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 Ethologist, renowned author, research scientist and international speaker Jonathan Balcombe refers to animals as emotional. He asserts they enjoy fine food, sex, touch and pleasure just like us. He also questions their place in our evolutionary 'food chain.' Jonathan recently toured New Zealand speaking to near capacity crowds to promote his latest book Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good. SAFE asks him questions that result in even more questions!
How long have you been working with animals?
From my earliest memory I was exploring nature, watching ants, beetles, birds, anything that caught my notice. I began formal studies of animal behaviour as an undergraduate student, nearly 30 years ago. You argue that pleasure is important in animals' lives. How so?
Just as pain is nature's way of punishing dangerous or maladaptive behaviour, pleasure is important for rewarding good behaviours which benefit survival and reproduction. Because food, for example, is so important to survival, animals are highly motivated to get it and eat it, just as we are. Pleasures play a huge role in our lives, affecting our hobbies and entertainments, our favorite recipes and even our careers. Similarly, animals respond to the pull of wants and needs - the pursuit of pleasures. Despite all we now know about animals and their sensory capacities, we continue to treat them poorly. Why so?
Frankly, I think it's primarily because we eat them, and we don't want to feel guilty about that. If we accept that they are like us in the most important ways ethically - they feel pain, suffering, pleasure and joy - then we are faced with the big moral question: How can we justify treating them as poorly as we do? Examples of this unjustified treatment include factory farms, abattoirs, whaling, sport hunting, bullfighting and fur-wearing. When I realised I couldn't reconcile my view of animals with my diet, I stopped eating them. That was 23 years ago. Now I have the good fortune to work for an organisation - Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine - that upholds these same values. Man has always regarded himself as the pinnacle of creation. How do you propose to change this deeply ingrained perception?
As Darwin showed us, we are just one of many wonderful and unique expressions of nature. As long as we think we are the only special ones and can run roughshod over the rest of nature, then the future looks bleak for us. When we understand that we are a part of nature, not above it, then our hopes brighten. Implicitly my book gives a prod in that direction. How do you think we should define intelligence and measure it among non-human animals? Are humans really the smartest animals?
We've tended to define intelligence in terms that place humans at the apex. Without a doubt, humans excel at technology, art and literature, for example. But our intelligence has also led to folly, such as weapons of mass destruction, global warming and cigarettes. If intelligence were defined as the pursuit of happiness, perhaps dolphins or crows might out-smart us. Then there is perceptual intelligence. Bats leave us in the dust with interpreting echoes, dogs with smells and migrating birds with navigation.
 Are animals smarter than most of us think they are? Can you provide some evidence to back up your view?
The closer we examine animals the more they surprise us with their intelligence and their awareness. Chickens practice deception, pigeons can categorise images in photographs as quickly as we can, a gorilla plays a joke on a human teacher and a tiny fish leaps from one tide pool to another using a mental map formed during high tide. Animals are as intelligent as they need to be, and they are good at doing things important to their survival. During the winter, a nutcracker (a crow-like bird of mountainous regions) can remember the locations of over 30,000 nuts and seeds that she has buried during the summer months. Evolution favors nutcrackers with good spatial memory. If whales and dolphins are so smart, for example, why can we do with them what we will? Are our aggression and tendency toward dominance necessarily hallmarks of intelligence?
We can control dolphins because we happened to evolve hands and they didn't. In the evolutionary stakes, we got lucky. Our particular intelligence also endows us with an advanced capacity for morality. Gradually, we are coming to realise that it's wrong to make other feeling beings suffer for our own selfish interests. Might doesn't make right. If a more intelligent race arrived from outer space, would they have the right to torture and kill us? I think not! Do you believe that emotions and feelings are an inherent part of the learning process?
The core emotions, such as fear, rage, panic and lust, are now believed to have evolved before consciousness. They are instinctual, but they still play a big role in learning. A gosling instinctively fears the silhouette of a hawk overhead, but she also learns to associate hawks with danger. Secondary emotions - anticipation, surprise, satisfaction, embarrassment, pride and disappointment and so on - require more thinking, and they, too, are associated with learning. A monkey who expects to find a banana under a box is going to change his expectations when he begins to find (to his disappointment and consternation) a piece of lettuce instead. If rats can laugh and have feelings, should such animals be used in research?
Defenders of animal tests and experiments boast that ninety percent of the animals they use are rodents, as if we should somehow be relieved by this! That's terribly unscientific. I've had rats as companions; they are inquisitive, playful, sensitive, complex individuals. I've also published a literature survey showing how laboratory confinement in labs affects the behaviour of rats and mice. Life in a barren plastic box is desperately unstimulating for these highly social and active mammals. Rats' brains become stunted and mice become especially neurotic, gnawing, digging and/or somersaulting for hours on end. Given the chance, they choose opportunities to hide, burrow, explore, forage, build nests (both males and females), try new food and choose social partners. Any closing thoughts?
My book Pleasurable Kingdom aims to enrich our view of animals. They are not just pain-avoiders, but pleasure-seekers. Like us, they enjoy food, sex, play, touch and other realms of pleasure, some of which we may not know. Pleasure is as adaptive for them as it is for us. It's nature's way of rewarding "good" behaviours that promote survival and procreation. Let me close with a story that speaks volumes about the pleasures of animal existence. When the kitchen of an animal shelter in England began getting regularly ransacked, the staff erected a hidden camera to film the goings-on at night. They soon discovered that one dog, named Red, was using his mouth to unlatch his kennel lock and gain access to the kitchen's delicacies. But Red wasn't making a bee-line for the grub; he first opened the locks of his fellow mutts' cells so they could join in. It just goes to show that we aren't the only party animals out there.
Jonathan Balcombe, Ph.D
Born in England and raised in New Zealand and Canada, Jonathan now lives in the United States. He studied biology at York University and Carleton University in Canada before earning his doctorate in ethology (animal behaviour) from the University of Tennessee, studying communication in bats.
He is the author of many scientific papers on animal behaviour, humane education and animal research. Jonathan is currently Research Scientist with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, in Washington, DC. He enjoys bird and nature watching, biking and playing the piano.
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