An increasing number of mainstream scientists and researchers also point to a consciousness that is outside individuals, sometimes called “universal consciousness.”
For the purposes of the declaration, researchers said, they focused on what is called “phenomenal consciousness.” This is the idea that “There is something that it’s like to be a particular organism,” explains Christopher Krupenye, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
Phenomenal consciousness can be a bit of a hard concept to get one’s head around at first, he says. But it basically means that an animal experiences the world not as a machine, but as a being. Phenomenal consciousness is what you are experiencing right now in your body with the sight of words on a page as you read this article.
There is another type of consciousness often called “metacognition,” in which a being is aware of what’s going on in its own mind. It is recognizing, for instance, that the temperature you feel is unpleasant, and then thinking that perhaps you should turn up the thermostat. It is recognizing that the words on the page are too small and that you should grab your reading glasses.
“Theory of mind” is another connected concept. You recognize that another person reading this article is not you, but that they can have an experience similar to yours.
Current research, including Dr. Krupenye’s, suggests that both dogs and primates display all these forms of consciousness.
In one of his studies, for instance, he was able to track eye movements of chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans in order to gauge whether or not they expected an unseen ape to see them through a transparent barrier. He found these primates were able to assume another being was having a similar but different experience from what they were having themselves, given their own perspective on the world.
Other studies show that dogs look to their owners for assistance when they do not understand a command, and that they look for clues and more information when they are having difficulty solving a task. Researchers believe this indicates dogs recognize their own ignorance – a sign of metacognition.
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A growing body of research suggests that bees have complex inner lives.
But of course there’s no way to prove, or even fully understand, what dogs or apes are experiencing, Dr. Krupenye says.
“You’re identifying one of the core philosophical challenges in this area of research,” he says. “With the case of phenomenal consciousness, in humans we take it as the case that if they verbally report they feel X or Y, we agree that’s what they are feeling. With animals, we can’t ask directly for them to verbally report.”
So researchers use alternative indicators to gauge how a nonhuman animal is thinking or feeling – such as tracking eye movement. But even this gets tricky. What about an animal whose umwelt isn’t visual at all?
“My dog’s experience of the world is much more dominated by smell data and much less by sight data,” says Dr. Sebo. “Different kinds of experiences might cause them different bodily pleasure and pain, but also different emotional pleasure and pain.”
For years, researchers were cautioned not to anthropomorphize their subjects, or bestow human traits upon other animals. Most scientists still agree with many of the tenets of this.
Dogs, for instance, don’t necessarily like what humans like, and most researchers agree that it is ethically important to keep those distinctions in mind. Think here about a dressed-up poodle. Its clothing and accessories are about human preferences. But the poodle might prefer an odor on the neighbor’s lawn. That’s a dog preference. Ethicists say it is important to be aware of this distinction, and not behave as if the poodle actually loves pompoms.
Many animal researchers now say worries about anthropomorphism went too far. The human umwelt might be different from those of other animals, they say, but there is still a deeper quality of being-in-the-world that is similar.
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Dr. Mattila (right) and student Arianna Groover-Landis check on honeybees at the apiary at Wellesley College.
Heather Mattila, a biologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, generally tries to sidestep the question of consciousness in the bees she studies – even though it’s what most interests her students.
Trying to determine consciousness leads down a complicated philosophical path, she says. It is difficult to prove anything. She is an empirical scientist, which is all about working with solid, replicable studies.
But in her personal opinion, there’s no question: Bees likely have consciousness. She watches bees map locations, share information, and dance in a way that appears excited when they have found a particularly tasty food source. (She has learned to write “vigorous” rather than “excited” in research papers to avoid sparking the critiques of reviewers.)
Other researchers have also detected play behavior in some bees. All in all, the insect’s behavior reminds her of the rescued dog she grew up with – an animal that convinced her that other species had full personalities and cognition. “In a human mind, we would just assume consciousness is involved,” Dr. Mattila says.
“We should aspire to treat them compassionately.”
But assuming consciousness in other species brings up profound moral quandaries. If it turns out that animals do have feelings, or if they do participate in this big, amorphous concept called consciousness, what would that mean for the way humans interact with the rest of the living world?
The scholars who signed the New York declaration tried to stay ambiguous on that point.
“All of these animals have a realistic chance of being conscious, so we should aspire to treat them compassionately,” says Dr. Sebo at New York University. “But you can accept that much and then disagree about how to flesh that out and how to translate it into policies.”
For Dr. Mattila and others, the possibility of consciousness has meant limiting the extent to which her scientific experiments cause harm.
“I know many strict vegans would not approve of me keeping honeybees on campus, but I feel like I’m supporting them,” Dr. Mattila says. “I specifically try to do experiments that don’t cause them pain or suffering. … I try to let them have a good life and observe how they operate within that good life.”
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“If we can live well without killing and harming other animals, why wouldn’t we?” says Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Mr. Baur poses with Greg the steer at the sanctuary, June 10, 2024.
But it also has her thinking more broadly about how humans and other animals cross paths and interact with each other. Should the real possibility of complex animal consciousness make a difference in where we build roads? Should it guide how we “consciously” take control of ecosystems? And should it impact how, and what, we eat?
Such ethical considerations could impact an array of human activity. “It’s culturally inconvenient to think that animals are conscious,” Dr. Mattila says.
Especially farm animals. Although research on animal sentience and intelligence has expanded to include a host of different species, there is still a gap when it comes to the animals we kill for food.
The agricultural industry has long focused on animal welfare within the context of the food system, and there have been industry-wide efforts to slaughter animals in the most humane way possible.
But a group of international researchers in 2019 published a report in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science that found a decided lack of information on the “physico-cognitive capacities” of farm animal species.
While there has been loads of research on animal husbandry, there has not been all that much investigation into animals’ conscious experiences outside their role as food products for humans.
To Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast and others at Farm Sanctuary, there are clear reasons for this. The first is that we generally want to distance ourselves from those creatures we eat. Multiple studies have shown that meat-eaters engage in something called “cognitive dissociation” to help alleviate the discomfort that comes if one starts to learn about the emotions or physical experiences of a pig or cow or chicken.
But there are also funding issues. Most scientific research on farm animals is funded by agricultural schools focused on industrial practices or is funded by large agribusiness companies themselves. And farm animals generally live in a way that some scientists say is not conducive to understanding individual sentience.
“When you’re thinking of chickens, specifically in a barn with 30,000 chickens, you can’t see an individual,” says Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast. The study she published this October focused on the behavior of Cornish hens – usually slaughtered after they reach 6 weeks of age.
There isn’t a lot of existing information about the Cornish hen’s interior life, she says, because they aren’t usually allowed to live long enough to study as adults.
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A pig, wearing sunblock to protect its light skin, forages in Charlotte’s Pasture at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, June 10, 2024.
Farm Sanctuary is explicit in its promotion of a vegan diet – it was founded by a California-born animal activist named Gene Baur, whose work revealing animal cruelty at industrial farms and slaughterhouses helped lead to animal welfare laws.
Because of that, however, critics have called its animal science research biased – a charge researchers here reject.
“There’s no reason to not offer somebody the benefit of the doubt of sentience, the benefit of the doubt of consciousness, and to provide research methods that respect their agency and autonomy,” Ms. Prasad-Shreckengast says. “You can still do really good science with those ethics in place.”
On tours at Farm Sanctuary, guides introduce visitors to goats who make family groups; cows who, when no longer confined to dairy barns, prance and play and take care of their young; and pigs who, given the space, build themselves nests in a barn but go outside to relieve themselves.
It is an explicit effort to introduce humans to the individuals within other species, says Mr. Baur. The purpose is simple: to normalize empathy for fellow creatures.
“What we’re trying to achieve here are relationships of mutuality with us and other animals, where everyone benefits by the interaction, instead of relationships of extraction, where those with power take from those without,” he says.
Promoting a vegan ethic, however, isn’t the only valid way to understand the relationship between humans and farm animals – even for those convinced they have consciousness.
For Dr. Andrews, the key thinker behind the New York declaration, the question of how to live in a world of infinite consciousnesses has more to do with negotiation than with moral absolutes.
She believes it is impossible to completely avoid causing harm. The bacteria on our skin are disrupted when we wash. Animals in the wild eat other animals. When she finds flower-
“It’s about acknowledging that harms are part of life, and we’re committing some harms, but we’re trying to minimize the harm that we do when we’re making our choices,” Dr. Andrews says.
It’s also recognizing that humans are not separate or unique, but part of an ecosystem with a dazzling array of individuals and understandings of the world – and a dazzling array of consciousness.
“It’s driving us to see ourselves as part of an integrated system of biology,” she says. “And that is probably better for the planet.”
