Marc Bekoff

There is a lot in this book. Too much to capture in a brief review but much of the main idea behind the chapters is linked to the idea "that arguments for evolutionary continuity...... the idea that the differences between species are differences in degree rather than differences in kind--are being supported for a wide variety of cognitive and emotional capacities in diverse species. We believe that there isn't a moral gap between humans and other animals", There is very much an evolutionary underpinning to the ideas. I've tried to capture some of the more interesting (to me) arguments in the following by some selective quotes...whilst realising that they can't give justice to all the nuances of the original.
"There is tremendous interest in the emotional and cognitive lives of animals, and there are daily revelations that surprise and even confound some of our assumptions about what animals are like. For example, fish are able to infer their own relative social status by observing dominance interactions among other fish. Fish also have been observed to display unique personalities. We know too that birds plan future meals and that their ability to make and use tools often surpasses that of chimpanzees. Rodents can use a rake-like tool to retrieve food that is out of reach. Dogs classify and categorize photographs the same way humans do; chimpanzees know what other chimpanzees can see, and show better memory in computer games than do humans; animals from magpies to otters to elephants grieve for their young; and mice feel empathy. For anyone who follows scientific literature or popular media on animal behavior it's obvious that we're learning a phenomenal amount".
"The innumerable situations in which we see individual animals working together aren't merely veneers of cooperation, fairness, and trust, but the real thing. Cooperation, fairness, and justice have to be factored into the evolutionary equation in order to understand the evolution of social behaviour in diverse species."
"Norms of behaviour will vary across species. Even within species there might be variations in how norms of behavior are understood and expressed. For example, what counts as "right" in one wolf pack might not be exactly the same as in another wolf pack because of the idiosyncrasies of individual personalities and the social nerworks "
"The heart of wild justice is the suite of moral behaviors that fall into three rough "clusters" (groups of related behaviors that share some family resemblances) that we've used as a fulcrum to organize our mate-rial: the cooperation cluster (including altruism, reciprocity, honesty, and trust), the empathy cluster (including sympathy, compassion, grief, and consolation), and the justice cluster (including sharing, equity, fair play, and forgiveness)."
"Although stories are appealing to many people, some researchers view tales of this sort as nothing more than just-so stories. It's true that anecdotes provide a kind of data that is qualitatively different from the hard numbers of empirical studies, and they cannot substitute for rigorous scientific research. But the use of stories, or "narrative ethology," is an important part of the science of animal behaviour." I guess we have to take their word for this but maybe try to retain some objectivity.
"Because animal research has for decades been performed in the service of human needs and desires, there is a habitual inclination to generalize to humans from what we learn about animals. Yet this habit of mind can lead to loose and sloppy science. Each species is unique, and even among a given species there will be individual variation. We cannot safely generalize in the realm of morality from animal behavior to human behavior or, while we're at it, from human behavior to animal behavior. This is why we constantly repeat the mantra "morality is species-specific."
"we now know that the emotional lives of animals are every bit as rich as our own. There's a lot of interest in animal emotion and lots of new research.......The tendency to focus on "negative" emotions such as pain, fear, and aggression has given way to an increased interest in "positive" emotions such as love, joy, and pleasure, and to complex emotional experiences such as empathy, grief, and forgiveness." I found it interesting that slime moulds were excluded as showing altruism if indeed slime molds were behaving altruistically, we wouldn't want to cal it moral altruism, because slime moulds don't meet our threshold requirements. Presumably, slime molds do not have rich emotional lives, nor do they have cognitive skills such as reading intentions or making predictions about the future. (There seem to be a lot of unproven assumptions here.
We believe that a sense of fairness or justice may function in chimpanzee society, and in a broad range of other animal societies as well.
"What we have done in this book is to give a descriptive account of moral behaviour in animals. On the other hand, our definition of morality does have normative elements. In other words, we say some concrete things about what constitutes moral as opposed to immoral behavior. Moral behavior is other-regarding and prosocial; it is behavior that promotes harmonious co-existence by avoiding harm to others and providing others with help. Norms of behavior that regulate social interactions are found in humans and animals alike. And these norms seem to be universal: in those animal societies in which morality has evolved, we see a common suite of behaviors."
"An evolutionary approach to morality can help with the problem of relativism, because core behaviour patterns are found in all human societies, and they're also found throughout animal societies in nature. These core behavior patterns may be heavily instinctual or hardwired; here, universal norms are likely to emerge, such as an instinctive empathic or altruistic response. Other, more species-relative norms may be peculiar to culture and place. There is room for both universals and for moral innovation.
Although much of the research we've cited in Wild Justice speaks to human moral behavior, we need to be very clear that we're not trying to provide a genealogy of human morality; we don't offer any hypotheses about where human morality comes from or why certain norms seem to persist over time and across cultures."
"It is worth noting that modern scientific research on animals, as well as the industrial farming of animals, has traditionally been justified by a scientific description of what animals are like. It's long been asserted as scientific fact that animals don't have complex thoughts or rich emotional lives. It is therefore, the old logic goes, morally acceptable to use animals however we please. As it turns out, the scientific description of the cognitive and emotional capacities of animals has undergone a major sea change in the last decade, and the old logic no longer works. In fact, the new logic imposes strong constraints on how we interact with other animals. A scientifically accurate description has the power to alter our perception of reality and can thus alter our moral responses.......More careful and scientifically accurate description of the lives of animals may lead to increased sensitivity to their needs."
Actually, a well argued case for giving more credit to animals than we have given in the past ...with all sorts of ramifications for our own morality in terms of the way we treat animals. I give the book five stars.… (altro)

Unleashing Your Dog doesn’t tell you a lot that is new about dogs, but it does tell you where the science is these days. Authors Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce are academics from Colorado—Berkoff in biology and Pierce in bioethics. Here are a couple of things I did not know before. A dog’s emotional intelligence and information processing are on different sides of the brain, so it is especially easy for it to get confused by mixed messaging if the emotional resonance for a command is not right. There is a lot we don’t know about tail wagging, but wagging to the left is usually happier than wagging to the right. Who knew? The basic message from Bekoff and Pierce: pay attention to the whole range of doggy behavior. We should watch them as carefully as they watch us.… (altro)

[b:The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age|31328683|The Animals' Agenda Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age|Marc Bekoff|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1471281663s/31328683.jpg|52002844] summarizes current research into exactly what animals think and feel. The research shows that they have much more complex thoughts and feelings than most people realize. The authors organize these results into several chapters: laboratory animals, food animals, zoos, and pets. Within each chapter, about a paragraph or so is used to summarize each research article that the authors chose, and extensive notes and a bibliography is provided at the end for further research. There really isn't any new data here, but instead a decent summary of current science. The authors are concerned about the well-being of individual animals, not species, and it shows in their attitudes towards animal welfare scientists, who they call "welfarists" in an attempt to denigrate them. The authors agenda is extreme veganism and they espouse "freedom" for all captive animals. While I certainly agree that much work remains to be done to improve our relationship with all animals, I think they go too far. In a world of over 7 billion humans, most of whom eat meat (and aren't going to stop), industrial farming of plants and animals is a given. We really need to focus on how those animals are treated, but the fact is that animals are going to be eaten. If not by humans, by other animals. We also need to work to provide our pets the best lives possible, but giving outdoor "freedom" to cats dooms billions of birds and small mammals to death. All-in-all it's a decent book with a great list of references, but not at all based on reality.

(Note: I received this book from the publisher via a GoodReads giveaway.)… (altro)