Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism

Edited by:
  • Lorraine Daston &
  • Gregg Mitman
Columbia University Press: 2005. 240 pp. $49.50, £32 | ISBN: 0-231-13038-4

When Konrad Lorenz began his studies of animal behaviour in the 1930s, thereby marking the beginnings of ethology as a science, he related the ways of his jackdaws to the ways of people and used highly personal and anthropocentric language. Then, from around the middle of the twentieth century, with the onset of behaviourism, any assumption that animals share the thoughts, feelings or motivations of humans began to be called anthropomorphism. It became a pejorative term applied to the ideas of anyone who dared to believe that animals were capable of conscious thought.

Over the past decades, with the expansion of knowledge about the behaviour of humans and animals, as well as an increased understanding of evolutionary theory, psychologists and philosophers have joined ethologists in research into the minds of animals. This research, known as cognitive ethology, has resulted in many investigations into consciousness, cognition, self-awareness and intelligence, as well as on whether animals feel pain, anger, fear or love, or have a theory of mind. In this context, the title of philosopher Thomas Nagel's essay “What is it like to be a bat?” (in Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press, 1979) has been much quoted and paraphrased in the ethological literature, including this book.

With cognitive ethology has come the general realization that anthropomorphism does not necessarily disrupt scientific observation but can support the continuity between humans and animals. A strong supporter of this view is Frans de Waal, who proposes the term ‘anthropodenial’ for the rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals (The Ape and the Sushi Master, Basic Books, 2001).

On the other hand, there are still those who maintain that anthropomorphism is a distraction from scientific rigour. Over half a century, J. S. Kennedy never wavered from his published view that “if the study of animal behaviour is to mature as a science, the process of liberation from the delusions of anthropomorphism must go on” (The New Anthropomorphism, Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Rotating photographs of bats turns our perceptions about them upside-down. Credit: T. FLACH/GETTY IMAGES

All these points are cited and discussed in the nine eclectic essays in Thinking with Animals, many of which begin with a sentence such as “Anthropomorphism has long been considered a bad word in science”. However, as the somewhat contentious title suggests, the main theme of the book is not a further discussion of the now rather jaded arguments for or against the humanizing of animals in science. Instead, it examines the actual practice of anthropomorphism in a wide variety of case studies.

One of the most impressive of these shows how taking an anthropocentric attitude to animals and treating them as individuals can have a dramatic effect on attitudes to animal conservation. In a fascinating account, Gregg Mitman outlines the management of elephants in Kenya. In the 1960s, when ‘hard’ science ruled, thousands of elephants were killed in order to keep the population within what was considered to be the carrying capacity of Kenya's national parks and reserves. Then, in the 1970s, came the work of Iain Douglas-Hamilton, followed by many others, to make the public aware of the social life of elephant families. This new perspective led directly to the promotion of the elephant as an endangered species and the banning of the ivory trade.

An essay by the film-maker Sarita Siegel describes how she made a documentary on the work of Anne Russon with orang-utan orphans. This demonstrates the importance for conservation of cooperation between the media and biologists with attitudes that, although they are anthropomorphic, are based on sound science.

The other seven essays are on widely different topics, from Wendy Doniger on zoomorphism in Indian Sanskrit texts to Paul White on the experimental animal in Victorian Britain. Cheryce Kramer discusses the ways in which Tim Flach manipulates his photographs to change our perceptions of animals: for example, his photos of bats are printed so that the animals appear to be standing upright, rather than hanging down, so they look like standing people. Sandra Mitchell asks: “What is the fate of anthropomorphism in contemporary science?” and argues that evidence is difficult to obtain, either way, for whether there are cognitive similarities between humans and animals. James Serpell writes about how thinking of animal companions in human terms is responsible for many of the benefits that their owners derive from them, such as the apparent love and loyalty of dogs. For the dogs, however, anthropomorphic intervention such as the docking of tails cannot be condoned, he argues.

Thinking with Animals is an unusual book that will surely join the growing literature on consciousness, animal cognition and the continuity between human and animal minds.