Animals: have they been thinking what we’ve been thinking all along?

Scientists have issued a declaration that animals should be considered as conscious beings – and even bees can play like us

Bees are helpful for agriculture because of their habit of pollination. But perhaps they are smarted than that.

If you give bees a little ball, they will roll it around, especially when they are young. They will, for want of a better word, play with it.

If you show some fish species a mirror, they will first attack it but then, when that fails, do odd things like swim upside down to see if their reflection follows. They recognise themselves. And if you make crayfish anxious, recent research shows that they can alleviate the feelings with benzodiazepines. Why would you take mind-altering drugs if there is no mind to alter?

Sydney Seafood Market tour guide Alex Stollznow with a Southern Rock Lob. Can they, like their close relative the crayfish, alleviate anxiety with benzodiazepines? Picture: AAP Image/Jane Dempster

This, according to a new declaration by leading philosophers and animal behaviourists, is precisely the point. It is time, they argue, to extend the same courtesy to animals that we already extend to fellow humans: the presumption of consciousness.

“You’ve got all these behaviours where in the human case we would very naturally think that this was the sort of behaviour that consciousness enables,” said Jonathan Birch, from the London School of Economics. So maybe the simplest answer, he argues, is that that’s precisely what is going on.

He is one of the organisers of what he calls The New York Declaration.

After decades in which studies of the internal lives of animals were considered unscientific, the past years have brought a profusion of research pointing in a similar direction, a conference at New York University heard.

“Ten years ago, this was a very, very nascent field. The first journal dedicated to the topic, Animal Sentience, had not even been founded. Now, there’s a critical mass of people working on it,” Associate Professor Birch said.

Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher, once argued that we often confuse intelligence and sentience. “The question is not, ‘can they reason?’,” he said, “nor ‘can they talk?’ but, ‘can they suffer?’ ”

Answering the third question is a lot harder than the first two. We can never know for certain that an animal is conscious but the same is true for fellow humans. In mammals and birds, said Professor Birch, the evidence was pretty strong that they have conscious experience. From the experiments showing that crows can adaptively problem-solve, recognise people and even report their own experiences, to the work demonstrating that, say, cows enjoy problem-solving, it is of course possible to construct explanations for their actions that do not require the animals having conscious experience. But, many animal behaviourists argue, it is a lot simpler to assume that they do, just as we would with humans.

The authors of the declaration, signed by 38 global experts including Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at Sussex University, and Kristin Andrews, a professor of animal minds research at York University in Toronto, say that new research is providing evidence of consciousness in even our distant evolutionary cousins.

A squid caught in Moreton Bay. “In the case of octopuses and cuttlefish and things like that, it is primarily behavioural evidence,” says Professor Jonathan Birch.

“In the case of octopuses and cuttlefish and things like that, it is primarily behavioural evidence. But it’s behavioural evidence pointing to remarkable abilities that no one really thought were there, to do with simulating the future, remembering specific events from the past,” Professor Birch said.

He particularly likes the experiments involving the bees. “They will roll the balls even when there’s no reward, as if just enjoying the experience,” he said.

Why, though? Why would this aspect of cognition be shared by different species? What is the point of being conscious at all? “There’s still a lot of disagreement about what exactly it does for us,” Professor Birch said. “There’s a range of suggestions – that it gives us the ability to locate ourselves in time, to plan for the future, to remember specific events from our past, to make flexible decisions and learn in very sophisticated ways about the world around us.”

Whatever the scientific reason consciousness exists, accepting its likely existence in other animals inevitably involves ethical questions. This, say the signatories, is one reason why they are making a statement now. “When there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal,” the declaration concludes, “it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

THE TIMES