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Six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador lies an archipelago called the Galápagos, famous for their connection to Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Darwin spent five weeks there in the fall of 1835. The Ecuadorian government has ownership and jurisdiction over the archipelago, and they have gone to great lengths to keep the islands as pristine and natural as possible. For example, before you are allowed to hike off trail into the interior of the islands, you have to go through a careful quarantine process to ensure that no foreign species are hiding in your backpack or clothes. Nevertheless, invasive species have been an ongoing problem for the native populations, especially the famous Galápagos tortoises whose diet depends heavily on the local vegetation, which has been systematically eroded by goats. Since their introduction just over a century ago, the goats have become an existential threat to the tortoises and other species native to the islands.

In response, the National Park Service of Ecuador undertook a massive goat eradication project that resulted in the killing of over 150,000 goats for a cost of over $12 million, making it the largest eradication of a mammalian species from an island in history.¹ On the most affected island — the massive 58,465-hectare Santiago Island — over 79,000 goats were killed in a span of just four and a half years in the mid-2000s. The initial culling of the goats was done by riders on horseback, who corralled them into pens with air horns and rifle shots, and then killed them. But this method fell far short of the goal because of the brutally harsh terrain of these volcanic islands. Even the native Ecuadorians more acclimated to the equatorial environment had to turn to helicopters to find the remaining goats, shooting them with rifles from the air. And still the goats persisted. To finish the job the National Park Service introduced “Judas goats” and “Mata Hari goats” to find the remaining feral goats and kill them. Judas goats are those captured from nearby islands and equipped with radio collars and then released on Santiago to lead hunters to their remaining kind in hiding. Mata Hari goats are sterilized female Judas goats chemically induced into long-term estrus so that when released they would tempt male goats who were hunter shy but female sure.

Was this a moral act? Who should live and who should die — the native species that evolved in the Galápagos islands over the course of millions of years, or the goats that were introduced there a mere century ago? At first blush that sounds like a moral no-brainer. The native species have the moral imperative by dint of time. Then again, invasive species have always been a problem for native inhabitants over the course of a billion years of evolution — it is one of the primary causes of extinction in nature — so what we’re talking about here is a difference in time scale (long term versus short) and the source of the invasion (natural versus human). One species nudging out another species by the natural process of migration and competition is morally different from humans introducing a species to, say, clear unwanted (by people) groundcover. So, my moral sympathies were with the conservationist eradicators, until I visited the island and came across a baby goat, and held him in my arms. These are surely sentient beings, and as mammals they are arguably even more sentient — more emotional, responsive, perceptive in their ability to sense and feel — than the ancient reptilian tortoises whose turf they moved in on. But after looking at the cute baby goat, gaze into the eyes of one of these magnificent tortoises as they lumber across the landscape in search of vegetation — which they have been doing in this island archipelago for millions of years untouched by civilization — and imagine them extinct because of a bunch of feral goats, and then try to defend the goat’s moral position. Then again, the goats didn’t choose to come here, nor did they arrive by an accident of nature, such as a chance flotilla of debris from a storm such as the one that probably brought the tortoises here millions of years ago.

This is a morally dumbfounding problem, and one that well represents others related to animal rights. It’s a moral triage of who lives and who dies. “In the long run, eradication is going to be cheaper,” explained Josh Donlan of Cornell University, who published a paper on the goat-eradication project. “It also makes sense from an ethical perspective, because in the end you are actually killing fewer animals,” referring to all the native individual animals who would have died from lack of food and that ultimately would have led to their extinction.² I concur, but not without some regret for our complicity in the problem in the first place, and acknowledgment that this “return to nature” can only go so far, given the impossibility of implementing such programs in places where civilization has encroached so deeply into nature that there is little natural ecology left. Short of a “world without us” scenario in which every human on Earth suddenly disappears and nature comes roaring back with a vengeance over all of our manmade structures, there is no clear way of reconciling between animals and civilization, no obvious moral bright line.

Continuous Thinking About Animals

A moral system based on continuous rather than categorical thinking gives us a biological and evolutionary foundation for the expansion of the moral sphere to include nonhuman animals, one based on the objective criteria of genetic relatedness, cognitive abilities, emotional capacities, moral development, and especially the capacity to feel pain and suffer. This is, in fact, what it means to be a sentient being, and it is for this reason that I worded the first principle of this science-based moral system as the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. But which sentient beings, and which rights?

Instead of thinking of animals in categorical terms of “us” and “them” we can think in continuous terms from simple to complex, from less to more intelligent, from less to more aware and self-aware, and especially from less to more sentient. So, for example, if we place humans at 1.0 as a full rights-bearing sentient species, we could classify gorillas and chimps at 0.9, whales, dolphins, and porpoises at 0.85, monkeys and other marine mammals at 0.8, elephants, dogs, and pigs at 0.75, and so forth down the phylogenetic scale. Continuity, not categories. Take brains, for instance. Scaling average brain size across species we can compare the brains of gorillas (500 cubic centimeters, or cc), chimpanzees (400cc), bonobos (340cc), and orangutans (335cc) with those of humans at an average of 1200–1400cc. Dolphin brains are especially noteworthy, coming in at an average of 1500–1700cc, and the surface area of a dolphin’s cortex — where the higher centers of learning, memory, and cognition are located — is an impressive 3700cm² compared to our 2400cm². And although the thickness of the dolphin’s cortex is roughly half that of humans, when absolute cortical material is compared, dolphins still average an impressive 560cc compared to that of humans at 660cc.

These notable facts about dolphins led a scientist named John C. Lilly to found the semi-secret “Order of the Dolphin” in 1961, a veritable Who’s Who of scientists that included the astronomer Carl Sagan and the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane, who were both interested in communicating with extraterrestrial intelligences. Since ETs were nowhere to be found, Dolphins had to serve as a terrestrial stand-in for studying how to communicate with a species radically different from us. The research project didn’t pan out, and Lilly’s lack of rigor in his experiments discouraged Sagan and the others from drawing definitive conclusions about dolphin language and intelligence (among other things, Lilly gave his aquatic charges LSD to see if that might open up the doors of perception for them).

However, a half-century of more scientific research on dolphins since then has been revealing. In her book The Dolphin in the Mirror, the psychologist Diana Reiss shows how dolphins pass a modified mirror test of self-awareness. A video of dolphins preening in front of a giant mirror placed in their tank is not just amusing to watch; they clearly know it is themselves they are seeing in the mirror, and they look more than a little pleased with what they see, staring inside their mouths, flipping upside down and blowing air bubbles, etc. There are also videos that show both dolphins and elephants passing the equivalent of the red-dot self-recognition mirror test — the dolphin with an ink mark on his side that he stares at in a mirror (compared to controls who received no mark and did not mirror stare), and an elephant with an “X” marked on her temple which, in viewing in a mirror, she touches repeatedly with the tip of her trunk, obviously curious (and perhaps irritated) at its presence. As for dolphin language, however, the psychologist Justin Gregg is less enthusiastic than Lilly was in his assessment of the literature:

Evidence for a dolphin language — dolphinese — is all but nonexistent. Dolphins do possess signature whistles, which function a bit like names. They likely use them to label themselves and might even call one another’s name on occasion. This is both unique and impressive, but it is the only label-like aspect of dolphin communication that we’ve found. All the other clicks and whistles that dolphins produce are probably used to convey messages about their emotional states or intentions — not the type of complex or semantically rich information found in human language.³

Gregg points out the obvious contradiction in the argument that big brains equal big intelligence: “If big brains are the key to intelligence, why do crows and ravens, which are (literally) bird-brained, display forms of cognition that rival those of their big-brained dolphin and primate cousins. The animal kingdom is full of small-brained species that display astonishingly complex and intelligent behavior.”⁴

As for cognitive continuity, psychologists who tested a gorilla named Koko concluded that she passed the mirror recognition test for self-awareness. Koko also passed an “object permanence” test in which she could memorize the location of moved objects. She was also able to figure out that the quantity of a liquid does not change when it is poured into a different-sized container, which is considered another cognitive hurdle in the “conservation of liquid.”⁵

Elephants have also apparently passed the red-dot test and, furthermore, they have been observed mourning the loss of a fellow family or tribe member. A 2014 study of 26 Asian elephants in a Thailand sanctuary found that when individuals feel stressed by snakes, barking dogs, hovering helicopters, and the presence of other hostile elephants (their ears go out, their tail stands erect, and they emit a low-frequency rumble), their mates comforted them by making seemingly sympathetic noises and by touching them with their trunks on their shoulders, in their mouths, and on their genitals (not recommended in human populations).⁶

The University of St. Andrews cognitive neuroscientists Anna Smet and Richard Byrne, in a series of clever experiments involving hungry elephants, hid food under an opaque container near an empty container and then pointed to the one where the morsels were located. To their astonishment, they discovered that African elephants are the first non-domesticated species to exhibit such advanced social cognition as the ability to read human nonverbal communication. As they noted: “Elephants successfully interpreted pointing when the experimenter’s proximity to the hiding place was varied and when the ostensive pointing gesture was visually subtle, suggesting that they understood the experimenter’s communicative intent.”⁷

This outcome is surprising because previous research found that domesticated animals such as dogs are better at reading nonverbal cues from humans about hidden food (the experimenter simply points to where the food is located) than free living (wild) animals such as chimpanzees, even though the latter are more closely related to us. The prevailing assumption has been that the ability to read human cues evolved in species under domestication as an adaptive strategy for survival. As Smet and Byrne noted: “Most other animals do not point, nor do they understand pointing when others do it. Even our closest relatives, the great apes, typically fail to understand pointing when it’s done for them by human carers; in contrast, the domestic dog, adapted to working with humans over many thousands of years and sometimes selectively bred to follow pointing, is able to follow human pointing — a skill the dogs probably learn from repeated, one-to-one interactions with their owners.”⁸

But elephants have never been domesticated despite repeated attempts over the millennia (dating back at least 4,000 to 8,000 years), and regardless of the considerable time spent in captivity in zoos and circuses. The explanation must come from elsewhere. “The African elephant’s complex society makes it a good candidate for using other’s knowledge: its elaborate fission-fusion society is one of the most extensive of any mammal, and cognitive sophistication is known to correlate with the complexity of a species’ social group,” the authors explain. “We suggest that the most plausible account of our elephants’ ability to interpret even subtle human pointing gestures as communicative is that human pointing, as we presented it, taps into elephants’ natural communication system. If so, then interpreting movements of other elephants as deictic [context dependent] communication must be a natural part of social interaction in wild herds; specifically, we suggest that the functional equivalent of pointing might take the form of referential indication with the trunk.”⁹

Perspective Taking

Perspective taking is the psychological foundation underlying the capacity for empathy. To judge the rightness or wrongness of an action against another, one must first have the ability and the willingness to take the perspective of that other sentient being. In the context of animal rights, the 2005 film Earthlings is arguably the most disturbing of the perspective-taking documentaries, drawing parallels between the mistreatment and economic exploitation of Black people and women in centuries past with the maltreatment and commercial use and abuse of animals today. To call the film hard to watch is an understatement. To get through it I had to have two windows open on my computer screen: the film and the transcript of it for note taking purposes, which was really just a pretext to cover the gore when I could take it no more. Scenes of animals being processed as products include slashed open dolphins flopping around on a concrete floor while school children obliviously pass by, and cattle being killed by a captive bolt gun that uses compressed air to fire a steel bolt in the animal’s, a process that doesn’t always work, in which case leaving them struggling for life even as the butchering process begins. Such images are overlaid with narration to drill home the point not just of our evolutionary continuity with all other animals, but of their continuity with humans:

Undoubtedly there are differences, since humans and animals are not the same in all respects. But the question of sameness wears another face. Granted, these animals do not have all the desires we humans have; granted, they do not comprehend everything we humans comprehend; nevertheless, we and they do have some of the same desires and do comprehend some of the same things. The desires for food and water, shelter and companionship, freedom of movement and avoidance of pain. These desires are shared by nonhuman animals and human beings.

Perhaps the windowless, fortress-like factor farm buildings surrounded by barbed wire fences are a twoway agreement — most of us don’t want to know how sausage is made. As the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson poignantly observed: “You have dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”¹⁰

The power of visual media to shift our perspective taking is on disturbing display in the Academy Award winning 2009 documentary film The Cove, about the mass slaughter of dolphins and porpoises in Taiji cove in Wakayama, Japan. The film features Ric O’Barry, former dolphin trainer for the 1960s hit television series Flipper, which as a young boy I watched faithfully every week as the show highlighted the very human-like characteristics of these marine mammals, most notably the compassion they display in social bonding with each other and with humans (and by which each week Flipper predictably thwarted bad guys in their nefarious activities underwater or rescued good guys trapped in improbable circumstances). According to the film, dolphins are herded into the cove where a few are captured unharmed for sale to marine parks and aquariums around the world, while the rest are brutally butchered and killed for their meat, which is sold to resellers in Japanese fish markets. The press attention the film received after it won the Academy Award led to Japanese government officials scrambling to deny, then explain, and then rationalize away the ruthless butchery of sentient beings so close to us in social cognition and emotion as to wrench powerful emotions at the sight of their slaughter.

One heart-ripping scene among many captured on film (with cameras hidden inside rocks and long-range lenses from the surrounding hills) is that of a young dolphin desperately trying to survive after being slashed open, gasping for air as blood gushes out of her torso, crying for help as the filmmakers watch in horror, powerless to save her as she slips beneath the surface one final time in a pool of blood, never to be seen again. It is at once an infuriating and sickening scene to watch. I cannot say that I would have been able to restrain myself from jumping into the cove, swimming over to the cluster of tiny boats, and in Rambo-like fashion pulling these fishermen into the water and giving them a dose of their own machete-medicine. But no matter how powerful the temptation to engage in retaliatory violence in these circumstances, such vigilante justice is precisely what most animal rights activists avoid; you can’t be an effective rights activist if you are in jail.

O’Barry and his crew showed great restraint in not attempting to stop the slaughter and instead expose it to the world through such gut-wrenching scenes, and that’s the point of the film — it translates the abstract into the concrete, thereby engaging our brain’s empathic neural pathways that are normally triggered when experiencing another human’s pain. So, even more than our shared intelligence, self-awareness, cognition, and moral capacity, it is our common capacity to suffer in a very human way — gasping for air, struggling to stay upright, fighting for life — that, in part, expands the moral sphere. Animal rights will not be fully realized until we gain a deep emotional understanding that they are sentient beings who — like us — want to live and are afraid to die.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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This is where is becomes ought, where the way things are naturally — by nature animals desire food, water, shelter, companionship, freedom of movement, avoidance of pain just like we do — becomes the way things ought to be, especially when a departure from nature is the result of an exploitation of one animal species over another. Here we make a moral choice in which perspective taking reverses the naturalism argument — from the perspective of humans exploiting animals to fulfill our nature to the perspective of animals fulfilling theirs.

To further this moral progress, starting from the bottom up, we can vote with our voices and our money for the type of food we eat and push the market toward this more moral stance. And from the top down we can work for legislation that abolishes the exploitation of sentient beings, expanding our moral sphere to include the great apes and marine mammals and working our way down the many branches and twigs of the evolutionary tree that Charles Darwin so eloquently described in the final sentence of On the Origin of Species:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.