Animal Consciousness - Paper 2

For many people, human beings come to mind when the topics of culture and learned tradition arise. Human beings are the most advanced species on Earth and there are a wide variety of culture and learned tradition spread across the planet. Many cannot define what culture and tradition are. In addition, many look into the vast space directly on top when the question arise if there are other sentient beings capable of having culture and tradition. Yet, there are evidences that nonhuman primates exhibit culture and learned tradition.

In the article “A Change of Heart About Animals”, Rifkin asserts that humans are treating animals in the most atrocious way, and he claims that in order for their lives to improve, we need to definitely adjust ours. He uses great amount of logos, and several experiments done with different animals and tries his best to closely relate animals to us, humans. Rifkin although, never inserts a call for action to this problem throughout his article. Instead, he puts the emphasis on the pathos of the argument. In the world we are living in today, there is about 8.7 million different living species. Whether they are land or marine animals, they do play a big role in our community such as being apart of the food pyramid, assisting handicapped people wherever they go, or being a transportation for people living on farms and fields. With this being said, the ranking of animals in our community has brought up a heated argument in connection to their rights and welfare. Eight legged, four legged, or two legged land or sea animals do not comprehend the concept of rights. If we, humans, give animals “rights”, we are basically inferring the fact that we are like animals, and they have the entitlement to share our rights. Although they don’t understand rights, the fact that many of these animals are being treated inhumanely is wrong and animal welfare should be ingrained into this community rather than the massive inhumane treatment.

In Chapter two of Moral, Believing Animals Christian Smith argues that human beings are moral animals because they are strong self-evaluators who inhabit morally based orders. In the next chapter, smith adds that humans are moral animals because they also believe. This ability to believe and act morally allows humans to stray away from our instinctive minds. In other words, it is apart of what makes us human. Smith finds that this way of viewing humans provides a better account of human religiousness. Religion is the manifestation of our capacity to be self-conscious. Smith uses Narrative morality writing to help explain his views on religion and human beings, which allow us to recognize our true moral capacity.

Anthropologist, Edward Tylor defines culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (McGrew, 1998). Other anthropological definitions refer to specific human nature of a culture centered on language, symbols, teaching and imitation (Humle and Newton-Fisher, 2013). Nonhuman primates are cultured and is passed from parent to offspring and is enforced throughout their lives. Various primates initially do the same thing, but carry out these tasks different per what they practice which would be a part of their culture. This research paper will explore specific evidence of culture in nonhuman primates and how it is transmitted.

Animal Intelligence Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. Psychologists have exploited this concept in many ways to try and determine whether non-human animals are capable of intelligence. From social learning it is logical to assume that, since non-human animals are able to both acquire and use new behaviours, they must be intelligent in some way. Heyes stated that there are 6 types of behaviour which suggest intelligence. These are imitation, self-recognition, social relationship formation, role-taking, deception and perspective taking.

The purpose of this paper is to explain anthropomorphism and its effect on children’s early learning about animals. The term anthropomorphism gives life-like or human characteristics to those who are not human such as an animal or an object. The author’s writing will inform those who are concerned about this current dilemma and their effects on the children’s early learning about animals as well as provide us with our next steps to ensure academic success for our youth. The proper development of these early young minds is the main purpose of this research and article.

In the article “A Change of Heart about Animals” Jeremy Rifkin uses scientific evidence to reason with us that “many of our fellow creatures are more like us than we had ever imagined”. Rifkin suggests that animals should be treated better and be provided with better living conditions. He uses Betty and Koko as examples that animals have higher intellectual abilities and emotions than we thought. Many scientists also argued that animals do not have an understanding of death or capable of grief, but Rifkin counteracts that argument by using elephants as evidence to show that they are capable of grief.

After reading Jeremy Rifkin’s article, “A Change of Heart about Animals”, I discovered more about animals than I had ever known before. As a former pet owner I know how much owners care for their pets and consider them to be a part of the family, almost like a child to them, so they are treated with kindness and are loved to the fullest. What I did not know was how intelligent animals actually are. Rifkin does a great job at expressing this by demonstrating to the audience facts that they had possibly not known or heard of before. For example, he describes how crows can make tools out of a wire, gorillas can learn sign language and have an average score on an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test, and how pigs can often feel lonely and go into depression.

If you argue that non-human primates DO NOT have culture, then how would you characterize the behavior that they exhibit? Its more than a biological instinct because it is not consistent between groups given the same stimulus. And where do we make the divide between tool use and social communication and culture that is uniquely human? For example, what kind of evidence do we have for the emergence of culture in the fossil record?

All children grow up under the influence of a similar style of learning. From a young age, we have been taught that knowledge comes from the understanding of textbooks, history, and algorithms. This is commonly known as the Western Tradition. Through this, we have been trained to think and respond a certain way to different events that occur throughout our lives; it’s very one-dimensional. I would agree with this, because up to this point in my life, I have not been taught to think any other way.

Exploring why culture among chimpanzees/bonobos and humans is not the same Can chimpanzees and bonobos really display characteristics of culture in the same way as humans do? To answer this question, a relatively good understanding of what similarities and differences can be seen between chimpanzees, bonobos and humans and how these similarities are relevant to culture is essential. Hence, this intriguing question will be discussed in this essay by first identifying the key features that collectively define or explain culture as a whole. It will also point out and explain different characteristics between the two genera with respect to culture. The significance of demonstrating culture via these key features in chimpanzees and bonobos will

When an animal is faced with a threat, several mechanisms are evoked in an attempt to

In the spring of 2011, students, professors, and community members met at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario for the 10th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies (CAS). The conference, “Thinking About Animals,” was co-hosted between the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) and Brock’s Department of Sociology. Conference participants covered a wide array of topics through panels and presentations that discussed the links between human and animal oppression/liberation, gender and meat consumption, postcolonial studies, animal liberation theory, abolitionist history, social attitudes and prejudice, veganism, and activist repression. There were also those which focused entirely on vivisection, farmed animals,

For the capuchins and chimpanzees, it’s a little more different. They seemed to not be very adaptable to any of the situations and out of the two the capuchins performed much better than the chimpanzees did but, yet it seemed to show that not all the primates were able to pick up the learning curve. It shows that cultural learning among the primates differs form humans because they might not retain all the necessary skills that were either learned or taught to them from the previous generation. It helps to understand that culture can be learned, taught, and shared from one generation to another and once an individual gets accumulated with the lifestyle and aspects of culture it will help them pass down to the next

Many have questioned the autonomy of animals and stuck by the theory that they lack consciousness. One of the first individuals to deny that animals had consciousnesses was Rene Descartes (1596-1650) Descartes’s philosophy was based of the ideologies of the time, in which the society he lived in was moving away from an Aristotelian conception of the world and toward a mechanistic