Jonathan Balcombe
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Edition: UK US AU Sign in Beta About us Subscribe This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out more here Search News US World Sports Comment Culture Business Money Environment Science Travel Tech Media Life & style Data News Science My bright idea Series: My bright idea Previous | Next | Index Jonathan Balcombe: 'Stop being beastly Share 1 to hens' Tweet 0 Animal behaviour scientist Jonathan Balcombe says that our 0 treatment of animals remains medieval despite a flood of studies shedding light on how they experience the world Sharre 0 Email James Randerson The Observer, Saturday 24 April 2010 Jump to comments (13) Article history Science On Science Animal behaviour Most viewed Latest World news Last 24 hours Animal welfare 1. The 'science of dating' and why it Series should make you My bright idea angry More from My bright idea on 2. MPs deliver their damning verdict: Homeopathy is useless and unethical Science Animal behaviour 3. Vegetarians more likely to think they are unhealthy, study finds World news 4. Golden Meaning: 55 graphic artists reveal the Animal welfare maths of the golden ratio More features Jonathan Balcombe: 'Sentience is the bedrock of ethics.' Photograph: Katherine 5. Internet trolls are also real-life trolls Rose More interviews More most viewed Chickens recognise human beauty, starlings can be pessimistic and elephants grieve for their fallen comrades: these are the perhaps surprising claims of Dr Jonathan Balcombe, an independent animal Today's best video behaviour research scientist. In a new book, he argues that a flood of studies of species ranging from minnows to monkeys adds up to a revolution in our understanding of the way other animals experience the world. "Just 30 years ago, it was scientific heresy to ascribe such emotions as delight, boredom or joy to a non-human," he writes in Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals (Palgrave Macmillan). "[But now] researchers have found that there is more thought and feeling in animals than humans have ever imagined." For Balcombe, who was born in the UK and now lives on the east coast of the States, this new understanding leads to radical conclusions. How Oscars host Ellen DeGeneres took star- So the idea that chickens have an aesthetic sense, for instance... studded snap we should pay attention to this because it seems to have A photograph of Oscars 2014 ceremony host Ellen profound implications for the way in which we treat animals. DeGeneres alongside a dozen celebrities became the most retweeted photograph ever For much of the 20th century, it was taboo to ask questions about what animals think and what they feel. That's changed; now we have a spate Speed riding: a cross of studies of phenomena that show that animals are, in all the important between freestyle skiing and paragliding ways, sentient in the manner that we are. They may not lead the same Runs at Les Arcs in the sorts of lives that we have, but they feel pleasure and pain just as Alps and the Ranch Ski intensely. They have just as acute emotional experiences as we do – Resort in Colorado there are studies showing that there are real inner lives to these animals. Oscars 2014: highlights converted by Web2PDFConvert.com What does this say about our relationship to animals? The paradox is highlights 12 Years a Slave wins that as our knowledge of animals increases, our treatment of them falls best picture at the 86th further behind because we still live according to a might-makes-right Academy Awards but strategy, which is the kind of thinking that justified colonialism and Alfonso Cuarón's sci-fi slavery. Unfortunately, our treatment of animals remains pretty much drama Gravity dominates the field with seven medieval. Oscars The real price of a cup Could you clarify this point about sentience? of Tetley tea How poverty-pay on tea Sentience is the capacity for feeling things, usually pleasures and pains estates in Assam fuels – but it's a very broad concept, ranging from grief to optimism, from a modern slave trade positive to negative feelings. The key is that it's the bedrock of ethics: humans are moral beings, what the philosophers would call moral 223 comments agents, who are able to make moral decisions, and sentience is what makes those moral systems. It's what makes a human life important – it's what makes murder, ultimately, a terrible crime. It's because you've On the Guardian today deprived the individual of a future life. Given that animals are acutely sentient in the important ways – I'm not talking about building computers or reading books – we need to expand our moral circle to include them. In a study titled "Chickens prefer beautiful humans", human faces were photographed and digitised, so they could be presented to undergraduates, who then rated them according to attractiveness. The male faces were rated by female students and vice versa. They came up with a gradation of the most and least attractive. Then chickens were presented with the same faces and strikingly, the chickens' preferences in binary choices, for whatever reason, showed a 98 per cent overlap with the humans' ratings. Environment Snake eats crocodile in Queensland lake It doesn't necessarily mean that the chickens found those faces more attractive – though that's what the authors seem to suggest. What meaning that has in a chicken's world I don't know. But what it does say to me is that they're very perceptive about cues and those perceptions are very similar to ours in terms of aesthetics. In your book you write: "Why should chickens find us beautiful at all? Today in the US we kill and cause suffering to more chickens than there are human beings on the entire planet." Surely there's a danger of taking individual studies and over-interpreting them, reading too much into them. This particular study had six chickens in it: to go from the preferences they exhibited to an World news idea about beauty, isn't that a bit of a leap? Ukraine crisis: 'facts on the ground' are In the time it took you to ask that question, about 3,500 chickens were 'deeply troubling,' Obama says – live slaughtered in the US, so that gives an idea of the scale of the killing of these particular animals. Some biologists would call them the most successful animals on earth because there are so many of them now, but I would call them the least successful because the vast majority lead such short, miserable lives. If you look at it from a population outcome, it's a very different outcome than if you look at it as individuals, but it's individuals who are sentient. But just because chickens rate humans in the same way as humans do in this particular study that doesn't mean their sentience is the same as ours, and I certainly wouldn't claim that. Although I wouldn't necessarily World news claim that they're less sensitive to the pain of a broken wing than we are to the pain of a broken arm: that can be debated. That is accessible to Ukraine crisis: US-Europe rifts science. But what the study does say – and this is just one study of many surfacing as Putin tightens Crimea grip – is that chickens have lives that matter. And this gets to the heart of some of the cognitive and emotional studies that I'm trying to bring to light: animals don't merely live in the moment. They have lives, moods and dispositions. They really have a welfare in the richest sense of the term. That means we have to look hard and reconsider the current relationship we have with them. People tend to see faces in clouds or hear voices in draughty buildings; we're very good at anthropomorphising our surroundings. Whether what we now believe that animals experience is really the same thing as human emotions is a very Comment is free open question, isn't it? Don't listen to Obama's Ukraine critics: Here's an example of an emotional study that's based on rigorous he's not 'losing' – and it's not his fight science. It's a study of the chacma baboon. These particular populations have been studied in Botswana for 30 years by the same scientists, so you have long-term observational and experimental studies with animals in their own milieu. It's known that for women who lose an infant, it's a terrible, traumatic, sad event. It's known that they grieve, naturally, and that grief is reflected physiologically by an increase of glucocorticoid converted by Web2PDFConvert.com hormones in their blood for a month or more. These baboons show a similar pattern of behaviour; if a baboon mother in the Okavango Delta in Botswana loses her baby, the scientists are able to measure the hormone levels in her blood in a very non-invasive way. They don't have to take a blood sample, they simply keep an eye out and when the Film female defecates they shout: "Oh, Lucy just shat, go get that!" and they Oscars 2014: critics give Ellen analyse the faeces. DeGeneres mixed reviews This shows that their glucocorticoid levels also go up for about a month. And the levels of their closest associates, of the female baboons which they relate to and have friendships with, also go up: there's an osmotic effect. Again in parallel with humans; humans rally round, support each other, increase our social networks.