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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Raising Consciousness About Chicken Consciousness, Bernard Rollin
Raising Consciousness About Chicken Consciousness, Bernard Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
The topics explored by Marino are definitive, and should work well to lay to rest forever the widespread belief that chickens have no personality, are unintelligent, or in any other way lack a mental life.
Far More To Sheep Than Meets The Casual Eye, Bernard Rollin
Far More To Sheep Than Meets The Casual Eye, Bernard Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
Marino & Merskin’s survey of the cognitive and social capacities of sheep is an eye-opener about the individuality and emotionality of this most maligned of all farm animals. My own eyes had already been opened by an adopted orphaned lamb, so much more like a dog as a companion animal than the mindless robot I had been conditioned to expect. I am morally certain that Marino & Merskin’s survey will have a similar effect on readers open to changing their minds.
Raising The Moral Consciousness Of Science, Bernard Rollin
Raising The Moral Consciousness Of Science, Bernard Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
Precaution on behalf of sentient animals should not be tempered by the questionable principle of the amorality of science.
Unity Of Consciousness In Animals, Bernard E. Rollin
Unity Of Consciousness In Animals, Bernard E. Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
Both Descartes the rationalist and Hume the empiricist, polar opposites philosophically, denied the unity and continuity of animal mind. Kant pointed out that the presence of retrievable memories entails unity of consciousness. Rowlands now argues that animals too have unity of consciousness.
Human Superiority?, Bernard Rollin
Human Superiority?, Bernard Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
Like Charles Darwin and George Romanes, I am quite willing to use anecdotal information as a source of knowledge about animal behavior. There are many more people observing nonhuman animals than there are people conducting controlled experiments, and we can thereby learn that behaviors we think are unique to humans are shared by other animals. From a strictly biological point of view, it makes no sense to speak of “human superiority.” One species of animal can be superior to another only in terms of survival and niche occupation. As moral concern for animals increases across the world, claims of human …
Recognition Of Distress In Animals – A Philosophical Prolegomenon, Bernard E. Rollin
Recognition Of Distress In Animals – A Philosophical Prolegomenon, Bernard E. Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
For those who continue to doubt the studiability of distress or suffering or misery in all of its forms in animals, consider the following thought experiment: If the government were to come up with a billion dollars in research funding for animal distress, would that money go a-begging? We can study these states just as we studied pain—excellent work on boredom by Franciose Wemelsfelder in a volume on laboratory animal welfare I co-edited made the methodology for such study quite explicit. (Wemelsfelder, 1990) And when the ideological scales fall from our eyes, we realize that the work of scientists like …
Animal Pain: What It Is And Why It Matters, Bernard E. Rollin
Animal Pain: What It Is And Why It Matters, Bernard E. Rollin
Bernard Rollin, PhD
The basis of having a direct moral obligation to an entity is that what we do to that entity matters to it. The ability to experience pain is a sufficient condition for a being to be morally considerable. But the ability to feel pain is not a necessary condition for moral considerability. Organisms could have possibly evolved so as to be motivated to flee danger or injury or to eat or drink not by pain, but by ‘‘pangs of pleasure’’ that increase as one fills the relevant need or escapes the harm. In such a world, ‘‘mattering’’ would be positive, …