The following column in the Daily Mail opens the door for letters on any animal issues. Please write. The Daily Mail takes letters at letters@dailymail.co.uk

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DAILY MAIL (London)
November 1, 2006 Wednesday
DO ANIMALS DESERVE HUMAN RIGHTS, TOO?
BY MICHAEL HANLON -- SCIENCE EDITOR

AS RESEARCH SHOWS ELEPHANTS SHARE SOME HUMAN TRAITS .

ARE WE alone? Is human intelligence all that there is? No, this is not a question about space aliens but about the creatures with which we share the planet: our fellow animals. The question of animal intelligence -- and animal sentience, the possession of feelings and perception, which is a related but separate issue -- has vexed mankind for millennia. Because of our unique relationship with the animal world, it is something we have tended to sweep under the carpet.

These are, after all, the beings we keep in farms and kill for food, prod and poke in the name of medical progress, hunt, skin, stuff and hang upon our walls. So experiments such as the remarkable one reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences raise a lot of uncomfortable questions. Three Asian elephants, Happy, Maxine and Patty, who live at the Bronx Zoo in New York, 'passed' a classic test which is designed to see if a creature possesses self-awareness.

The test is quite simple and has been used on a number of species with varied -- and interesting -- results. Basically, you use a mirror to find out if the animal recognises its own reflection. By painting a spot or cross on the animal's forehead, as was done with the elephants, you can see how the creature reacts when it stares into the looking-glass. All three elephants behaved in ways suggesting they realised the 'animal in the glass' was themselves. They poked their trunks into their mouths and watched the reflection in fascination. One -- Happy -- passed the spot test: she tried to wipe the mark off her face with her trunk after seeing it in the mirror. This suggests, say the scientists, that the elephant can join a small elite of species that have true self-awareness. 'The social complexity of the elephant,' said Joshua Plotnik, one of the scientists behind the study, 'its well-known altruistic behaviour and, of course, its huge brain made the elephant a logical candidate species for testing in front of a mirror.'

The 'mirror test' was invented by a scientist called Gordon Gallup in 1970. It is considered to be the best-available marker of whether a species shows true 'selfawareness', the key property of sentience which can be defined, loosely, as a conscious feelreligiousing of self as separate from the world around. So far, apart from humans, the great apes -- chimps, bonobos, orang-utans and at least one gorilla -- have passed the test, as have dolphins and, possibly, pigeons. Dogs fail every time, as do cats and most monkeys, although one species, the capuchin, reacts in an intermediate way, suggesting some awareness that the monkey in the mirror might possibly be itself.

Of course, plenty of animals, such as budgerigars, are fascinated by mirrors, but the key difference here is that they do not seem to realise that the reflection is of themselves. So what does this prove? Is it really meaningful to talk about, say, a chimp being 'self-aware' and a dog not so? Does this mean that we should consider the 'lower animals' as only semi- conscious at best, zombies at worst? Until quite recently, the answer given by most scientists would have been a definite 'yes'. It has been something of a taboo among scientists to suggest animals have mental lives at all.

This thinking stretches back a long way. Aristotle denied the power of thought to animals, asserting that they are capable only of appetite and sensation, and furthermore that all nonhuman creatures are there for the service of mankind. This became a prevailing view in Western thought until surprisingly recently (although in other cultures the idea that animals were sentient and had 'souls' was commonplace). The 17th- century French philosopher Rene Descartes considered animals to be mere automata, organic machines which could have no more mental life than a clock. In the 20th century, the behaviourists, an extreme school of psychology, maintained that all animals were essentially unthinking machines -- even humans. This mechanistic thinking influenced the way many scientists have thought about animal minds ever since.

But there is a problem with this. It might be hard to 'look into the mind' of an ape or an elephant, but empirical evidence suggests these animals possess a keen intelligence. We now know, for instance, that many, many species are capable of making tools. Chimps can use sticks to fish for termites, and even crows, no bird-brains it seems, have been shown to fashion complex hooks and other tools from pieces of wire, or drop nuts on busy roads, using cars to crack them. If they can do many of the things that we can do, then it seems illogical to maintain the great divide between man and animal.

But intelligence does not mean that an animal is sentient. The computer upon which I am writing this article is 'intelligent' in the sense that it is capable of performing amazing feats of calculation and data manipulation. But it is no more sentient, no more conscious, than a housebrick. And yet despite this, despite the denials by philosophers and leaders (who suggest that animals are part of man's dominion on Earth), there has always been the sneaking suspicion that animals, irrespective of their IQ, do have minds something like ours. This was tacitly accepted long before the modern notion of 'animal rights' took hold. In the Middle Ages, it was surprisingly common for animals to be put on trial, in proper courts, for 'crimes' committed against people and property. In 1494, a French pig was tried and hanged for biting an infant, a trial paradoxically supported by the same Christian establishment that was supposed to be maintaining that a profound divide existed between man and beast.

Anyone who has ever owned a dog will be able to tell you that these animals are self-aware, whether they pass the 'mirror test' or not. Canines, cats and many other species, including rats, ferrets and pigs, show distinctive abilities and behaviour strongly suggestive of an inner mental life that might not be much like ours, yet is present nonetheless. I have watched mountain gorillas peering at their own reflections in a pond, poking the water with their fingers and literally falling about at the funny shapes that result. These were no automata.

Of course, the growing scientific awareness that animals -- a majority of mammal species, some birds and perhaps even a handful of invertebrates such as the octopus -- have some sort of mental life raises profound ethical questions. If we were to conclude that animals were conscious entities capable of full self-awareness, would we be able, morally, to kill them for food or hurt them in experiments? If we did, would this be, ethically, any different to cannibalism?

Some philosophers, such as the Australian Peter Singer, have argued that the great divide between man and the beasts is essentially artificial. He points out that a healthy adult chimpanzee is certainly more intelligent and probably more self-aware than, say, a human newborn infant or a person suffering from severe dementia. Yet the human is given rights, in all circumstances and by all societies, which are denied to the ape. This amounts, he says, to no more than arbitrary DNA discrimination. So what do we do? We cannot know what it is like to be an ape, or an elephant or a crow. Experiments suggest that these animals, and perhaps many others -- including species we eat and experiment upon -- have active mental lives much like ours.

Is treating them the way that we do morally indefensible? Perhaps. Will we continue to do so anyway? Certainly. The only thing we can do is to avoid unnecessary cruelty and bear in mind that the more scientists discover about the minds of our fellow creatures, the harder the moral questions we are going to have to face.

Dear Friends and Supporters of VeggieGlobal, Looking-Glass, the SCRuF Appeal and other campaigns on the sites.

This is just a brief mail to give you some important latest developments.

The Sunday Mirror are supposed to be doing an article on Kim Cooling's rescues and the SCRuF appeal. In typical media style, they have chosen just one of the recently rescued pups (Lizzy) to "spin" the story, but as you can see on the SCRuF site, tiny Lizzy is just one aspect of the rescues and the costly involvement.  We hope the Mirror's article covers all the necessary angles and provides the vital information that could effectively help the project.

By the way, Vince the pup continues to do well in Little Creek Kennels. Apparently they call him Disco Pants because he is so lively!

Ban the Bang successfully (and I must emphasise - peacefully) put a stop to a huge firework display that was going to be held inside an Animal Park (yes, you heard that right ... a firework display in an animal park - we know it sounds absurd!) The potentially libellous manner in which the Park announced its cancellation and their subsequent press statements leaves a lot to be desired as you can read here:

http://www.looking-glass.co.uk/campaigns/banthebang-Q4-1-2006-update.htm

Since then we have been investigating other animal and wildlife parks and protected areas which also (incredibly) run firework displays, corporate and wedding functions are also held in some of these places - which often also means fireworks. Over the next year we are cautiously confident that with enough diplomatic pressure on these places (which often claim that the welfare of their animals is of utmost importance), such an irresponsible activity will become a thing of the past.

On a sadder note, I'd like to also point you to a powerful, exclusive article I put on our news site just last night. Please note that due to its upsetting content the pictures are on a separate page, so that you can easily avoid the distressing visual content if you so wish.

http://www.looking-glass.co.uk/news/library2006/2006-11-kim-cooling.htm

Thank you as always for interest and help with our work.

To see the latest SCRuF updates please click the following link

http://www.veggieglobal.com/scruf/index.htm

With Kind Regards

John O'Donnell

www.looking-glass.co.uk

www.veggieglobal.com