Bekoff and Dawkins on animal consciousness

Here is another post that I originally made on a discussion thread in the Facebook group Reducing wild-animal suffering. It's in reply to two articles: (1) "Dawkins' Dangerous Idea: We Really Don't Know If Animals Are Conscious" by Marc Bekoff, and (2) "Convincing the Unconvinced That Animal Welfare Matters" by Marian Stamp Dawkins.

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Thanks for sharing the pieces by Bekoff and Dawkins. I admire both of those authors, and I can definitely see where both sides are coming from.

I think the most important distinction that needs to be made is between “certainty” in science and “certainty” in ethics. Dawkins is right that science should remain skeptical of animal consciousness and that we should seek out proof independent of existing assumptions. Scientists don't like to stamp a statement as "true" until they're really sure about it from lots of angles.

But while Dawkins is correct that we don't know "for certain" whether animals are conscious, this statement is misleading to many laypeople who assume that she must mean the odds are around 50%. I don't know what she thinks the odds actually are, but I would give above a 90% chance of chicken consciousness and above, say, 93% for pig consciousness. With odds like that, it's best to say that the case is proved or else the public will misunderstand. Many people are not motivated by less than absolute certainty, and I think Bekoff is right that emphasizing scientific doubt is going to hurt animals on average. (Just look at what talking about uncertainty does for the global-warming debate.)

Now, Dawkins is totally correct that we don't understand exactly why animals are conscious. Indeed, we don't even know why people are conscious. What exactly does being conscious allow you to do that you can't do if you're not conscious? As blindsight shows, you can walk and avoid objects without being conscious of them. And as Libet's famous free-will studies showed, you can decide to move your hand half a second before you become conscious of your choice. If we ourselves didn't experience our consciousness through our own minds, then we would definitely have scientific doubts about whether people are conscious, too.

There are lots of excellent studies demonstrating sophisticated, self-reflective behavior in animals that Bekoff and others take to imply consciousness, and indeed these are excellent pieces of evidence. However, they are not conclusive proof of consciousness because we can't even prove that humans are conscious using such tests at the present time. (In the future, once we really understand how consciousness works in the brain, we should be able to assess consciousness just by looking at the brain itself. But that is a long way off.)

So I think arguably the strongest reason we should believe animals are conscious is that they're close to us on the evolutionary tree, and their brain structures are remarkably similar. In "New evidence of animal consciousness" (2004), Donald R. Griffin and Gayle B. Speck note that "the search for neural correlates of consciousness has not found any consciousness-producing structure or process that is limited to human brains" (p. 1). And in "Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being" (2012), Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach comment:

Progress has been facilitated by the recognition that hedonic brain mechanisms are largely shared between humans and other mammals, allowing application of conclusions from animal studies to a better understanding of human pleasures. […] 

Some might be surprised by high similarity across species, or by substantial subcortical contributions, at least if one thinks of pleasure as uniquely human and as emerging only at the top of the brain. The neural similarity indicates an early phylogenetic appearance of neural circuits for pleasure and a conservation of those circuits, including deep brain circuits, in the elaboration of later species, including humans.

There must be dozens of other papers that could be quoted in a similar fashion. Based on this, a probability for mammal and bird consciousness as low as 50% is completely unreasonable, IMHO.

Now, what about the effort that Dawkins proposes: Making people care about animals for human-welfare reasons? If we could press a button to do this, I'd be in favor of it. But when we're parceling out our scarce resources for helping animals, I think this undertaking should go pretty low on the priority list. It's great if we can help animals in the short term in this way, but if we're going to prevent future humans from multiplying wild-animal suffering into the galaxy or simulating vast numbers of suffering sub-human minds to make a profit, we had better make sure our descendants actually care about animals. The situations that cause harm to animals in the future may well benefit humans at that point -- we have no idea.

Finally, I did like this statement from Dawkins, as quoted in Bekoff's article: " ... it is much, much better for animals if we remain skeptical and agnostic [about consciousness] ... Militantly agnostic if necessary, because this keeps alive the possibility that a large number of species have some sort of conscious experiences ... For all we know, many animals, not just the clever ones and not just the overtly emotional ones, also have conscious experiences." (p. 177) This is how I feel about insects. They easily may not be conscious (I'd give a ~55% probability that they are not), but we should actively consider the implications if they are conscious because of their great numbers. It's totally appropriate to talk about probabilities and expected values in the right context, but my complaint to Dawkins is that among the general public, the language of uncertainty makes people confused and less motivated.

More on Humane Insecticides from Jeff Lockwood

Below is an email conversation with Jeffrey Lockwood on the subject of humane insecticides. Thanks so much for the insights, Jeff!

[me:] What's your tentative rank order for the humaneness of insect-control methods?

Also, I'd like to support research on this question in more seriousness within a few years. How would you recommend beginning that process? Would I contact professors and grad students to see if one of them would be interested in writing a paper on the topic? (Maybe for an ethics journal or maybe a more science-based one.)

Suppose the effort got a little more traction. How would we then go about advocating for the use of humane insecticides? For example, imagine that the Humane Society got interested in the cause and wanted to run a campaign. What could they do? Maybe find and support farms willing to switch to the better methods? Ask schools to buy from those farms (similar to the current cage-free-egg campaigns)?

[Jeff:] As for a tentative rank order for the humaneness of insect control methods, that's a real challenge! But let me try a very 'soft' ranking:

Cultural control: Preventing insects from occupying a resource (e.g., habitat modification) seems the most humane approach as no beings are directly harmed (at least [when] this is possible).

Physical control: [... Some] forms of physical control would likely cause suffering (e.g., picking and crushing) but the duration would be relatively brief.

Biological control - predators: Death from predators is often relatively rapid, although this is not certain. Larger predators (e.g., birds or skunks) are rather more efficient in their killing than small predators (e.g., ants or beetles).

Chemical control - neurotoxins: Depending on the dose, it appears that death comes quickly. Of course, at low doses the individual may be rendered physiologically and behaviorally dysfunctional and prone to a slow death. It should also be noted that many non-insect species are likely to be intoxicated, and these non-target species would substantially lower the ranking of this approach if taken into account. [me: This assumes they're not better off dead. I think killing non-target organisms may be a bonus because their lives probably aren't worth living.]

Chemical control - growth regulators: The insect, in my observations, often dies very slowly in a protracted state of dysfunctionality during which the individual is highly susceptible to scavengers and small predators.

Biological control - pathogens: The type of pathogen matters a great deal. Many viruses, for example, don't appear to inflict substantial suffering. However, various fungi appear to work rather slowly and erode the capacity of the insect.

Biological control - parasites: As with pathogens, there are many different parasites. However, it does not appear that death is quick and the quality of life appears to slowly erode. It has been noted, however, that some parasitized insects appear to act normally for much of the period of parasitization.

These are really brainstormed rankings and I'd be very open to refutation of my simplistic rationales.

As for moving the discussion into a wider venue, I can offer a few ideas. It might make sense to begin with a symposium as part of a national meeting. Perhaps the Entomological Society of America would be an interesting venue. Or you might go with a more philosophical setting for the discussion. There are also some organizations that fund/host workshops -- and I can imagine that a 1-week meeting to gather people together to hash out ideas, argue about positions, and exchange perspectives could be extremely exciting. Some journals are open to proposals for "special issues" (Psyche and Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics come to mind), and you might also approach some academic publishers with this concept (this would be particularly viable following a symposium or workshop).

In terms of taking the concept into the realm of application, I would think that the Human[e] Society might be a fine organization. The concept of human[e] pest control/management is very intriguing. Of course, most people won't put a great deal of energy or thought into the matter. However, if there were alternatives that were no more (or even less) expensive AND more humane, then it could well matter to many people. In the best of all worlds, the Humane Society might provide a scoring or ranking system for methods and products (and even provide some explicit endorsement for consumers). The Freedom Foods label through the RSPCA would be one such model (perhaps insects could even be incorporated into the considerations for producers who seek this label). I suspect that some of the "what to do?" possibilities might make a most interesting session in a symposium or workshop.

Pain-free Animals?

The current Vegan Outreach newsletter contains a link to a New Scientist piece (as well as an unfortunate editorial) based on a fascinating article: "Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality has Stalled?" by Adam Shriver. The moral urgency of such a proposal seems to me obvious, so I was most interested in the discussion of its scientific plausibility.

Shriver presents two example proposals for what might be done. First, we might

create knockouts of other mammals (cows and pigs for starters) lacking the AC1 and AC8 enzymes. Interfering with the cAMP cycle in the brain reduces the affective dimension of chronic or persistent pain, rather than pain full stop, but this would still be an improvement over current circumstances. If we could eliminate the sensitization that occurs as a result of painful or traumatic experiences, the animals would still be better off than they are now.

Secondly,

Zhou-Feng Chen and colleagues searched the Allen Brain Atlas to find genes that were highly expressed in the ACC but not other areas of the brain [29]. One strong candidate was the peptide P311. The researchers created knockout mice lacking the expression of P311 and found that heat and mechanical sensitivity were normal in the animals. However, they then performed a conditioned place aversion test on the animals and found that the knockouts no longer demonstrated the conditioned place aversion caused by formalin injections, in stark contrast to control rats. Thus, at first glance, it appears that knocking out P311 in mice strongly diminishes the affective dimension of pain while keeping acute responses intact.

Furthermore, P311 is likely to play a similar role in all mammals (Chen, personal communication), so one presumably could engineer other mammals that have a reduced affective dimension of pain while maintaining the sensory dimension of pain.

Since I'm even more interested in wild-animal suffering than farm-animal suffering, in view of the vast difference in numbers of animals involved, my immediate question was whether similar techniques might one day be applicable there. Doing so is a lot trickier, because evolution produced the badness of pain for a reason. Shriver mentions this concern:

Since it seems likely that the affective dimension of pain played some role in determining the evolutionary fitness of organisms, we might question whether knockout livestock could really survive up through the point where they are normally slaughtered. However, it appears that the experimental rats were able to survive without complication at least in their cages (Chen, personal communication). This would be a good model for sows or veal calves who spend most of their lives confined in small pens where they can’t do much of anything that would injure or otherwise harm themselves.

Producing genetically fit wildlife without pain might require not just knocking out pain but replacing the "pain" - "pleasure" axis with a "less pleasure" - "more pleasure" axis, which could be much more difficult.

I mentioned that Shriver's proposal seems obviously valuable from my perspective, but unfortunately this isn't necessarily the case among the general public. As the New Scientist article notes:

[Alan] Goldberg also contends that public attitudes may make pain-free livestock a non-starter. He and colleague Renee Gardner conducted an online survey on the use of pain-free animals in research and found little public support, even among researchers who experiment on animals (Alternatives to Animal Testing and Experimentation, vol 14, p 145).

This underscores the importance of public outreach to change hearts and minds about wild-animal suffering and how it could be prevented.