FRANS DE WAAL: We know more about animal cognition than ever — it’s time to consider the moral implications
We barely know what’s going on at many farms, which makes it easy to act as if nothing is the matter. If all locations with captive animals would become public, matters would improve in a hurry.
FRANS DE WAAL: ‘Changes in our attitude towards animals are long overdue. This applies equally to certain academic disciplines, which still place our species closer to the gods than to the rest of the animal kingdom, as well as to how we treat the animals in our care. The only possible exception is those we keep at home. They often lead pampered lives, whereas all other animals are left out in the cold…
There are continuities between the emotional lives of humans and other animals. Take the video clip of Mama, the alpha female of the large chimpanzee colony at Burgers Zoo in the Netherlands, and her embrace with my professor, Jan van Hooff. From the public reaction to this encounter, I learned that many people were both intensely moved and surprised that apes express themselves the same way we do.
While I fully understood the first reaction, the second took me by surprise. Science has been saying for 50 years that chimps are our closest relatives, so why wouldn’t this include their emotional lives? The facial expressions of humans and chimpanzees not only look strikingly similar, but they also convey similar emotions of affection, fear, anger, disappointment, disgust, and even fun…
On old-fashioned farms, animals had names, pastures to graze in, mud to wallow in, or sand to dust-bathe in. Life was far from idyllic, but it was appreciably better than it is nowadays when we lock up calves and pigs in narrow crates of stainless steel, cram chickens by the thousands into sunless sheds, and often don’t even let cows graze outside anymore. Instead, we keep them standing in their own waste. Since these animals are mostly kept out of sight, people rarely get to see their miserable conditions…
We barely know what’s going on at many farms and facilities, which makes it easy to act as if nothing is the matter. We need research facilities with open-door policies and farms with an obligation to show how they keep their animals. Ideally, supermarket meat packages would feature a scan bar that allows us to call up pictures on our smartphones so that we can judge the animals’ living conditions for ourselves. If all locations with captive animals would become as public as zoos, matters would improve in a hurry…
We can’t recognise all of the current progress in the field of animal cognition — with a new discovery almost every week — and keep ignoring the moral implications. Many scientists would like to leave this issue entirely up to society, but we need to get involved because the situation is dire… and move towards a thorough re-thinking of how we keep and treat animals. For me, the keywords would be “respect” and “well being.” We increasingly have the science to measure the latter, so why not make use of it?’ SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: