Yes. A large and growing body of research shows other animals feeling fear, joy, grief and affection, solving problems, making and using tools, passing on traditions and communicating in rich and varied ways, and many scientists now regard animal sentience, the ability to feel, as established for mammals and birds, and increasingly for others, though some questions are still argued over, especially about insects and other small creatures and about how far animals reason. Therapeutic Shamanism goes further than the science, seeing animals as the Animal People, our close kin, many of them highly emotional beings whose minds are different from ours, not lesser.
What does it mean to say an animal thinks or feels? #
Two different things are being asked. Feeling is about sentience. In the words of the ethologist Marc Bekoff, “Sentience simply means the capacity to feel.”1 Thinking is about what an animal can work out, remember, plan or understand.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel gave the classic test for whether a creature has any inner life at all, in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974). A creature is conscious if there is something it is like to be that creature, “something it is like for the organism.”2 A bat finds its way by echolocation, a sense none of us has, so we cannot imagine what being a bat is like from the inside. That, for Nagel, gives us no right to deny that its experience is “fully comparable in richness of detail to our own”.3 See What is an umwelt, and what does it tell us about how animals experience the world?
What is the evidence that animals feel? #
A lot of it, from the field and the laboratory. Bekoff gathers decades of it in The Emotional Lives of Animals, with examples such as magpies laying grass beside a dead magpie, elephants waiting for a disabled member of their herd, joy that shows in a loose, bouncing body, and grief after the loss of a mate.4 In her foreword, the primatologist Jane Goodall recalls being told at Cambridge to number her chimpanzees, not name them, and would turn the burden of proof round, writing, “I think we should confront the skeptics by asking them to prove that animals do NOT have emotions.”5
The primatologist Frans de Waal, in The Age of Empathy (2009), describes dolphins holding an injured companion up so that it can breathe, and an elephant from another family lifting a fallen elephant back onto her feet with her tusks.6 On his account empathy is far older than our species, part of the mammal inheritance. In 2012 a group of scientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which Bekoff describes as stressing that many non-human animals are conscious, and proposing that the real question is why consciousness evolved, not whether it did.7
What is the evidence that animals think? #
Some of the most striking evidence comes from birds, long insulted as ‘bird brains’. The science writer Jennifer Ackerman, in The Genius of Birds (2016), describes New Caledonian crows making hooked tools from twigs and leaves, in styles that differ from one area to another and are learnt over a long apprenticeship; ravens remembering their friends for years; and crows that, years after people wearing one particular mask had trapped some of them, still mobbed anyone in that mask, including young birds that never saw the trapping.8 She is clear that our intelligence tests are “human yardsticks”, adding, “I would flunk these sorts of intelligence tests as readily as birds might fail mine.”9
Animals communicate, too, in ways we are only beginning to hear. The philosopher Eva Meijer, in Animal Languages (2019), surveys alarm calls, greetings, names, dialects, whale song and bee dances, and points out that “Definitions of language decided by humans will always favour humans”.10 See What are the different kinds of intelligence, and how has the list grown?
Why did science doubt it for so long? #
For much of the twentieth century, scientists were trained to explain animal behaviour in the simplest mechanical terms they could, and to treat any talk of animal feelings as anthropomorphism, the error of projecting human qualities onto animals. Frans de Waal named the opposite error ‘anthropodenial’, “the denial that we are animals.”11
The film and media scholar Claire Parkinson, in Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (2020), traces how the word, which once meant giving gods a human form, came by the early twentieth century to be used, as a criticism, for giving uniquely human qualities to animals. In her view, its rejection in science and ‘serious’ art was shaped by more than evidence, including the habit of treating emotion and sentiment as feminine, by a ranking of kinds of knowledge that dismissed animism as primitive, and by mixed feelings about popular culture. Anthropomorphism can lead to misunderstanding, but it can also, she writes, be “an effective irritant to humanism and anthropocentrism”.12
The way the questions are asked matters too. The philosopher Vinciane Despret, in What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (2016), shows how often an animal looks stupid or clever depending on the test it is put through and the setting it is kept in, and how differently animals behave with people who take the trouble to know them. The real question the umwelt idea raises, she suggests, is what matters to the animals themselves.13 As Meijer puts it, “The questions that are asked determine the answers that animals can give.”14
Do all scientists and philosophers agree? #
No. Some researchers think there is still a deep gap between human and animal minds. The researchers Derek Penn, Keith Holyoak and Daniel Povinelli hold that only humans reason about things that cannot be seen, such as causes and other minds, and that on this point “Darwin was mistaken”. The philosopher of science Marta Halina, in Animal Minds (2024), replies that this is one hypothesis among many, and that there is no consensus on what the evidence shows. That dispute is about reasoning, not about feeling.15
The philosopher Daniel Dennett, in Kinds of Minds (1996), suggests that many animals may feel pain without suffering in the way we do, since suffering may need a lasting sense of self. He notices at once how convenient that conclusion would be for us, and asks for caution about illusion on both sides. Elsewhere in the book he argues that the ethical course is to err on the side of seeing minds, not missing them.16 Some philosophers go further, holding that conscious experience needs higher-order thought, or even language, which would leave most animals out, and many scientists still prefer the simplest explanation of a behaviour before they reach for a mind. For insects and other invertebrates, the philosopher Jonathan Birch writes, “There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue.”17
Bekoff’s answer to the charge of anthropomorphism is that some of it is unavoidable, and useful if it is done with care. Trying to understand a dog, he writes, “I have to be anthropomorphic, but I try to do it from a dog-centered point of view.”18 And the philosopher Mary Midgley pointed out that the sceptic’s doubt about other minds applies between two humans just as much, so that the barrier “falls between you and me”, not between us and the dog.19
What does Therapeutic Shamanism teach about animal minds? #
That animals are the Animal People, our kin, and that we are Animals ourselves. Many animals are social, and the stresses of living together, with all its cooperation, competition, alliances and bonds, have given them “a complex range of ever-changing emotional states”, from terror, anger, shame and grief to love, empathy, joy, ecstasy and awe. “Essentially, many animals are highly emotional beings.”20 Animals communicate through displays, colours, scents and calls, and “we are by no means the only animal with language, of course”.21 Far from having risen above our animal nature, “we are the very definition of Animal, the epitome of it.”22 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
The science asks whether animals have minds like ours. Therapeutic Shamanism turns the question round. Much research measures animals against ourselves, and so finds us at the top. The mirror test, in which an animal is shown its reflection with a mark on its face, “is not measuring consciousness but self-awareness”, the one kind of consciousness most people recognise.23 Sentience is not the same as self-awareness. Humans are the most self-aware species on the planet, and so the most boxed-in and separate; most other beings are sentient in a less self-centred, more collective way. It is the same with intelligence. When it is defined in human terms, “humans will emerge with the most favourable results.”24 See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Animism goes further than the science in one more way. Most Westerners recognise consciousness in a chimpanzee, or in their own dog or cat, because it is like their own, but “There are many different kinds of consciousness though.”25 In animism, everything is alive and conscious, animals, plants, stones and rivers alike, each in its own way. See Is the living world intelligent?
Can we know what an animal is thinking or feeling? #
Only partly, from the outside, as Nagel and the science writers stress. Therapeutic Shamanism adds a way in from the inside. In a shamanic journey a person can shapeshift into an Animal, and come to know it not as an idea but as a deep felt senseFelt sense. Eugene Gendlin’s term for the whole bodily ‘feel’ of an issue: deeper than emotion, deeper than words, reached through Focusing. Read the full answer, a knowing from the inside out, which brings a sense of connection and bonding with the being experienced.26 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting? It also changes how we treat animals, which is the subject of Does it matter whether an animal is sentient?
