Anyone who lives with a dog or cat has probably observed that their furry companions ignore mirrors, or if they notice them at all, often behave as if there’s a dangerous interloper on the other side of the looking glass. Dogs and cats fail the mirror self-recognition (MSR) test, which gauges an animal’s self-awareness by determining whether it can recognize its own reflection in a mirror. In the classic version of the test, a small paint mark is placed on an anaesthetized animal’s forehead, and upon awakening, the animal is presented with a mirror. If the animal touches the mark, or otherwise behaviorally indicates understanding that the mark is on itself, it is concluded that it has passed the test. Cats and dogs are not the only animals to fail the MSR test. So do humans less than 18 months old. Chimpanzees, orangutans, elephants, dolphins, and magpies (PLoS Biol 6(8): e202. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060202) have passed the MSR test. Monkeys have not, until recently. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying how Ritalin affects the prefrontal cortex in rhesus macaques outfitted with head implants, observed that the monkeys engaged in self-directed behaviors, including extensive examination and touching of the implants as well as examining their own genitals in a mirror. (PLoS ONE 5(9): e12865. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0012865)
Not everyone is convinced that the rhesus monkeys passed the test, including Gordon Gallup, who devised the mark test in chimpanzees in 1970. But why should we care if animals can pass this test of self-awareness? It is a matter of controversy whether the test really proves what it purports to prove. It is, for one thing, a visual test, so animals that do not rely primarily on their sense of sight are at a disadvantage. Likewise, the test was devised originally in chimpanzees, but other species may, for a variety of reasons, be less sensitive to foreign marks on the forehead. I draw your attention to this sentence from the Wisconsin-Madison paper: “We hypothesize that the head implant, a most salient mark, prompted the monkeys to overcome gaze aversion inhibition or lack of interest in order to look and examine themselves in front of the mirror.” The researchers propose that the rhesus macaques — who have failed the MSR in the past — found the implants in their heads more compelling than a paint mark. The salient ethical feature: these monkeys have large implants protruding from their heads. In the videos accompanying the paper, “The view of the head implant has been blocked for discretion” with a crude black spot. What cannot be obscured is that the monkeys are also housed in tiny steel cages. (http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid90402333001?bclid=90190339001&bctid=620981260001) Ought we be concerned that self-aware monkeys are kept in small cages with surgical implants protruding from their skulls?
Primates, such as rhesus macaques and chimpanzees, are used extensively in research. The Great Ape Protection Act is currently working its way through the US Congress — the act would prohibit the use of great apes in “invasive research.” In 2000, the US Congress passed the Chimpanzee Health Improvement Maintenance and Protection Act (CHIMP Act), to create a system of sanctuaries for housing surplus chimpanzees that have been “retired” from research. It was deemed inappropriate to euthanize chimps, our closest genetic cousins, once they’ve outlived their usefulness, but not inappropriate to use them in the first place. No comparable restrictions on research, or retirement homes, have been proposed for other research animals, including those self-aware rhesus monkeys. (According to the Humane Society of the US, there are approximately 112,000 rhesus monkeys currently being used for research or breeding in the US.)
What’s the moral significance of self-awareness in animals? There is at least one line of argument to the effect that moral status in animals is contingent on having interests, and having interests is contingent on having mental states, which is contingent on being sentient. (See e.g. David Degrazia’s Taking Animals Seriously). But the MSR test is not a test of sentience, per se. Gallup explains the significance of self-awareness thusly: “self-awareness is defined as the ability to become the object of your own attention, consciousness as being aware of your own existence, and mind as the capacity to be aware of your own mental states…” (Gallup G “Do minds exist in species other than our own?” Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews 9(1985):631-41). Gallup goes on to claim that “either you are aware of being aware or you are unaware of being aware, and the latter is tantamount to being unconscious.” And there’s the rub: animals that are not self-aware are not conscious, or so the story goes. Surely we cannot harm unconscious animals, and surely we do not owe them anything (such as humane treatment). If the presence of self-awareness is our sole criterion for moral consideration, then any animal who fails the MSR test just doesn’t warrant it. But it is quite extraordinary to suggest that a mouse, or your cat — or that mouse trying to escape your cat — is not conscious, based on an inability to convincingly indicate that it can recognize itself in a mirror. Indeed, it strikes me as implausible to even say that they lack self-awareness. Certainly the cat and mouse must possess other-awareness, hence the cat chases the mouse, and the mouse runs from the cat, but not from other mice. But Gallup argues that “awareness presupposes self-awareness,” which is to say that the mouse, or the cat, is not aware at all. That also means, if we take the MSR to be universal and definitive, that the year old human infant, or the blind person, or the prosopagnosiac is also not self-aware, and is not conscious. And that is absurd.
One way to avoid this absurdity is to abandon the MSR test as a valid, universal test of self-awareness. A blind person, or a prosopagnosiac surely has other ways of proving that she is self-aware and conscious. An ordinary human infant, one who learns and responds and interacts with the world, may (arguably) not be self-aware, but is surely conscious, and so is the cat. The MSR is not sensitive to the natural behaviors and inclinations of a species, or to the developmental stage, environment, and learning of an animal — hence, for example, the controversial and inconsistent findings on gorillas, who have learned to communicate with human sign language, but repeatedly fail the MSR test. More fundamentally, we can avoid absurdity — and moral dissonance (and the need to discretely hide ugly head implants) — by abandoning the notion that certain types of cognition, or cognitive abilities, or behaviors, are indicators of moral status that allow us to create a moral hierarchy, with humans at the top, and chimpanzees, dolphins, and other creatures in the exclusive MSR club somewhere below us, worthy of some limited degree of concern and care, and the rest of the animal kingdom even lower, there to be used as we see fit. But even if we accept that there’s a justifiable moral hierarchy, and a corresponding hierarchy of moral concern and moral obligation, we still need to justify keeping an intelligent, self-aware animal in a tiny steel cage, surgically implanting a box in its skull, and feeding it Ritalin.
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