Do animals have rights?

Circus lore recalls tales of animals which have been taught to do arithmetic, or stomp their feet to indicate letters of the alphabet. But can animals really solve problems – can they use tools – can they think in the same way that we can? More importantly, do animals deserve the same rights as human beings?

Clearly Caligula’s horse was not able to function as a member of government. The emperor, we are told, despite being mad, bestowed this office on his horse to show that he had absolute power to do whatever he wanted. In the case of the apparently mathematically gifted circus beast - animals can be trained and rewarded to perform astonishing acts, but without awareness of their meaning. Commonly we tend to ascribe human features to animals when we believe we recognise behaviours in them which we ourselves posses – we anthropomorphise them. But it goes without saying that animals, however similar and despite shared characteristics, are not like us. However, knowing this is simply a starting point in the debate on animal rights. Science alone cannot tell us how to make the decision on this issue – it can, however, provide us with some of the information necessary to do so.

There are examples of animals exhibiting behaviour that we might tend to view as ‘human’ or ‘conscious’. A bird called the killdeer, for example pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from it’s nest and young. The bird will walk away from the nest with it’s wing in an awkward position, mimicking an injury, flapping about and chirping urgently. This behaviour, however, is genetically inherited – the bird does not logically reason and decide what strategy is best suited to the situation – it simply does so, as part of it’s response to a threat on it’s nest.

Yet animals do present other behaviours which appear to be very similar to humans – behaviours which seem to indicate not just reacting to a situation – programmed, without thought – but apparently making a choice. Martin Seligman began research in 1967 based on his interest in human depression. Seligman proposed that human beings and animals exhibit symptoms of depression because they have ‘learned’ to believe that their situation is helpless. His experiments involved dogs which were conditioned to associate a sound with a low voltage electric shock. Conventional thinking at the time was that animals (and people) responded to their environment and responded in a manner which enabled them to overcome negative situations. Some of Seligman’s experimental dogs were given the ability to escape the shock, while others were not. The dogs which were not provided with the ability to evade the shocks exhibited a different response at a later point to those that did. When confronted with the sound preceding the electric shock, they did nothing to avoid it: the animal had ‘learned’ that nothing it did mattered – it gave up trying. Seligman goes on to state that these animals went on to exhibit symptoms of clinical depression.

What other human-like attributes do animals possess? New Caledonia, a Pacific Ocean island 1200km east of Australia is home to the New Caledonian Crow (Corvus moneduloides). These crows exhibit another characteristic that we generally tend to look upon as being an indication of some sort of higher intelligence – the use of tools. Unique amongst all other bird species the New Caledonian crow uses at least four different types of tools to forage for food. Gavin Hunt of the University of Auckland in New Zealand has observed these crows not only using tools, but manufacturing them in complex staged processes using formed twigs and leaves.

While scientific research can reveal interesting animal behaviours as those cited above where does it leave the question of rights for non-humans?

How shall we use the animal data we have gathered?