing
the limitations of such a life they return to society draw out other
(hidden) apes and sail away

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C arruthers, P eter and and Sm ith, Peter K, editors, Theories o f
theories o f mind , xv + 390pp., Cambridge U nivesity Press,
Cam bridge, 1996.

The first three parts of this book take up a wide range of debates in
the philosophy of mind. Part four consists of four articles on
whether non-human primates have minds. The authors are
Andrew Whiten (Psychology, St Andrews), Daniel Povinelli
(Comparative Behavioural Biology, New Iberia Research Center),
Juan-Carlos Gomez (Psychology, Madrid) and Peter Sm ith
(Psychology, Sheffield). Andrew Whiten concentrates on what it
means to attribute mental states to beings such as chimpanzees.
Daniel Povinelli tries to show that there are plausible reasons
why chimpanzees (at least) might have a theory of mind pointing
to features such as gaze-following and self-recognition in mirrors
but then he raises some doubts. Shifting the focus onto practical
understandings of overt mental states as expressed in intelligent
social action, Gomez argues that what chimpanzees display is
more complex than trial-and-error but it need not involve a
meta-representational theory of mind. While Smith asserts that a
theory of mind cannot exist without language - in the sense of an
abstract symbolic system of communication. The conclusion to
the article and the book is quite a telling example of hum an
arrogance: 'Only if chimpanzees could talk to each other about
mental states would they have evolved mind-reading, and only if
they could talk to us about mental states would we believe them'.
Hopefully the club of 'we' is diminishing.

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