Atlanta Science Tavern talk

These are the slides from a talk Nathan Nobis recently did for the Atlanta Science Tavern that addressed some ethical issues concerning animals:

Cherry-Picking Our Scientific Data

Yesterday I read a news story reporting on findings by a research team at Queen’s University Belfast in the prestigious journal Animal Behaviour providing evidence that hermit crabs feel pain and remember it. That is, there is a cognitive component to their reaction to various stimuli. To those who have witnessed the screams of lobsters dropped into pots of boiling water or take as an assumption that having a nervous system has something to do with feeling and perceiving… well, this is not news. But for those who demand their beliefs be based on objective scientific data… it is a revelation I suppose.

Okay, well, what do we do now? Those of us in science have spent lifetimes teaching our students that the beauty of the scientific enterprise is that it is self-correcting and adjusts conceptually to incoming data. Yet, there seems to be no response to the above findings. Of course this silence is just a microcosm of the broader stance that we take towards “inconvenient truths” – we ignore them. We have an overwhelming amount of evidence that other mammals feel pain and distress and yet we don’t take those findings into account when eating them, experimenting on them (to get even more data!), and poaching them. So why am I all bent out of shape (coming out of my shell) about hermit crabs? Two reasons.

One is that, despite the loose protections in existence for mammals and (some) vertebrates there is no protection against pain and suffering for invertebrates such as hermit crabs. There is not even an Animal Welfare Act to minimally guide how we treat them nor any substantive discussion of whether we should give them the benefit of the doubt. Up to now even the most empirically-minded scientists might have appealed to the fact that there was no clear evidence for the conscious experience of pain in invertebrates. Now their hand is forced because of these new data.

Two is the very unscientific nature of our response. The scientific study of other animals as models for human conditions is done from a cherry-picker. We use rats in depression research but refuse to acknowledge the very data that makes them valid subjects in such research. We use monkeys in studies of horrific neurological disorders that cause tremendous suffering in people yet choose to ignore the data that they are just as debilitated by these diseases as we are. And on and on. It is fair to say that our propensity to “keep the good data and throw out the bad data” is so imbedded in the scientific process that we are barely aware we are doing it at this point.

It will be interesting to see if the scientific community responds in the manner we prescribe for our students (to adjust to changing evidence) or whether we decide to, as we always have, cherry-pick those data that are consistent with our professional and personal objectives from those that represent an authentic challenge to our role as scholars and human beings. I wonder. How many of us will engage in a parlor debate over this issue at the seafood buffet?

Planet of the Apes Redux

By Lori Marino

As I read about the recent story of Santino, the chimpanzee at the Furuvik zoo in Sweden who was throwing stone disks at visitors I could not help but be taken back to the classic movie Planet Of The Apes. Santino is being given all this attention because he is planning his behavior, choosing, modifying and stockpiling appropriate rocks during the evening for throwing the next day when visitors are around. This obvious instance of foreplanning has sent shock waves through the scientific community because planning ahead is supposed to be a distinctly human trait and Santino is apparently in possession of it. Here’s the part that is like Planet Of The Apes. In the movie Charlton Heston is captured, collared, and confined by great apes who consider Heston “an animal”. When he tries to talk and show similar cognitive abilities to the apes their response, led by a close-minded orangutan named Dr. Zaius, is to silence him by threatening castration or a frontal lobotomy. All because they are deathly afraid of the obvious – that Heston thinks and feels the way they do. The implication is that if they admit this, their treatment of him is nothing short of immoral and they have to change.

This scenario was played out in real life in the case of Santino. The zoo’s response to his agitated behavior? Castration. They imagine this will make him more docile and less motivated to throw stones. It may work. But that is not the issue. It reminds me of the old, pre-Civil War diagnosis of "drapetomania" - the "psychiatric" disorder "possessed" by slaves who tried repeatedly to run away from their “owners”. Rather than listen to those who are imprisoned, we so often prefer to malign them, which is a good way of reducing the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.

The focus of attention on Santino is driven by the psychological traits he shares with us, and yet, the response of the human great apes is stunningly inconsistent with that fact. Like the apes in the movie, we avoid the obvious and try to “keep him quiet” with invasive procedures. There is no apparent attempt to use this discovery as the occasion for considering the fact that Santino might actually have a point. There is apparently no recognition of the fact that Santino is communicating loud and clear that he does not want to be in a zoo watched by unfamiliar people all day. Must he wear a sign? The author of the report , Mathias Osvath, in Current Biology (Vol 19, Issue 5, R190-R191, 10 March 2009) states that "These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way,". He adds that "It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events." Yet, apparently this discovery warrants a review of a scientific paper but not a review of how Santino is being treated.

The time has come for us to listen to these beings who are expressing their feelings about captivity and their experiences. They may not speak the words in English or some other human language but the message is obvious. We can, like the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” apes in the movie, choose to suppress the obvious with strong-arm tactics or we can choose the truly educated and enlightened path and listen to what Santino and his kin are telling us. The choice is ours.

At the end of the movie Dr. Zaius discovers a human doll that talks. It says’ “mama” and he knows the justification for his treatment of human apes is crumbling before him. Well, we have heard our “mama” in the form of Santino’s stone throwing. The question is whether we will answer our fellow great ape with consistency in thought and compassion or, as Dr. Zaius does in the end of the movie, blow up the mine and forever seal the truth and our fates.