Lists of named, famous, or important subjects/individuals and some facts about them

Ok, so given this semi-random list of 10 animals that I would like to investigate some more, there are, of course particularly famous, almost iconic animal subjects involved in the research. I am not sure about crows or pigeons, but so far, there are some very famous individuals that I think are interesting in that they stand as symbols of their species and attain a level of fame and individualism that begins to set them apart or indicates being treated much more as a human rather than a more "expendable" animal. It's actually really interesting when you look at the wikipedia articles dedicated to these animals too and the way that they differ in the format of the article. It seems like it almost indicates a hierarchy . . . Because someone like Kanzi has a side bar that says date of birth and relatives (see below), while Washoe has no side-bar box, but has a photo of her researcher giving her eulogy. Even to eulogize such a creature is sort of amazing. Meanwhile, the dolphin Akeakamai has a sort of biological taxonomy box rather. I could just be coincidence, but it's interesting to see that there might be some difficulty in classifying these outstanding animals.

Anyway, here are some notable examples of each of these animals that I have found so far.

1. great apes / monkeys
   
   • Kanzi Bonobo - don't know how his name was chosen. Still alive.
   • Koko Gorilla - her name is short for "Hanabiko" which, in Japanese, means "fireworks child" because she was born on the 4th of July. Still alive. Note also in this article that it talks about her keeping pets (which is "not unique" but interesting with her, and also that she (or the lab, rather) was sued for sexual harassment because she insisted upon some female workers showing her their breasts and the researcher encouraged them to do so. That's a whole different thing, I guess. But kind of amazing.
   • Washoe Chimpanzee - named for the county in Nevada where she was raised. She was 42 when she died.
   • Nim Chimpsky Obvious. He died at 26 from a heart attack.
2. dolphins / whales
   
   • Akeakamai name in Hawaiian means "science" or "lover of wisdom" ("ake" = love, "akamai" = widsom). Died of cancer in 2003.
3. rats
4. pigs
5. crows / ravens (corvids)
   
   • Betty whose name I don't think means anything at all. Though I don't know.
6. parrots
   
   • Alex African Grey Parrot. Name stands for Avian Language EXperiment (or Learning Experiment) Died at 31 from artherosclerosis.
7. dogs
   
   • Rico is a Border Collie shown to know almost 250 different words
8. elephants
   
   • Kosik Not much info on him yet.
   • Batyr Name is name is a Turkic word meaning The Dashing Equestrian, The Man of Courage or The Athlete. Basically the saddest story I have ever heard - He lived in a zoo in Kazakhstan, died because his zookeepers accidentally gave him an overdose of drugs, and he never saw or heard another elephant in his entire life ("He died in 1993 having never seen or heard another elephant.") (The claimed he could speak vocally using his trunk to make noises). On the upside, his mama's name was Palm. And that is loveliest name I have ever heard.
   • Happy, which almost sounds like a joke given the sad elephant before, but Happy might actually be Happy, and was one of three elephants tested using a mirror.
9. octopus (octopi?)
10. pigeons

Naming is vital here. Some of these things were called "projects" . . . like "Project Nim" and "Project Washoe" which has that X-files kind of ring to it. Or very scienc-y, detached. The naming of ALEX is that way too, even though in her book, Irene Pepperberg I think admits (or at least in that Moth story she does) that she had a very close personal relationship to ALEX as well. And then there are those like Koko - "fireworks child" which is so lovely and sweet and humane.


To me, there is an enormously interesting distinction between using their names and their species name. And it makes me wonder how I should title those "portraits" or series of paintings. I could name the pieces like portraits of the invidial animals, with their real name, or their life span, or maybe just as their species name. What a difference that simple distinction would make. Both are accurate names for the animals, given to them by us, but that makes a huge difference. Can I do a series of both - copies perhaps or prints? that are simply named differently. But the same animal or image? How can I accomplish this so that the real question of the artwork isn't what is there in the image necessarily, but is in the naming, the language, which to me is kind of what this whole thing is about?

General Anecdotes of Animal Intelligence

Pigs

“Other behaviors showcase pigs' ability to learn new behaviors. Using their snouts, pigs can even be taught to maneuver a modified joystick to move a cursor on a video monitor, as proven in research done at Penn State from 1996 to 1998 by Stanley Curtis, then professor of dairy and animal science and now an adjunct animal sciences professor at the University of Illinois.

For rewards of M&M's, Skittles or Reese's Pieces, the pigs moved the cursor over to a target, then used the cursor to distinguish among scribbles drawn by Curtis' grandchild. The pigs were shown one scribble, then a few seconds later shown the same scribble along with a second. They used the joystick and cursor to distinguish between the scribble they had seen before and the one they were seeing for the first time.

The pigs learned these tasks within 5 to 10 attempts, "very quickly," says Curtis. "As quickly as chimpanzees.""

From PSU Article

I'm also going to throw this quote in here too. “A PETA investigation found that workers at an Oklahoma farm were killing pigs by slamming the animals’ heads against the floor and beating them with a hammer.(34)” This, from PETA. Honestly?

If only he could talk: Language Studies

The idea of teaching animals language is so great, partly because it is really seductive to imagine being able to actually communicate with animals . . . like opening this door into their minds. To finally share a language so that we could ask each other things, know things about each other.

It was mentioned in that one review that studies of animal intelligence often get a lot of popular press (ALEX AND ME?), even to the point of exceeding their professional publication. I think this speaks to our very deep desire to communicate with animals, to believe that they have things going on in inside their minds, and even more importantly than to be able to communicate our wishes and feelings to them, to finally be able to find out what they are thinking. What pet owner doesn't want to know what their dog is thinking all day while they are gone at work. And if only we could ask them. I remember the David Sedaris story where he says that people were saying "If only the dog could talk" in the OJ Simpson trial (the Kato Calen? dog? I don't remember) and how, at the time, he thought, yes, if only it could! Let's ask it! or whatever. And the same about these worms that they sent up into space or on the the challenger or something. :) I think that's a great, wonderful example of the improbility of animals communicating with us actually sounding so appealing.

Dogs

Here is a relatively recent study involving dog language that sounds pretty great. I heard about this article on NPR, called Dog Prodigy Gives New Meaning to Language: Border Collie Quick to Learn and Remember New Words

"The research, reported in the current issue of Science, centers around canine prodigy Rico. The Border collie can recognize the names of more than 250 toys and fetch them on command.
To test Rico's learning ability, researchers with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology placed a new toy among seven familiar toys. When the owner asked Rico to fetch the new item, using a name the Border collie had never heard before, Rico correctly retrieved the new item seven out 10 times. Even more remarkable: Not only can Rico connect a new word with a new object on the first try, he can also remember the word when tested a month later.

"We know now that the dog can rapidly associate new words with new objects, which is just what children do right at the point that language takes off," says Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a Georgia State University researcher who works with great apes. "So the dog's on the border of very complex language ability."

These abilities seen in animals such as dogs, bonobos and orangutans, go against the theory that only humans have the capacity for language, and that it came from a genetic mutation in the past 200,000 years or so."

Pigs

Curtis hopes to teach a crude language to pigs by teaching them words for images and building a vocabulary. The objective is simple: build a better hog house. "If we're going to build a better piggery so that animals' needs and wants are being supported, then we need to know more about what they need and want," he says. Designing hog houses this way would be both humane and practical, he argues.

This "Curtis" refers to a researcher named Stanley Curtis, who actually teaches at UIUC. I haven't looked up to see if he has actually taught pigs a rudimentary language yet, but I'm pretty excited about this possibility.

From PSU Article

Though animals may be physically limited in their ability to produce language, perhaps their abilities to comprehend it are far less limited.

"It was shown, instead, that comprehension did not automatically flow from language production. The preeminence of comprehension in language development, only recently appreciated in the ape language field, has long been emphasized among those studying child language. Language comprehension by young children develops earlier than language production, and even into adulthood comprehension vocabularies exceed speaking vocabularies." From Language Learning which actually talks more specifically about dolphins but has a good general introduction.

Dolphins

This may be where dolphins come into the picture.

From reading the Language Learning article, it looks like dolphins seem to have some syntactic understanding as well as semantic (the author makes that argument) . . . that word order and sentence structure understood and can be manipulated. I wonder what Steven Pinker and those like him say about this kind of research. His deepest criticism of Savage-Rumbaugh's work was that simply understanding signs is not the same as possessing language, since language requires syntactic abilities as well. Of course, these dolphins, again, can't PRODUCE the same kind of language, but if they can understand it . . .

Kewalo Basin dolphin language studies. The work on dolphin language competencies by Louis Herman and colleagues at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu was begun in the mid-1970s and emphasized language comprehension from the start. These researchers, working principally with a bottlenosed dolphin named Akeakamai housed at the laboratory, constructed a sign language in which words were represented by the gestures of a person’s arms and hands. The words referred to objects in the dolphin’ habitat, to actions that could be taken to those objects, and to relationships that could be constructed between objects. There were also location words, left and right, expressed relative to the dolphin’s location, that were used to refer to a particular one of two objects having the same name, e.g., left hoop vs. right hoop. Syntactic rules, based on word order, governed how sequences of words could be arranged into sentences to extend meaning. The vocabulary of some 30 to 40 words, together with the word-order rules, allowed for many thousands of unique sentences to be constructed. The simplest sentences were instructions to the dolphin to take named actions to named objects. For example, a sequence of two gestures glossed as surfboard over directs the dolphin to leap over the surfboard, and a sequence of three gestures glossed as left Frisbee tail-touch directs the dolphin to touch the Frisbee on her left with her tail. More complex sentences required the dolphin to construct a relationship between two objects, such as taking one named object to another named object or placing one named object in or on another named object. To interpret relational sentences correctly, the dolphin had to take account of both word meaning and word order. For example, a sequence of three gestures glossed as person surfboard fetch tells the dolphin to bring the surfboard to the person (who is in the water), but surfboard person fetch, the same three gestures rearranged, requires that the person be carried to the surfboard. By incorporating left and right into these relational sentences, highly complex instructions could be generated. For example, the sequence of five gestures glossed as left basket right ball in asks the dolphin to place the ball on her right into the basket on her left. In contrast, the rearranged sequence right basket left ball in means the opposite, “put the ball on the left into the basket on the right.” The results published by Louis Herman, Douglas Richards, and James Wolz showed that the dolphin was proficient at interpreting these various types of sentences correctly, as evidenced by her ability to carry out the required instructions, including instructions new to her experience. These were the first published results showing convincingly an animal’s ability to process both semantic and syntactic information in interpreting language-like instructions. Semantics and syntax are considered core attributes of any human language.

There was also a study done with similar constructs involving a sea lion named Rocky, but it seemed like he was processing things differently. "Additionally, unlike the dolphin, the sea lion’s string of gestures were given discretely, each gesture followed by a pause during which the sea lion looked about to locate specified objects before being given the next gesture in the string. In contrast, gestural strings given to the dolphin Akeakamai were without pause, analogous to the spoken sentence in human language."

Anyway, they go one to further give some examples of evidence that semantics and syntactics are both being adequately understood:

Akeakamai’s knowledge of the grammar of the language. As a test of Akeakamai’s grammatical knowledge of the language she had been taught, Louis Herman, Stan Kuczaj, and Mark Holder constructed anomalous gestural sentences. These were sentences that violated the syntactic rules of the language or the semantic relations among words. The researchers then studied the dolphin’s spontaneous responses to these sentences. For example, the researchers compared the dolphin’s responses to three similar gestural sequences: person hoop fetch, person speaker fetch, and person speaker hoop fetch. The first sequence is a proper instruction; it violates no semantic or syntactic rule of the learned language. It directs the dolphin to bring the hoop to the person, which the dolphin does easily. The second sequence is a syntactically correct sequence but is a semantic anomaly inasmuch as it directs the dolphin to take the underwater speaker, firmly attached to the tank wall, to the person. The dolphin typically rejects sequences like this, by not initiating any action. The final sequence is a syntactic anomaly in that there is no sequential structure in the grammar of the language that provides for three object names within a sequence. However, embedded in the four-item anomaly are two semantically and syntactically correct three-item sequences, person hoop fetch and speaker hoop fetch. The dolphin in fact typically extracts one of these subsets and carries out the instruction implicit in that subset, by taking the hoop to the person or to the underwater speaker.

These different types of responses revealed a rather remarkable and intelligent analysis of the sequences. Thus, the dolphin did not terminate her response when an anomalous initial sequence such as person speaker was first detected. Instead, she continued to process the entire sequence, apparently searching backward and forward for proper grammatical structures as well as proper semantic relationships, until she found something she could act on, or not. This analytic type of sequence processing is part and parcel of sentence processing by human listeners.

And now for something kind of amazing that has to do with representation in a more abstract way, though it still relates to language.

As viewers, we understand this and often respond to the displayed content similarly to how we might respond to the real world. We of course understand that it is a representation, and not the real world. It appears, however, that an appreciation of television as a representation of the real world does not come easily to animals, even to apes. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh wrote in her book, Ape Language, that chimpanzees show at most a fleeting interest in television, and that from their behavior it was not possible to infer that they were seeing anything more than changing patterns or forms. Her own language -trained chimpanzee subjects, Sherman and Austin, only learned to attend to and interpret television scenes after months of exposure in the presence of human companions who reacted to the scenes by exclaiming or vocalizing at appropriate times. Louis Herman, Palmer Morrel-Samuels and Adam Pack tested whether the dolphin Akeakamai might respond appropriately to language instructions delivered by a trainer whose image was presented on a television screen. Akeakamai had never been exposed to television of any sort previously. Then, for the first time, the researchers simply placed a television monitor behind one of the underwater windows in the dolphin’s habitat and directed Akeakamai to swim down to the window. On arriving there she saw an image of the trainer on the screen. The trainer then proceeded to give Akeakamai instructions through the familiar gestural language. The dolphin watched and then turned and carried out the first instruction correctly and also responded correctly to 11 of 13 additional gestural instructions given her at that same testing session. In further tests, Akeakamai was able to respond accurately even to degraded images of the trainer, consisting, for example, of a pair of white hands moving about in black space. The overall results suggested that Akeakamai spontaneously processed the television displays as representations of the gestural language she had been exposed to live for many years previously.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear: Mirror Studies

I want to write an article called "Objects in Mirror are Closer than they appear" about the mirror studies, unless it's already been done . . . which as far as I can tell, has been used as a title for a lot of stuff but nothing actually relating to the mirror studies, self-consciousness, or relatedness of other species to humans.

Using the Wikipedia article Mirror Test as a starting point, I learned that the mirror test "is a measure of self-awareness developed by Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970."

According to this Wikipedia article, here is some information on animals that "pass" the mirror test.

Animals that have passed the mirror test include: all of the great apes (bonobos,[5] chimpanzees,[5][6] orangutans,[7] gorillas and humans), bottlenose dolphins,[5][8][9] orcas,[citation needed] elephants,[10] and European Magpies.[11] Initially, it was thought that gorillas did not pass the test, but there are now several well-documented reports of gorillas (such as Koko[12]) passing the test. In 1981, Epstein, Lanza and Skinner published a paper in the journal Science in which they argued that the pigeon also passes the mirror test.[13][14] Pigeons though could only detect the spots on their own body after they had been trained to and untrained pigeons have never been able to pass the mirror test.[15] However, magpies have been shown to pass the test by trying to remove a coloured sticker from underneath their beaks when shown it in a mirror.[16] Dogs, cats, and young human babies all fail the mirror test.[3][4] Humans tend to fail the mirror test until they are about 18 months old, or what psychoanalysts call the "mirror stage".[17]
[ . . . ]
Pigs are also able to pass a variation of the mirror test. 7 of the 8 pigs tested were able to find a bowl of food hidden behind a wall using a mirror. The eighth pig looked behind the mirror for the food. (Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information)

However, other sources seem to say that other animals have NOT passed the mirror test (keeping in mind that this is from 2006, so perhaps science has made major strides since then, or perhaps the definition of "passed" is somewhat different than I assume.)

Scientists have tested mirror self-recognition in a variety of animals other than humans and great apes, but invariably failed, with the exception of the bottlenose dolphin. "After the recent discovery that dolphins are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, elephants seemed the next logical species for testing," said Reiss. "Humans, great apes, dolphins and elephants, well known for their superior intelligence and complex social systems, are thought to possess the highest forms of empathy and altruism in the animal kingdom."
(First Evidence To Show Elephants, Like Humans, Apes And Dolphins, Recognize Themselves In Mirror

Dolphins

At any rate, more sources than not at least consent that dolphins do very well on this mirror test, as suggested by this paper, Evidence of self-awareness in the bottlenose dolphin, published in 1996. (It's from a book called "Self-awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives. " Edited by Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell, and Maria L. Boccia. which might prove to be interesting to look into someday.)

This chapter reports on the results of a series of studies utilizing a mirror to assess whether dolphins recognize contingent representations of themselves or use the mirror to examine an area of the body not otherwise visible that has been marked with a highly salient substance. We adapted the mirror mark test (Gallup, 1970) for use with the bottlenose dolphin. We employed several control conditions, including mirror without mark, no mirror and no mark, and first encounter between unfamiliar dolphins through a barrier. We also devised and conducted several new tests for self-recognition, tailored for dolphins rather than primates. These tests, which utilize self-view television and video playback, are summarized here. This chapter focuses on interpreting mirror-directed behavior (both marked and unmarked) by comparing it to the control data. We address the central question of whether the dolphins' mirror-directed behavior is social or self-examination. We also discuss the role of environmental, social, and individual influences on the test results.

Methods
Five dolphins, 6-14 years old, living at Sea Life Park, served as subjects of this study (Table 24.1). The groups of dolphins changed throughout the course of the research. The dolphins dwell in a two-tank complex (Figure 24.1). The laboratory has five underwater windows looking into the large tank. One window is a 1.2-m-diameter circle, which can be made into a large one-way mirror. Another window is 0.6 m x 0.6 m and houses a 20-in. Sony Trinitron color television that the dolphins can watch. Data were collected by videotaping the animals through the window or a one-way mirror with a Minolta S-VHS Series V-200 video camera. Notes on behavior were also recorded on an ongoing basis during testing. No food rewards were provided.
[ . . . ]
Mirror mark tests. All dolphins had some mirror exposure prior to their first mark test. The dolphins were not isolated during their mark tests, and sometimes more than one animal was marked at a time. All but one of the dolphins had multiple mark tests. Table 24.1 presents information regarding the hours of mirror exposure prior to each mark test, the body part marked, and other relevant information.
[ . . . ]
Unless noted otherwise, all animals were marked on their sides with approximately 3/4 oz of zinc oxide (Figure 24.2). Zinc oxide is a tactile as well as visual stimulus. (We could not find an appropriate stain without tactile stimulus.) Other stains used were gentian violet, a purple topical antiseptic, and ichthammol, a black antiseptic ointment. One subject, Itsi Bitsi, was sham marked (with the mirror present) with Vaseline six times prior to her first zinc oxide mark test. Mark locations were selected for their likelihood of being visible only with the aid of a mirror. Bottlenose dolphin eyes point laterally and cant forward and down. This creates a binocular field in front of and below the animal, with a blind area behind and above, where the marks were located.

[ . . . ]
Conclusion

No single test presented here proves self-recognition in bottlenose dolphins. The tests were developed mainly from primate research paradigms, and their limitations for interpretations of dolphin behavior are apparent. Nevertheless, the data taken together make a compelling case for self-recognition in this species. Four of five dolphins apparently examined their marks in a mirror; most brought objects to the mirror and played with them in front of it, even moving the object back when it drifted out of view; and most of the mirror-mode television tests designed to distinguish self-examination from social behavior suggested self-examination. Not only did dolphins attend to their mirror (or television) images less than 1% of the time as compared to 100% for real dolphins, but they engaged in different behavior with mirrors than they did with other dolphins. The results obtained in the experiments presented here are consistent with the hypothesis that these animals are using the mirror to examine themselves. More definitive results, however, will have to come from methodologies developed specifically for dolphins.

Elephants

Notes below are from an NPR interview: Self-Recognition in an Asian Elephant.

October 31, 2006
A study titled "Self-Recognition in an Asian Elephant" has found that elephants, like humans, chimpanzees, and dolphins, recognize themselves in mirrors. Robert Siegel talks with Joshua Plotnik, a gradate student in psychology at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center, who co-authored the study.

Mr. JOSHUA PLOTNIK (Emory University): [ . . . ]So we installed a huge mirror that was about eight feet by eight feet glued to a piece of plywood, encased in steel and then bolted to a wall so that the elephants have no way to really manipulate the mirror. We would then release the elephants into the yard where the mirror was located to see how they would react to the mirror image.
SIEGEL: And the star of the class, I gather, was a 35-year-old Asian elephant named Happy.
Mr. PLOTNIK: Yes, absolutely. We tested three elephants - Maxine, Patty, as you may know those are the Andrews Sisters, and Happy. Maxine and Patty and Happy, all three of them, approached the mirror and did not do social behavior, which is extremely unique. What you expect from an animal when they're first exposed to a mirror, as we see in chimpanzees, is immediate social behavior. As if they're thinking that mirror image is another animal.

Actually, almost all animals initially react to mirror images socially -- even human babies or humans who regain their sight later in life. ("At first, even animals that are capable of passing the mirror test respond as the orangutan described by Darwin.[4] In fact, young children and people who have been blind from birth but have their sight restored initially react as if their reflection in the mirror was another person." Wikipedia article citing "Stanley Coren. How dogs think. ISBN 0743222326. and Archer, John (1992). Ethology and Human Development. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0389209961.")

What we saw immediately was a lot of investigations. So smelling, touching of the mirror surface. Maxine and Patty both tried to actually climb the mirror wall to look up and over and behind it to see perhaps if there was another elephant there.

They then moved to what we call contingency testing behavior, which the best way to describe that is an animal moving its head in and out of mirror view as if it's asking itself, why is the animal in the mirror doing the same thing that I'm doing. And then the hallmark that we look for, the self-directed behaviors.

In humans, obviously, when you go to a mirror, you might try and pick food out of your teeth, pick a booger out of your nose, whatever you would do in front of a mirror. Chimpanzees do very similar things. Elephants, on the other hand, we weren't sure what to expect, but what we saw was one elephant, Maxine, for instance, grabbed her left ear and pulled it slowly towards the mirror as if she was inspecting it. And all three elephants did a lot of trunk in mouth displays. Taking their trunks and sticking them into their mouths.

SIEGEL: But it was Happy - you put an X on her forehead, I gather - and she did things that indicated that she knew that X was on her.

Mr. PLOTNIK: Actually we did this to all three elephants. We put a visible white face paint mark on one side of her head, and a sham mark - we call this a sham mark - and it's an invisible face mark on the other side of her head. And the reason you do this is you want to make sure that the elephant isn't touching the mark on its head just because it feels it or smells it.

And Happy in front of the mirror repeatedly touched the visible white X mark on her head more than 12 times.

SIEGEL: Now does this tell you that Happy is just a little sharper than Maxine and Patty or that there might be some elephants capable of this cognitive behavior and some not. What's the answer?

Mr. PLOTNIK: We have two hypotheses. One is that we've only tested three elephants here. In the chimpanzee literature, many, many chimpanzees have been tested and less than half of them seem to pass. So the idea is that when you demonstrate the capacity for mirror self-recognition in a species, that's the most important thing. That doesn't necessarily mean that every single individual will pass.

The other interesting idea is that chimpanzees and humans, for that matter, like to groom by taking things off their body. So you might have a piece of dirt on your arm that you would want to pick off. And elephants, they actually like to put things on their body. They're constantly dust bathing by throwing dirt on their backs and storing food on their backs.
So it's possible that although had Happy had initial interest in the mark on her face, Maxine and Patty just might have seen the mark as inconsequential.

In another article (First Evidence To Show Elephants, Like Humans, Apes And Dolphins, Recognize Themselves In Mirror), Plotnik describes the set-up and it's importance further:

Elephants have been tested in front of mirrors before, but previous studies used relatively small mirrors kept out of the elephants' reach," said Plotnik. "This study is the first to test the animals in front of a huge mirror they could touch, rub against and try to look behind.

Corvids - Magpies

Magpies (which are included in the family of Corvids that includes crows, ravens, rooks, etc.) have been shown to try and remove a sticker when shown their image in a mirror. A BBC News article about the study, called Meet the brains of the animal world , explains (as well as has some other very interesting information about tool use in corvids.)

And to test this, scientists use the Gallup mark test, where an animal is marked on a part of its body that it cannot normally see and is then shown its reflection in a mirror.

If it notices this mark and tries to remove it, then it suggests that the animal knows it is looking at itself and could possess some kind of self-awareness.
So far, only some species of primates have consistently passed this self-recognition test, although more recent studies suggest elephants and dolphins may also respond.
But last year, a German team revealed that magpies, marked with a coloured sticker under their beaks, tried to remove it when presented with a mirror - the first time a bird had been seen to pass this test.

Professor Onur Gunturkun, from Ruhr-University Bochum, one of the authors of the Plos paper, says: "It throws out the assumption that only higher mammals were capable of self-recognition."

Pigs

In the study presented by Animal Behaviour, seven out of eight pigs primed with a mirror found food reflected in the image. Naive pigs shown the same reflection looked behind the mirror for the food. The study abstract predicts, "The results may have some effects on the design of housing conditions for pigs and may lead to better pig welfare."

However, don't think pigs are the next Darwinian link to humans -- researchers cannot yet say whether the animals realize the pig in the mirror is itself, a finding of self-awareness and advanced intelligence that species like apes and dolphins have passed.

From LA Times article.

And, from another article about the same study:

Mirror usage has been taken to indicate some degree of awareness in animals. Can pigs, Sus scrofa, obtain information from a mirror? When put in a pen with a mirror in it, young pigs made movements while apparently looking at their image. After 5 h spent with a mirror, the pigs were shown a familiar food bowl, visible in the mirror but hidden behind a solid barrier. Seven out of eight pigs found the food bowl in a mean of 23 s by going away from the mirror and around the barrier. Naïve pigs shown the same looked behind the mirror. The pigs were not locating the food bowl by odour, did not have a preference for the area where the food bowl was and did not go to that area when the food bowl was visible elsewhere. To use information from a mirror and find a food bowl, each pig must have observed features of its surroundings, remembered these and its own actions, deduced relationships among observed and remembered features and acted accordingly.

(From Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information)

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Criticisms

Perhaps even more interesting than the results of the mirror test are criticisms of its validity. According to Wikipedia:

There is some debate as to the value and interpretation of results of the mirror test.[3][verification needed] While this test has been extensively conducted on primates, there is debate as to the value of the test as applied to animals who rely primarily on senses other than vision.[3][verification needed] Adaptations of the mirror test have been made in other modalities, such as scent. For instance, biologist Marc Bekoff developed a paradigm using dog urine for testing self-awareness in canines.[3][4] Proponents[who?] of the hard problem of consciousness claim that the mirror test only demonstrates that some animals possess a particular cognitive capacity for modeling their environment, but not for the presence of phenomenal consciousness per se.[citation needed] Some critics, such as philosopher Stuart Smith, maintain that it does not establish the existence of self-awareness of an independent character in animals whose self-awareness is solely a product of external experience.[citation needed] Gallup's mirror test has also been criticized as logically invalid because negative results are uninterpretable. Prosopagnosiacs, for example, may fail the test despite having the ability to report self awareness.

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Visual notes, connecting this to art or something like that

On a visual note, I read this article about how humans don't actually understand how mirrors work (Humans Do Not Understand Mirror Reflections, Say Researchers) -- that, in studies, humans expect to see themselves in mirrors before they are on an even plane with the mirror, and gauge that their head is roughly life-size when a property of mirrors is that the mirror plane is always 1/2 way between the object and the image of the object, meaning the object is always 1/2 of life size. This property is sort of interesting to me, because if I were to make a 1/2 size, reverse image of one of the animals in a painting or drawing, that would reference mirrors without being so direct as to make two parallel images or put two paintings next to one another, etc.

The idea of mirror studies is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One is that, in the abstract, mirrors are about representation, about that ability to see something as a representation of YOU and recognize that it is NOT you. And for someone interested in representational work, in the act of trying to create facsimiles of real things, this is interesting to me.

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Several weeks/months later (December 2, 2010, to be exact), Adam F. emailed a link to Jacob to a story in Scientific American called Kids (and Animals) Who Fail Classic Mirror Tests May Still Have Sense of Self talking about some of the flaws of the mirror test. It brings up familiar things like the false-negative issue, and has some familiar names like a researcher at Emory who worked with Joshua Plotnick on the elephant tests. What was new to me in this article was that, apparently, not all humans pass the mirror test . . . and in many non-western cultures, children won't respond the way we expect them to up until the age of 6, or even much older. The article goes on to theorize about possible cultural reasons for this rather than the assumption, of course, that some people don't have self-awareness.

They had another example of sort of a corollary in animals: "Gorillas are another good example: for many years, nobody thought gorillas could pass the mark test. Turns out, the test was just very uncomfortable for them. Eye contact is a thorny social issue for gorillas, often leading to fights, several researchers said. More than that, gorillas are easily embarrassed, says Robert Mitchell, foundation professor of psychology at Eastern Kentucky University. Instead of messing with the mark in front of the mirror, they would sometimes go away, hide in a corner, and wipe the mark off there. Gorillas got what was going on, they just didn't respond the way we thought they should."

"Where do pigs fall in a scale of animal intelligence? #4."

Something I find particularly interesting is the general agreement by average people (somewhat cross-culturally, actually) about which animals are considered intelligent. I also think its ridiculous and fantastic that we feel the need to rank them. I found bunches of websites with rankings of the top 10 or 15 smartest animals on the planet (not including humans). Though the idea of ranking them is a bit reductive, I kind of like these lists as a starting point for a series of work that looks at animal intelligence. So, based on a number of sources combined by however I feel like it, here are the animals that I think I should do paintings of.

The Most "Intelligent Animals" in no particular order (even though they are in order), based on general feelings, as compiled by me

1. great apes / monkeys
2. dolphins / whales
3. crows / ravens (corvids)
4. rats
5. pigs
6. parrots
7. dogs
8. elephants
9. octopus (octopi?)
10. pigeons

I didn't think of octopuses before I started sifting through these lists. So far as I can tell, octopi make the list on the sole fact that they can open jars, and apparently jar-opening is a sign of cleverness. Could it be that the octopus is considered so smart because it is just an enormous head with arms attached? Just a thought.

Pigeons also came up a lot, though I can't help but wonder if that is just a result of the fact that they have been used for a LOT of studies (they are the rats of the air, they say, so maybe they are the lab-rats of the air too) and therefore there is a lot of data for pigeons and not other animals.

Cows made somebody's list (?) . . . because standing around idly chomping all day long and extreme apathy is a good indicator of a rich mental life? Also, this one jumping spider made another list and I'm not even sure spiders have brains.

Language Studies

Anyway, I'm also interested in how many of these creatures have had language studies done on them (or how many show strong capacities for language) since the relationship between language and how we think about these animals is important to me, as well as the fact that we have, in the past, tried to use linquistic aptitudes as a distinguishing factor between humans and everyone else. (Steven Pinker, who I think looks a lot like Paul Cadmus' favorite nude model and life-partner. Just saying.)

Mirror Experiments

Another running thread are mirror experiments, which are probably done on a lot of animals, but which seem to have the potential to indicate certain kinds of mental modeling that might relate to consciousness or a sense of self (like the chimps with the red dot on their foreheads, for example.) So far, I have heard about studies with promising results for pigeons, chimps, and dolphins, but I'd like to look into those more specifically. There is one with pigs too, but it shows them being able to use a mirror to find food, but not necessarily evidence of self-identification. I think incorporating that would be good for these paintings.

Tool Use

Tool use seems to be another recurring factor in these experiments and another popular way of distinguishing humans from animals. So far, I have read mention of elephants, octopuses, dolphins, and maybe pigs for this.

Anyway, my plan is to start compiling some of this stuff so that I can try and thread them together within the paintings. We shall see.

Animal Intelligence / Animal Cognition

I was listening to a Moth Podcast of Irene Pepperberg telling the story of her 20-odd years of research with her parrot named Alex. Among other things, she told some incredible anecdotes about the ways in which Alex totally surprised them in what he was able to put together on his own, including offering a phonic spelling of "N-U-T" before they actually taught him letters in order to express his desire for a nut. Anyway, Irene Pepperberg and Alex had a lot of coverage in the popular press and have several books out, so I feel like they themselves (Alex actually died) felt too close to the circus or sideshow thing at times . . . The point is, the story got me really excited about animal cognition research. :)

I began where most things begin--with a perusal of a Wikipedia page on the topic. I read the Wikipedia: Animal Cognition article, which turned out to be incredibly exciting and gave me a whole list of other things to look into. I wrote down a few quotes from the article, though, because some of which are just great as they are.

For instance, the mirror test: might be a fascinating thing to do with an artwork too . . .

"The best known research technique in this area is the mirror test devised by Gordon G. Gallup, in which an animal's skin is marked in some way while it is asleep or sedated, and it is then allowed to see its reflection in a mirror; if the animal spontaneously directs grooming behavior towards the mark, that is taken as an indication that it is aware of itself. Self-awareness, by this criterion, has been reported for chimpanzees and also for other great apes, the European Magpie,[7] some cetaceans and a solitary elephant, but not for monkeys. The mirror test has attracted controversy among some researchers because it is entirely focused on vision, the primary sense in humans, while other species rely more heavily on other senses such as the olfactory sense in dogs.[citation needed]"

"Some animals, including great apes, crows, dolphins, dogs, elephants, cats, pigs, rats, and parrots are still typically thought by laypeople as intelligent in ways that some other species of animal are not. For example, crows are attributed with human-like intelligence in the folklore of many cultures. A number of recent survey studies have demonstrated the consistency of these rankings between people in a given culture and indeed to a considerable extent across cultures.[16]"

This short note here sounds really promising to me. What if I do portraits or pieces of species representatives of each of these typically-thought-by-laypeople-as-intelligent animals? It gives purpose to the series of animals I choose.

"One question that can be asked coherently is how far different species are intelligent in the same ways as humans are, i.e., are their cognitive processes similar to ours. Not surprisingly, our closest biological relatives, the great apes, tend to do best on such an assessment. Among the birds, corvids and parrots have typically been found to perform well."

"Young chimpanzees have outperformed human college students in tasks requiring remembering numbers." That is SO GREAT.

Anyway, the Wikipedia article led me to look up some further examples of successful (and unsuccessful) attempts of training or teaching animals, especially this great story of Washoe the Chimpanzee, who learned sign-language. Apparently, she could reliably use 250 different signs, showed ability to combine signs in novel and meaningful ways, and did so best when she learned without external/classical-conditioning sort of motivation (rewards) though that's how they started teaching her. I LOVE the way these learning sessions were described.

"Washoe then tended to bring her arms together again, at which point the Gardners would reward her with more tickling. Over time, the Gardners required Washoe to be more precise with her arm and hand movements in order to elicit more tickling."

"In addition, they stopped the tickle rewards during instruction because these generally resulted in laughing breakdowns."

This relates really nicely with a TED Talk: Susan Savage-Rumbaugh on apes. She shows some AMAZING video of Bonobos learning things like making and putting out fires (which is really great given the whole "man is human because he can make fire" or something) but also how they have learned various communication skills like the comprehension of conversational English and the ability to draw pictograms/symbols (SYMBOLS!) that represent words or ideas. !! Ok, so there is a lot there to look at, but one thing she, or maybe Jane Goodall because I can't remember where I actually heard this, or maybe just in another Wikipedia article, they were saying that one reason why some of the language acquisition experiments didn't replicate well was because teaching language through classical conditioning is not an effective way of learning languages, and that it has been found that chimps/apes etc. learn languages far more effectively when they simply WANT to be able to communicate with individuals in their lives and learn through mimicry and a desire to participate. If that made sense. That seems to be the method Savage-Rimbaugh has taken, and the results are astounding.

This whole idea of animal cognition is fascinating, because it seems both really threatening to human's status as somehow separate or suprerior to other creatures, ut also really endearing and reassuring to know we are not alone. . . that there are billions more thinking and feeling living things on this planet than we perhaps previously gave credit to. it offers to demonstrate so much about what DOES make us human, then, or what factors have pushed us to develop in the strange and complex way that we have.

Jacob did point out during a discussion of all of this that perhaps the science is not as straightforward as it appears, and it is hard to really prove or quantify the kinds of progress in animal intelligence that is being posited. (Neither of us could figure out how they could reliably prove that pigeons out-perform humans on the Monty-Hall probability problem that quite intelligent humans notoriously get wrong or do not even comprehend.) A few days before, Jacob and I also had a discussion about whether or not animals other than humans can be said to commit suicide. According to Katie Gordon, their resident suicide researcher, humans are the only animals that take their own lives. But certainly you hear plenty of anecdotes of animals that, some more actively than others, find ways to stop living. The question of how conscious this decision is has real implications for the consciousness of animals (even though there are some who would argue that proving consciousness in humans is still pretty tricky.) I was reminded very recently of the documentary "The Cove" about dolphins in which the former dolphin trainer claims that one of the dolphins that played Flipper just swam into his arms and purposefully stopped breathing (since breathing is a conscious decision for dolphins) and therefore killed herself out of depression. Questions of these dividing lines - "Humans are the only animals that . . . " kill themselves, draw, have complex language, have sex for fun, kill each other for reasons other than food, use tools, etc. (all of which, I think, can be strongly undermined) is really interesting. I mean, I think our attempts to delineate our own uniqueness is a fascinating compulsion. It also seems really vital if we are to keep existing in the same kind of relationship to animals as we currently have (a system of "dominion" over the animals, right to eat them, own them, put them in zoos, etc.)

So much for now.

Some quotes and my thoughts regarding "Although of course you end up becoming yourself"

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A road trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky

I am thrilled to see that this book is almost entirely just long paragraphs of unrehearsed DFW conversation, I'm sure edited down though it reads as though it was unedited at all, and that everything he said was just transcribed from the tape recorder into this book. I am going to buy it, because the sheer number of the post-it notes that I have stuck to almost every page of my library copy means I probably should.

I can't help but read what he says as direct advice about how to be a creative person - "w/r/t" painting or writing or, at the risk of being too sincere and therefore sounding like a sap, the rest of my life. Anyway, he talks like this is a conversation, he talks about writing as a conversation with the reader, and I'm going to converse back.

38
"Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff -- this is gonna get very abstract -- but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So the reader feels less lonely."

This is exactly how I feel about you, DFW. That is exactly what I felt when I read you for the first time (and to a different degree, Dave Eggers but that's probably a true statement most of the time.) I have been trying to articulate that's how you made me feel since I read you, and there you go, saying it yourself.

You say "the way it feels on your nerve endings." Yes. That is exactly right too. That's what it is about you that is so true most the time -- especially the sad stuff that I can't even read. It feels way too much like how these things really feel.

41
"What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit--to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. . . . It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop . . . and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person."

Again, you have described what it is that you do so perfectly well. People keep describing you as an unusually awake person, a very aware person (probably to the point of too much self-awareness, or self-conscious self-awareness which I of course find so appealing). You DO make me feel smarter for having read what you say. You let me IN on the insights somehow. And all I wish I could do is be more AWAKE all the time. And I think the few times when I have felt connected to other human beings, and therefore alive by that connection, was when I felt like they and I were both equally perceiving what was going on around. Like, we are on pace with one another. People who make me feel smart and funny when I talk with them because we both get the jokes at the same time, both find the same things interesting or funny.

62
"'Cause see, by this time, my ego's all invested in writing, right? It's the only thing that I've gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted."

FOOD PELLETS FROM THE UNIVERSE.

71
"Because a good book as to teach a reader how to read it." Were you the first one to say this? Who said this?
Later
"You teach the reader that he's way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you're dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you're the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think-- and I'm not saying I'm the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we're smart. And that there's stuff that TV and movies--although they're great at certain things --cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, you know, to get these other kinds of art. And I think you can see it in the visual arts, I think you can see it in music."

I get the feeling that if I could live like this all the time, I'd be a better person. This is what I mean by that comment before about you possibly giving advice on how to live, as grandiose as that seems.

72
"There's a thing in Lester Bang's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, about certain music giving you an erection of the hart. And that term really resonates for me. "The Balloon" gave me an erection of the heart. ["The Balloon", a Donald Barthelme short story.] For me a fair amount of aesthetic experience is -- is erotic. And I think a certain amount of it has to do with this weird kind of intimacy with the person who made it."

I love that you get this - that you feel this way - and that it doesn't sound insane to say it. I have always had what amounts to crushes on people for this kind of thing, and always felt a little weird for it, for feeling this attraction to someone because of what they made or wrote or said. Like I am imagining too much between me, a nobody, unseen, at the receiving end of the work, and this person.

73
"I'll bet, I mean, I don't know you, but I'll bet there'll come a time when you realize you're always gonna have about as much success as you need, and that's fine."

I love this. I love that way of seeing success. Seems awfully wise.

94
"I always feel that when I really impose my will on something, the universe is gonna punish me."

160
"I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school or college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion. And believe that civic movements or political activism are either a farce or some way to get pwoer for the people who are in control of it. Or who just . . . who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific. ironists and pokers of holes. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just, it doesn't seem to me that there's just a whole lot else."

Pokers of holes.

174
"I mean, it was all -- and I was so arrogant. I would have this defense, that when the professors would say they didn't like the stuff, I would think it was because they didn't understand the grand conceptual schemes I'd laid on it. But I was not willing to realize that I'd laid the grand conceptual schemes on a substance that was essentially, "How will this enable me to show off in way X?""

180
"Well, then I can tell you, from authoritative firsthand experience that there's nothing like--there's no keen, exquisite pleasure that corresponds with the keen exquisite pain of envying somebody older."

It's the same way with a crush, with "unrequited" love, I think. It is, to use your word, devastating to desire someone that doesn't desire you back, but the feeling of being desired by someone else in no way matches it in intensity.

215
"I doubt I'm all that different from other like you know, seriously overeducated, intellectual kids. I really had this -- I think I really had a very difficult time believing that anybody else, um, was at all like me. Or was anywhere as smart as me.
And please, if you put this in, make it clear that I'm talking about really how I was, like twelve, fifteen years ago. That I mean I, that I'm real embarrassed by that, you know? And I'm sayig it only 'cause I pray that other people will, like--that other people will have been the same way."

273
"And I remember in college, al ot of even the experimental stuff I was excited by, I was excited by because I found reproduced in the book certain feelings, or ways of thinking or perceptions that I had and the relief of knowing that I wasn't the only one, you know? Who felt this way. Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else. I remember that early on in Gravity's Rainbow and really getting an enormous charge out of it."

I looked for this at the library, by the way, and it is like an enormous book. I don't think I'm ready to commit to reading this just now. But someday I will. :) Because all this stuff is like laying out a curriculum, I feel like, so that I can see what it is that you saw when you read this stuff and understand this history and context that makes what you say so true. If that makes any sense at all. And sounds weird.

275
"I think with writing it's really feeling that, their brain voice for a while becomes your brain voice. And that you feel -- the Vulcan Mind Meld perhaps is a better analogy.
That just, they feel intimate with you, in a way. Or that you'd be, not just that you'd be somebody that id' be great to be friends with, but that they are your friend. And you know, one reason why I've got an unlisted number, and why I really try to hold down on the mail, is that, is that stuff is difficult to deal with. Because I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings. But it's also a delusion, and it's kind of an invasive one. But then I realize that I set up it by doing just what I did, and so it all gets very . . ."

293
"I think if you dedicate yourself to anything, um, one facet of that is that it makes you very very selfish. And that when you want to work, you're going to work. And you end up using people. Wanting people around when you want them around, but then sending them away. And you just can't afford to be that concerned about their feelings. And it's a fairly serious problem in my life. Because, I mean, I would like to have children. But I also think that sort of life that I live is a pretty selfish life. And it's a pretty impulsive life. And you know, I know there's writers I admire who have children. And i know there's some way to do it. I worry about it. I don't know that I want to say anything much more about it-- I mean, there's jokes about getting laid on tour and stuff."

305
"It'd be very interesting to talk to you in a few years. My own experience is that that's not so. That the more people think that you're really good, um, actually the stronger the fear of being a fraud is."

On Readings in Animal Cognitions: The Myth of Anthropomorphism

And so begins some notes and responses from a book called Readings in Animal Cognition. This particular article, Chapter 1, is called The Myth of Anthropomorphism by John Andrew Fisher.

First of all, as I read this, I am beginning to crystalize part of why I think the exploration of animal intelligence is so interesting, and of course it selfishly has to do with what it, by proxy, says about human intelligence. I was listening to Radiolab in the car the other day (I don't remember which one. . . maybe the Animal Minds one? Maybe Emergence?) and they were talking about a case where a woman lost the ability to see motion, so when she is pouring tea, for example, she gets a still image of the tea cup and then like 15 seconds later, gets another image (my friend said his psychology professor described this condition like a strobe light, which I think is a fantastic illustration of it). Anyway, they made the point that rare cases of . . . . disability isn't the right word . . . but you get the idea . . . like this show, for instance, how amazing healthy people's ability to have coordinated thoughts or coordinated perception really is. In a larger way, I think these fascinating cases where something doesn't work sheds light on how amazing it is that those things do work in the rest of us, and end up teaching us a lot about what capacities we take for granted in "normal" brains or people. And I think, in the same way, comparative study of animal intelligence, animal emotions, and animal minds offers a lot of insight into the things about human capacities that we take for granted or don't understand.

That ramble out of the way, here are some quotes from the actual article:

First, the author makes the distinction between forms of anthropomorphism, namely, the "Imaginative" version (like when we create talking rabbits, for instance) and "Interpretive" in which we use behaviors or other indicators and interpret the origins of those behaviors to be similar to human thoughts/feelings etc. His contention is that the "imaginative" version is not particularly dangerous or bad and is properly a part of fiction, but that many people refer to interpretive anthropomorphism in a derogatory way (imply or outright state that all anthropomorphism of this kind is a "categorical" mistake and shouldn't be done.) This paper actually just addresses that issue, of whether or not it is a categorical mistake, and basically supports the idea that dismissing all anthropomorphism is too broad and not necessarily automatically wrong. He points out that there might be situational mistakes (like mis-interpreting a monkey showing it's teeth as anger when it really was a friendly greeting) which might be wrong, but not categorically inappropriate to that species, since both are likely actually possible, and there might be categorical mistakes for certain species (attributing emotions to an earthworm might be categorically wrong, but not so when talking about a dolphin).

Fisher does allow, though, that this idea of imaginative anthropomorphism may undermine our inferred or interpretive anthropomorphism.

Anthropormorphic Inference Has Suspect Origins
10
Children invest dolls and other objects with personalities as part of normal cognitive development. They see personalities everywhere. Even when we grow up, we still easily see human forms in clouds, cracks, cars, etc.; indeed, much visual art is based on our ability to see human forms in vague lines and shapes. Clearly, humans have a capacity to perceive objects as having personalities. It is not just a capacity to imagine; it is a sort of imaginative representation of a perceived object. As children, we often accept these representations as real.

further down the page, he states that in order to have these imaginative representations, people don't actually have to believe that these things really ARE persons.

Even children know that raisins are not really like the California Raisins, and that trains are not alive. Spectators are guilty of anthropomorphism only when they accept that the false nearness to humans is possible. When dogs talk in The Plague Dogs this is anthropomorphic, but viewers are not taken in. In Bambi most of the other details of forest life, in contrast to The Plague Dogs, are entirely misrepresented. . . .

I point that out because I have these pieces with the Bambi backgrounds in them, and that is a random but interesting connection point to me. Further down the page, it says

Our general capacity to understand stuch anthropomorphic representations makes suspect the way we understand real animal behavior. What is at stake here is the validity of commonsense explanations of animals and their behavior. . . . Just as we can easily imagine Bambi on screen as a preadolescent human child, so when we see a real deer there probably is a certain amount of imagination going on in how we relate to and understand the deer.

On 13, it talks about "projecting" ourselves onto animals (the possible "sin" of projecting), though it makes the argument that projecting our own thoughts onto another is basically how we understand or form empathy with other human beings, so maybe that isn't an all-together inappropriate response (plus, we don't really project our OWN personal ideas onto other humans or animals because we are capable of making allowances for things like gender, age, etc. so why not species differences?)

And that's all for notes on this chapter. Generally, it seems like a really helpful basis for further discussions on anthropomorphism and might be useful in a classroom someday too . .. hmm.

On The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee

A faculty member recommended a book to me this spring called "The Lives of Animals", which it turns out is kind of an important book. The first half of the book is a semi-fictional story of a famous, elderly author who is invited to speak on any topic that she wants and, instead of talking about her poetry, talks about animals and ethics and why we should all be vegetarian. This is weirdly modeled after real-life lecture series at [Ivy-league school name here]. The trick is that, while the character gets to say all kinds of true or real things to defend vegetarianism, Coetzee doesn't really have to stand behind the more controversial statements (like when she equates the eating of meat to the genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust). Anyway, the second half of the book is a real-life philosopher, poet, primatologist, and maybe a few others, who write essay responses to the fictional story at the beginning. Peter Singer even goes so far as to make a fictional story about a Princeton philosopher who is asked to respond to a fictional lecture . . . META!!!! Anyway, I took some notes and overall it was a very interesting book and one that got me thinking more, even if it was at times a bit over the top with the fictional conceits.

54
"Animals are not believers in ecology. Even the ethnobiologists do not make that claim. Even the ethnobiologits do not say tha the ant sacrifices its life to perpetuate the species. What they say is subtly different: the ant dies and the fucntion of its death is the perpetuation of the species. The species-life is a force which acts through the individual but which the individual is incapable of understanding. In that sense the idea is innate, and the ant is run by the idea as a computer is run by a program."

Earlier on the page, Elizabeth Costello (the character in the book) says

"The irony is a terrible one. An ecological philosphy that tells us to live side by side with other creatures justifies itself by apealing to an idea, an idea of a higher order than any living creature. An idea, finally --and this is the crushing twist to the irony--whcih no creature except Man is capable of understanding. Every creature fights for its own, individual life . . . "

Kafka's "Red Peter" story is mentioned and maybe I should read it.

"The children's film Babe, about an intelligent and sensitive pig who learns to herd sheep, begins with a scene in a factory shed that directly evokes both German expressionist film and the specter of the Nazi death camps." Marjorie Garber - talking about the comparison that the Costello woman makes to the holocaust and how she imagines that maybe the whole world is engaged in a crime of "stupefying proportions" that we all sort of ignore, like peole did to the Nazi death camps. Hmm.

100
Wendy Doniger

"The belief that animal are like us in some essential way is the source of the enduring and widespread myth of a magic time or place or person that erases the boundary between humans and animals. The place is like the Looking-Glass forest where things have no names, where Alice could walk with her arms around the neck of a fawn. The list of people who live at peace among the animals would include Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the many mythical children who are raised as cubs by a pack of animals, like Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan, like Pecos Bill (suckled by a puma) and Davy Crockett (raised among mountain lions). T.H. White, translator of medieval bestiary, imagined the young King Arthur's education by Merlin the magician as taking place among ants and geese and owls and badgers. This myth is very different from the mythologies of bestiality, which imagine a very different sort of intimacy) though the two intersect uncomfortably in the image of 'lying down with' animals, literally sleeping with animals.) Our myths general do not define animals as those with whom we do not have sex (though the president's elegant wife, Oliva Gerrard, favors this distinction.)"

She also talks earlier about

"The argument that humans (but not animals) are created in the image of god is often use in the West to justify cruelty to animals, but most mythologies assume that animals, rather thanhumans, are the image of god--which may be a reason to eat them." 100

And later, she quotes Xenophanes, Greek philospher "If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses."

[Sorry, I get excited whenever there is a connection to drawing. And also horse gods. ]

Finally, there is a really wonderful essay by Barbara Smuts about companionship with animals where she talks specifically about her relationship to her very smart dog that she has taught all kinds of lovely things to. I actually copied the entire article and saved it to my computer, so I can read it someday when I get my very own dog and want a humane and reasonable way of thinking about my companionship with it. :)