Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Reflections on Redecorating Nature Book

This book has its pluses and minuses, if I could have given it a 3.5 stars, that would have been my choice.

On the one hand is a very interesting exploration of the differing points of view in the scientific world concerning the issue of animal cognition. Specifically - do animals think and feel? And; if they do, how should we create experiments which prove that this is so?

So much of the 'evidence' is ancecdotal, which is to say the stories of someone who says a particular animal did something which 'proved' to that individual that animal do think. But anecdotal evidence has not traditionally been a respected source for proof of anything in the scientific world. What scientists look for is evidence which is recorded from the observations of accredited scientists, and these observations can be seen again and again under the same conditions (that is to say, the observations are 'repeatable').

But the author posits some questions such as, what if animals in a lab tend to react differently than animals in the wild because their natural environment is removed from their senses? One example of this would be the experiments which were intended to prove that animals are self-aware, by placing a sticky paper dot on their forehead, with a mirror nearby. If the animal notices the dot, and touches their own forehead, then this would - presumably - prove that the animal has an awareness of itself as an individual, i.e. it is self aware.

But is this a valid test for an animal whose primary sense is not vision, but it's sense of smell? Or touch? Are we testing from a bias toward human; or even primate, bias?

What if a given animal reacts differently from their peers; as we humans do from day to day and even moment to moment, and this individual reaction would thereby impact the testing sample? Or what if different individual animals react differently from one day to the next, depending on their 'mood' or other factors not known to us. How does this skew the potential results of an experiment?

These are all fascinating and thought-provoking questions. But in the forward, the author says, "It is a book for scientists and nonscientists alike." I didn't find this quiet true. I am a well educated and well read person, but I found myself reaching for the dictionary and writing notes in order to decipher sentences such as this:

[Referring to the scientist Jacques Loeb] "Although he believed that consciousness was an emergent property of higher organisms, he argued that all animal behavior could be explained nonteleologically in terms of tropisms." (Page 51 of the paperback edition). Even though the essays are relatively short, I found myself having to set the book aside frequently, and rereading sections, just to be sure that I was comprehending fully what I was reading.

In short, the concepts are stimulating, but this is far from a quick read. If my interest - as a lay person - in animal cognition was not so strong, I probably wouldn't have finished this book.