Zoology Commons^™

Emergence Of Zoos In The U.S. And A Search For The Exotic, Austin M. Hutchinson

Student Scholar Showcase

The emergence of zoos in twentieth century America had many factors that contributed to their mission, success, and overall exotic nature. Zoos have been a part of human civilization for centuries, but it would not be until 1876 when the first zoo would appear in the United States. Individuals craved excitement and the use of exotic animals from all over the world became an important component of what zoos would become. This era coincides with the European colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa, known as the Scramble for Africa. Animals were brought from the so-called “Dark Continent” to be put on display, …

An Engineer Cantonment Bestiary: The Art Of Titian Ramsay Peale, Hugh H. Genoways, Thomas E. Labedz

University of Nebraska State Museum: Mammalogy Papers

Includes an overview of the work of American nature artist Titian Ramsay Peale as part of the Stephen H. Long Expedition, 1819-1820, at Engineer Cantonment in eastern Nebraska, USA.

Includes textual descriptions and/or reproductions of watercolors and lined drawings by Peale of banded killifish (Fundulus diaphanous), American White Pelican (Pelecanus erythrothynchos), Wood Duck (Aix sponsa), Rough-legged Hawk (Buteo lagopus/Falco lagopus), Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis tabida), Pectoral Sandpiper (Calidris melanotos), Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea), American Tree Sparrow (Spizella arborea), Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus …

Chickens Play To The Crowd, Cinzia Chiandetti

Animal Sentience

The time was ripe for Marino’s review of chickens’ cognitive capacities. The research community, apart from expressing gratitude for Marino’s work, should now use it to increase public awareness of chickens’ abilities. People’s views on many animals are ill-informed. Scientists need to communicate and engage with the public about the relevance and societal implications of their findings.

Post-Darwin Skepticism And Run-Of-The-Mill Suicide, John Hadley

Animal Sentience

Peña-Guzmán’s depiction of the opponent of animal suicide as a conservative is a straw man. It is possible to accept that animals are self-conscious and reflexive yet still reject the view that they have the mental wherewithal to commit run-of-the-mill suicide. That animal behaviour can be positioned on a continuum of self-destructive behaviour does not establish that animals can intentionally kill themselves.

An Adaptationist Perspective On Animal Suicide, Timothy P. Racine

Animal Sentience

Peña-Guzmán’s discussion of suicide in nonhuman animals has broad implications. In this commentary, I focus on the logical relation between suicide and intention. Proximate cause must be distinguished from ultimate function in explanations of suicide. I briefly discuss two adaptationist accounts of suicidal behavior.

Lessons From Chimpanzee Sign Language Studies, Mary Lee Jensvold

Animal Sentience

Claims are often made about behaviors being unique to humans; the evidence usually shows they are not. Sign language studies on chimpanzees may provide a useful model for comparative studies of suicide. A productive approach to comparative studies is to focus on observable behaviors rather than getting lost in the pitfalls of vague definitions and changing measures.

Animal Suicide: An Account Worth Giving?, Irina Mikhalevich

Animal Sentience

Peña-Guzmán (2017) argues that empirical evidence and evolutionary theory compel us to treat the phenomenon of suicide as continuous in the animal kingdom. He defends a “continuist” account in which suicide is a multiply-realizable phenomenon characterized by self-injurious and self-annihilative behaviors. This view is problematic for several reasons. First, it appears to mischaracterize the Darwinian view that mind is continuous in nature. Second, by focusing only on surface-level features of behavior, it groups causally and etiologically disparate phenomena under a single conceptual umbrella, thereby reducing the account’s explanatory power. Third, it obscures existing analyses of suicide in biomedical ethics and …

Can Nondolphins Commit Suicide?, David M. Peña-Guzmán

Animal Sentience

This Response addresses the scientific and philosophical criticisms of my 2017 target article “Can nonhuman animals commit suicide?” It defends my key claims and explores topics (such as animal judgment, animal theory of mind, and the evolution of suicide) that did not appear in the original article. It also points out areas in which further research is needed and concludes that we should be wary of accusations of “anthropomorphism” in debates about animal suicide.

Animal Suicide: Evolutionary Continuity Or Anthropomorphism?, Antonio Preti

Animal Sentience

Evolutionary processes are characterized by both continuity and discontinuity. Evidence on suicide in nonhuman animals is faint and often rests on the metaphorical or anthropomorphic use of the term. Suicidal behavior might be an evolutionary jump relatively recent in our species: a byproduct of living in groups of people who are not as closely related genetically as in social groups of nonhuman mammals.

Animal Suicide And "Anthropodenial", Ryan Hediger

Animal Sentience

Increasing understanding of the impressive cognitive and social capacities of nonhuman animals suggests the possibility that they may sometimes commit suicide. Such notions tend to be dismissed as “anthropomorphism.” That interpretive hazard, I argue, must be weighed against the opposite hazard of “anthropodenial” — “the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals” (de Waal 2006). If animals do commit suicide, how often is it motivated precisely by the impact of humans on animal life?

Continuum And Temporality, Gerard Kuperus

Animal Sentience

I fully support the continuum proposed in the target article and argue along the same lines that we should be suspicious of drawing any strict borders between human and non-human animals. Since we can say very little with absolute certainty about human intentions regarding suicide, we have no certainty about the intentions of non-human animals. Although I am very sympathetic to Peña-Guzmán’s overall argument, I suggest that time could be taken into consideration as well.

Thinking About Thinking Chickens, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

This response focuses on three major conceptual threads that run through the peer commentary on my target article: (1) how the use of chickens influences our views of them, (2) whether education is effective, and (3) what components of chicken psychology are most relevant to understanding who chickens are.

Historical Observations And Identifications Of Plants And Animals In The Vicinity Of Engineer Cantonment In 1819-1820, Hugh H. Genoways, Brett C. Ratcliffe, Carl R. Falk, John R. Bozell

University of Nebraska State Museum: Mammalogy Papers

Historical observations and identifications of plants and animals in the vicinity of Engineer Cantonment in 1819–1820 (James 1822) are shown below in Roman and Roman italic print. Specimens identified through phytoarcheological and zooarcheological analysis of materials and believed to be reasonably associated or contemporaneous with the Long Expedition use of the site (AU4) are shown in boldface. Species present in both the historical and archeological data are marked by an asterisk (*). References used in this compilation include Benedict (1996), Brewer (1970 [1840]), Conant and Collins (1991), Ducey (2000), Evans (1997), Falk et al. (this volume), Genoways et al. (2008), …

If Nonhuman Animals Can Suicide, Why Don’T They?, C. A. Soper, Todd K. Shackelford

Animal Sentience

An evolutionary analysis suggests that selection is unlikely to have tolerated the capacity for intentional self-killing in nonhuman animals. The potential to escape pain by suicide would have presented a recurrent and severe adaptive problem for an animal with a reproductive future to protect. If the potential for suicide arose in the evolutionary past, anti-suicide mechanisms may have co-evolved, as we believe they have in adult humans. Peña-Guzmán’s (2017) argument that some nonhuman animals can suicide is incomplete without an account of the defences that result in the vast majority opting not to.

Chicken Minds And Moral Standing, Kristin Andrews

Animal Sentience

Some of the cognitive traits that Marino reviews are not in themselves relevant to ethics, either for chickens or human infants, but affective traits are, among them desires.

Sentience, The Final Frontier...., Shelley Adamo

Animal Sentience

Arguments for fish sentience have difficulty with the philosophical zombie problem. Progress in AI has shown that complex learning, pain behavior, and pain as a motivational drive can be emulated by robots without any internal subjective experience. Therefore, demonstrating these abilities in fish does not necessarily demonstrate that fish are sentient. Further evidence for fish sentience may come from optogenetic studies of neural networks in zebrafish. Such studies may show that zebrafish have neural network patterns similar to those that correlate with sentience in humans. Given the present uncertainty regarding sentience in fish, caution should be applied regarding the precautionary …

On Crabs And Statistics, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

I respond to commentaries by Elwood and Seth & Dienes and to a recent critique by Diggles, discussing the link between avoidance learning and sentience, the relevance of the clash between frequentist and Bayesian statistics, the risks to decapod welfare in aquaculture, and the broader concerns one may have about a “precautionary” approach to protecting invertebrates.

On Jealousy, Envy, Sex Differences And Temperament In Humans And Dogs, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Sylvia K. Harmon-Jones

Animal Sentience

Cook, Prichard, Spivak, and Berns (2018) find that dogs’ levels of trait aggression are positively correlated with their amygdala activation when observing their caregivers giving a food to a fake dog. The authors conclude that this may provide neural evidence in dogs for the experience of jealousy, an emotion that some psychologists consider to be unique to humans. Here we explain the difference between the emotions of jealousy and envy, suggesting some ideas for future experiments that may help disentangle the experience of jealousy from that of envy in dogs. We also propose ideas for future research that may yield …

Why Do We Want To Think Humans Are Different?, Colin A. Chapman, Michael A. Huffman

Animal Sentience

One harmful consequence of creating categories where one group is unique and superior to others is that it justifies committing negative, often atrocious, acts on the members of the inferior group. Correcting divisive human categorizations (racial superiority, gender superiority) has bettered society. Scholars have often claimed that humans are unique and superior to nonhuman animals. These claims need to be reevaluated. Many have already been refuted. Animals have been shown to outperform humans in many tasks, including cognitive ones. Here we raise the question: Has the false sense of superiority been used to justify human cruelty to animals?

How To Foster Respect For Animals? Superiority, Dissimilarity, And Prejudice, Matteo Colombo

Animal Sentience

Chapman & Huffman (C & H) might be taken to argue as follows: Humans may treat animals however they want only if humans are superior to animals. But humans are not superior to animals. Therefore, humans may not treat animals however they want. Whatever its merit, this is not C & H’s actual argument. Their point, instead, is that humans often mistreat animals because they tend to perceive them as inferior. A remedy for animal mistreatment would then be acknowledging the deep similarities between us and animals. But is C & H’s suggested remedy likely to be effective to foster …

Researchers, Not Dogs, Lack Control In An Experiment On Jealousy, Jennifer Vonk

Animal Sentience

Cook and colleagues (2018) have developed a clever method to measure fMRI in awake dogs in response to a number of interesting stimuli. As a result, they are able to determine neural correlates of observable behavior. They report that dogs may experience something akin to jealousy because they show greater amygdala activation in response to food being given to a fake dog versus food being placed in a bucket. However, several critical controls are missing which prevent the authors from being able to speak of jealousy.

What Can The Social Emotions Of Dogs Teach Us About Human Emotions?, Dean Mobbs

Animal Sentience

It has long been believed that social emotions such as guilt and jealousy are only expressed in humans. In the case of jealousy, its adaptive value has been linked to the prevention of sexual infidelity or fairness. So why would dogs feel jealousy? I suggest that understanding how social emotions have been bred into dogs can help us understand our own emotions, including their functionality — and potentially their mechanisms.

Lessons From Behaviour For Brain Imaging, Carolyn J. Walsh

Animal Sentience

Integrating physiological and behavioural arousal with social context is fundamental to understanding affect in dogs. Cook et al. (2018) have made a worthy start towards illuminating the neural basis of dog affect underlying resource loss. However, their study depends on retrospective behaviour reports versus direct testing, and an interpretation of differential neural activation that is based on too few dogs. Research groups conducting canine brain-imaging work might: (1) consider collaborative approaches to augment sample sizes and replicability, and (2) take a recent lesson from dog behavioural research regarding a more cautious approach to applying functional labels to physiological and/or behavioural …

What Would We Like To Know By Imaging The Brains Of Dogs?, Ralph Adolphs

Animal Sentience

Using fMRI to study emotions in animals is important, fascinating, and fraught with methodological and conceptual problems. Cook et al. are doing it, and there is no question that they and others will be doing it better and better as time goes on. Where will this lead us? What could fMRI in principle tell us about the minds of nonhuman animals?

Fake Or Not: Two Prerequisites For Jealousy, Juliane Bräuer, Federica Amici

Animal Sentience

Cook and colleagues (2018) use a novel approach to test jealousy in dogs. Although such a non-invasive approach is more than welcome in comparative research, several methodological shortcomings limit the impact of this study. We briefly outline two main problems. (1) There is no evidence that the fake dogs in the study were perceived as real, and thus as social rivals, which would be a prerequisite for jealousy. (2) It is questionable whether dogs generally show the cognitive prerequisites for jealousy, such as attentiveness toward a social rival, the ability to understand intentions, and a sense of fairness. We suggest …

Only The Human Brain Has The Cognitive Capacity For Jealousy, Donatella Marazziti

Animal Sentience

Jealousy is exclusively a human phenomenon because nonhuman animals lack the brain structures regulating the higher processes underlying jealousy.

The Degeneracy Of Behavior And The Rise Of Neuroimaging To Measure Affective States In Dogs, Peter F. Cook, Gregory S. Berns

Animal Sentience

It is gratifying and significant that so many scientists from diverse fields are arguing in-depth regarding a particularly complex set of social emotions in a non-human animal. Emotions play a fundamental role in decision making and information processing. Neuroimaging is important in understanding the cognitive and emotional worlds of non-human animals and can help measure covert emotions lacking clear behavioral correlates. Various experimental approaches could clarify the relative importance of attachment and aggression in jealousy and whether the phenomenon we measured is more akin to human envy or jealousy. Reverse inference from amygdala activation is probably justified because behavior is …

Fill-In-The-Blank-Emotion In Dogs? Evidence From Brain Imaging, Alexandra Horowitz, Becca Franks, Jeff Sebo

Animal Sentience

What is needed to make meaningful claims about an animal’s capacity for subjective experience? Cook et al. (2018) attempt to study jealousy in dogs by placing them in a particular context and then seeing whether they display a particular brain state. We argue that this approach to studying jealousy falls short for two related reasons. First, the relationship between jealousy and the selected context is unclear. Second, the relationship between jealousy and the selected brain state (indeed, any single brain state) is unclear. These and other issues seriously limit what this study can show. It is important not to see …

Pain In Fish: Evidence From Peripheral Nociceptors To Pallial Processing, Michael L. Woodruff

Animal Sentience

The target article by Sneddon et al. (2018) presents convincing behavioral and pharmacological evidence that ray-finned fish consciously perceive noxious stimuli as painful. One objection to this interpretation of the evidence is that the fish nervous system is not complex enough to support the conscious experience of pain. Data that contradict this objection are presented in this commentary. The neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the fish nervous system from the peripheral nerves to the pallium is able to support the sentient appreciation of pain.

Fish Sentience, Consciousness, And Ai, Ila France Porcher

Animal Sentience

The systematic criticism of articles providing evidence that fish and invertebrates can feel pain is discussed. Beliefs are known to be stronger than evidence in the human mind, and could generate this outcry, while from another perspective, the criticisms appear as a territorial move by fishermen against a perceived threat to their domain. The scientific inconsistency in which consciousness is granted to machines but not to fish and invertebrates, purely due to political bias, is pointed out. No basis exists for denying sentience to any life form as long as science is ignorant of the nature and source of consciousness.