Website review: The Scientific Basis for Assessing ...
IntrepidDreamer discovered this in Psychology
•1 reviews since Feb 2, 2008
psychology
•animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/stampdawkin...
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IntrepidDreamer discovered 3 months ago- Asking the Animals At first sight it may seem quite impossible even to think of trying to obtain any sensible, scientifically based evidence on this point. We cannot ask animals to tell us in so many words what it feels like to be inside their skins. But even with other human beings words are not always our most powerful source of information. We say things like, 'Actions speak louder than words' or 'He put his money where his mouth is.' The word 'mouthing' actually carries an implicit suspicion of'mere words'. We are, in fact, particularly impressed by someone who does not just say that he dislikes or disapproves of something but shows it by taking some action and 'voting with his feet'. For all our human reliance on words and the complexity of our languages, we are often more impressed by what other human beings do than by what they say. And the things that impress us most about what they do - making choices between difficult alternatives, moving from one place to another, foregoing a desirable commodity for a later, larger reward - are things that many non-human animals do too. Other animals besides humans can make choices and express their preferences by moving away from or towards one environment or another. They can be taught to operate a mechanism which in some way changes their environment for better or worse. A rat that repeatedly presses a lever to get food or to gain access to a female is certainly 'telling' us something about the desirability, for him, of these things. The rat which crosses an electric grid to get at a female is telling us even more. A. P. Silverman, in an article published in Animal Behaviour in 1978, describes an experiment in which rats and hamsters were certainly making their views plain enough. These animals were being used in an experiment to study the effects of cigarette smoke. They were kept in glass cylinders into which a steady stream of smoke was delivered down a small tube. Many of the animals quickly learned to use their own faeces to bung up the tubes and block the smoke stream. It was not completely clear whether it was the smoke itself or the draught of air that they objected to, but it was quite clear that they disliked what was being done to them. Words here would simply have been superfluous." thank you klassy for the great link
