Subject: Tool use
Date: Jul 1 21:31:35 1999
From: Michael Price - mprice at mindlink.bc.ca


Hi Tweets,

Just to warn you in advance: this response to Jim Rosso's post wanders away
from the topic of birds; if you're a 'birds only' subscriber, best delete now.

Jim Rosso writes;

>I am just finishing my work to get my masters degree in Education and about
>to start the doctoral program. So I am involved in many discussions on
>intelligence and communication. I am always surprised that people have such
>strict categories on who has intelligence and who doesn't. They are very
>reluctant to accept the notion that non-human animals can think. I pass
>along these notes as examples of what I consider thinking. They respond
>periodically that it is really advanced stimulus response. So the debate
>goes on.

Repeatedly moving the goalposts of what constitutes 'thinking' further
downfield is a known advanced human stimulus response to the concept that
animals may share traits hitherto believed solely human.

>While people "admire nature" and maybe will consider Darwinian concepts,
>they are still reluctant to consider that we may have more in common with
>other animals than we thought.

Actually, I believe the phrasing of this may be nitpicking but important:
it's that *they* have more in common with *us*--it offends some that we are
not unique in the ways we have congratulated ourselves in innumerable ways
of being. For example, that idea runs up smacko against all but the least
literal interpretations of the scriptures, and besides raising the normal
'this is what I believe/this is what I know' religious dichotomies so
familiar to this modern world, may also introduce some interesting political
and social quandaries as well.

If, for example, different chimpanzee groups have developed actual cultures,
even language, as recent studies seem to prove, as well as simple
technologies and military strategies (i.e., warfare between groups, perhaps
learned from observing human guerillas--no macabre pun intended--and
soldiers. that abound in some African forests) intelligently employed, and
then what separates them from having a rudimentary humanity by the very
criteria we've used to establish the definition of what it means to be
human? Is then logging their forest and thus extirpating them a form of
ethnic cleansing? Or is shooting them for bushmeat not hunting but murder?
Does using them for medical research in the documented conditions in which
they've been kept, constitute a violation of indigenous rights if not the
outright crime of torture--or even a war crime if humans use chimpanzees to
test chemical or biological weaponry?

Would they have rights of protection--until now reserved for humans--under
the UN charter? Who would represent their interests in world political
bodies? Would laws of territoriality and sovereignty apply to their groups,
their cultures? Do we have a responsibility to teach them more sophisticated
survival skills, such as medical techniques beyond their self-medicating
with indigenous forest plants, or not intrude on their culture at all as we
now do in recognising the cultural sovereignty of many aboriginal peoples?
If they fall within the definition of 'human' under our criteria--that is,
intelligent, accultured, tool-using, self-aware--at what point does our
actual legal and political responsibility--as opposed to the ethical and
practical motives already extant--to protect them or any other acculturated
animal from other humans begin?

If we think *we* have more in common with *them*, a subtly different
position, we are still able to maintain an implied sense of superiority and
patronise them rather than acknowledge our debts and responsibilities to
them, whatever those may eventually be. Intellectually, we're still moving
goal-posts, except we're waiting until after dark to do it.

Michael Price (who is still kinda breathless from blowing out the 132
candles on Canada's birthday cake earlier today)
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net