{"id":769360,"date":"2022-08-06T06:50:40","date_gmt":"2022-08-06T10:50:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=769360"},"modified":"2022-08-06T08:20:59","modified_gmt":"2022-08-06T12:20:59","slug":"769360","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=769360","title":{"rendered":"OTHER-WORLDLY: The animal worlds that lie beyond our perception"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t

A deluge of innovative research is revealing that behavior we would call intelligent if humans did it can be found in virtually every corner of the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

BETSY MASON:<\/strong> What is special about humans that sets us apart from other animals? Less than some of us would like to believe. As scientists peer more deeply into the lives of other animals, they\u2019re finding that our fellow creatures are far more emotionally, socially, and cognitively complex than we typically give them credit for. A deluge of innovative research is revealing that behavior we would call intelligent if humans did it can be found in virtually every corner of the animal kingdom.<\/em><\/p>\n

Already this year scientists have shown that Goffin\u2019s cockatoos can use multiple tools at once to solve a problem, Australian Magpies will cooperate to remove tracking devices harnessed to them by scientists, and a small brown songbird can sometimes keep time better than the average professional musician \u2014 and that\u2019s just among birds.<\/em><\/p>\n

This pileup of fascinating findings may be at least partly responsible for an increase in people\u2019s interest in the lives of other animals \u2014 a trend that\u2019s reflected in an apparent uptick in books and television shows on the topic, as well as in legislation concerning other species. Public sentiment in part pushed the National Institutes of Health to stop supporting biomedical research on chimpanzees in 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Canada, an outcry led to a ban in 2019 on keeping cetaceans like dolphins and orcas in captivity. And earlier this year, the United Kingdom passed an animal welfare bill that officially recognizes that many animals are sentient beings capable of suffering, including invertebrates like octopuses and lobsters.<\/em><\/p>\n

Many of these efforts are motivated by human empathy for animals we\u2019ve come to see as intelligent, feeling beings like us, such as chimpanzees and dolphins. But how can we extend that concern to the millions of other species that share the planet with us?<\/em><\/p>\n

Three recent books take on one of the major barriers to empathy for other animals: the particular way we sense and experience the world, or perceptual bias. Each of these books aims to break down our human-centered perspective by pointing out our sensory blind spots and using various strategies to illuminate the vast array of animal sensory realms that are often incredibly different from our own.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ed Yong, a staff writer for The Atlantic and author of \u201cAn Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us,\u201d points out that even the use of metaphors like \u201cblind spots\u201d betrays how heavily most humans depend on \u2014 and favor \u2014 the visual sense…<\/em><\/p>\n

In \u201cSentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses,\u201d British author Jackie Higgins covers some of the same sensory territory as Yong \u2014 even interviewing a few of the same scientists and describing the same classic experiments \u2014 but through a very different lens. Her primary interest is exploring the sensory overlap between humans and other animals. And because she\u2019s more interested in the human experience, she avoids the deep end of Nagel\u2019s dilemma.<\/em><\/p>\n

After disabusing her readers of the notion that humans have just five senses \u2014 there may in fact be dozens, depending on how you count them \u2014 Higgins devotes each of her 12 chapters to a different human sense, focusing on how each one works in another species…<\/em><\/p>\n

In \u201cSounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution\u2019s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction,\u201d biologist David George Haskell… delves deeply into a smaller slice of the sensory landscape: the way humans and other animals sense sound. He explores the sonic world from every angle \u2014 physiology, evolution, conservation, culture, history, philosophy. He does an admirable job describing soundscapes across the globe through words \u2014 not an easy task \u2014 and starkly lays out how those sounds are threatened. SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

RELATED VIDEOS:<\/strong><\/p>\n