Even Cows Get the Blues

Lori Marino on November 1, 2017

Earlier this month a young bull escaped from a slaughterhouse in Brooklyn and ran for his life through the streets of NYC. He ended up two miles away in a field in Prospect Park. The bull, nicknamed Jimmy K, was taken to the Skylands Animals Sanctuary in East New York, Brooklyn.

Jimmy K’s desperate effort to live is characteristic of what all cows feel on their way to slaughter. And a new peer-reviewed paper in the journal Animal Behavior and Cognition, entitled “The Psychology of Cows” authored by Dr. Lori Marino and doctoral student Kristin Allen, provides the scientific evidence to support this conclusion.
Cows share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, and humans.

The authors reviewed dozens of peer-reviewed studies of cognition, emotion, personality and social behavior of domestic cows. They found that cows possess surprisingly high emotional sensitivity, including the ability to “catch” each other’s feelings. This sophisticated capacity, known as “emotional contagion,” occurs when one individual experiences an emotion by witnessing that emotion in another individual. Shown in many socially complex species, including humans, this adaptive ability to share the feelings of others allows both cows and humans to use social cues to deal with challenging situations.

In addition to their empathic qualities, cows are also deeply affected by their own emotions, resulting in a cognitive effect on decision making akin to what we call “pessimism” and “optimism.” For example, the emotional and physical pain of early separation from their mothers and dehorning – two common practices in the dairy and beef industries – can result in a negative feeling that can last for days and impact their willingness to play or take on a new challenge.

With intriguing examples based on an extensive review of the scientific literature to date, the authors conclude that “Cows lead rich and intense social lives; experience a range of emotions; and rely on one another for comfort.” For example, they:

  • ABC_Cover_Nov-2017-smShow excitement and signs of pleasure when they master intellectual challenges, suggesting that cows have a keen awareness of the consequences of their own actions
  • Differentiate between individual humans, other cows, and members of other nonhuman species
  • Possess long-term memories
  • Can navigate complex mazes
  • Love to play with objects and one another
  • Experience judgment bias, a cognitive effect on decision-making analogous to what we call “pessimism” and “optimism”
  • Experience emotions, exhibit emotional contagion, and show some evidence for feeling empathy
  • Stay calmer and less stressed when accompanied by fellow cows even during stressful situations
  • Form strongly bonded social groups, with mothers and calves sharing an especially powerful emotional connection
  • Learn from each other
  • And have distinct, individual personalities.

Dr. Marino explains:

“We have shown that cows share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, and humans.

“The capacities explored in this paper also emphasize the need for additional non-invasive comparative behavioral research with cows in natural settings.

“At present, the available research on cows focuses overwhelmingly on how these animals can be used to maximize the profits of farming industries. Consequently, most studies explore questions such as: “How can we make cows grow bigger bodies in smaller spaces?” and “How quickly after her calf is taken away can a mother cow be re-impregnated to maximize her efficiency?”

“We want to encourage future research to shift away from a focus on how to use cows. Until then, we hope that insight into the feeling, thinking lives of cows inspires a future in which cows are not used as commodities but, rather, celebrated for the individuals they are.”

This is the fourth paper produced with grant money from Farm Sanctuary’s The Someone Project, an endeavor aimed at using scientific evidence to raise the public’s understanding of farm animal cognition and behavior. The first three papers focused on the cognitive and behavioral complexities of fish, pigs, and chickens respectively, and generated international attention.

A white paper based on this publication is also available. Also, the paper is reviewed at Newsweek magazine.

Farm Sanctuary Hoe Down 2017

Lori Marino on September 11, 2017

By Lori Marino

Last month, I joined hundreds of farmed animal advocates, other scientists, and caretakers at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, for the annual weekend celebration of cows, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, turkeys and other farmed animals.

There were presentations, discussion panels, meet-and-greets with human and nonhuman animals alike, evening entertainment, and lots of top-quality vegan food, all on the beautiful sanctuary grounds near the Finger Lakes region.

The goat who scoots around in a wheelchair, and turkeys who loved being tickled under their beaks.I kicked off the presentations with a talk on the Someone Project, a joint project between the Kimmela Center and Farm Sanctuary. The Someone Project publishes scientific evidence to demonstrate cognitive, emotional and social complexity in farmed animals. Our work includes peer-reviewed scientific papers for the academic community, along with accessible and engaging white papers to help people understand that these animals are “someone” not “something.”

In my talk, I shared some of our findings on pigs, chickens, and cows, like how pigs can use mirrors to find hidden food; roosters use deception to gain favor with their favorite hens; and cows jump for joy and have other positive emotional reactions when they realize they’ve completed a task successfully.

FS_how-down-520-Aug2017_JMcArthur-6431Other speakers included Gene Baur, President of Farm Sanctuary, who gave his signature speech about the importance of kindness for all – humans and nonhumans alike.

Australian James Aspey gave a moving and witty talk about how a seven-day experiment in vegetarianism transformed him from being less-than-enthusiastic about animals to a global vegan activist.

And Timothy Pachirat, an assistant professor at U Mass Amherst discussed findings from his undercover fieldwork for nearly six months on the kill floor of an industrialized cattle slaughterhouse in Nebraska and how “big ag” is fighting back against veganism with a range of surprising PR efforts.

During the afternoon that we spent visiting with the nonhuman residents of Farm Sanctuary, I was especially honored to meet Benedict, the goat who scoots around in a wheelchair, turkeys who loved being tickled under their beaks, and some of the most affectionate sheep I have ever met.

What’s on the horizon for the Someone Project? Look for a scientific paper on cow psychology in Animal Behavior and Cognition in November and new reviews of sheep and goat intelligence, emotions, and personality over the next few months.

“Enormously Complex” Orca Brains Lead to Great Stress in Captivity

Michael Mountain on March 20, 2017

In an interview for National Geographic, Whale Sanctuary Project President Lori Marino explains why orcas experience greater stress in marine parks and aquariums than any other species, and with belugas coming in a close second.

Dr. Marino, a neuroscientist by profession, is one of the leading authorities on the brains of cetaceans (whales and dolphins). In the article, she tells author Carl Safina that orcas have brains whose relative size is well above average, and that they are “enormously complex and highly elaborated” in regions that are to do with complex communication systems, culture and social relationships.

One example of this is that entire studies have been devoted to the kinds of complex social interactions in which they engage in the wild. They can keep track of many social relationships at the same time, rely upon learning from others, and each individual orca has a role to play in his or her culture. They lead shorter and more stressful lives in marine parks and aquariums.

One of the latest findings, laid out in a 2016 paper coauthored by Dr. Marino, is that dolphins have more than one ascending auditory tract. That means that sound is processed in two completely different areas of the brain. That’s an example of complexity in the way acoustic processing is integrated with cognitive processing.

We humans only have one such auditory tract, and we don’t know exactly why dolphins (and probably other cetaceans) have two. But we might guess that one of them is to do with processing whistles, while the other is to do with echolocation.

In answer to a question by Dr. Safina about what led her to want to create a seaside sanctuary for whales who are retired from captivity, she says:

For years, we’ve watched dolphins and whales succumbing to the effects of living in concrete tanks and being forced to perform for food. Some of us decided that we needed to move beyond observing and into the realm of providing a realistic solution to these problems. And that is when we decided to build the first permanent seaside sanctuary for these animals.

It is precisely because of their sophisticated intelligence and their naturally complex social relationships that whales and dolphins are so unsuited to life in a concrete tank. The simple fact is they lead shorter and more stressful lives in marine parks and aquariums than their wild counterparts.

It really is not a matter of making the tanks a little bit bigger or deeper or forcing them to perform more “naturalistic” behaviors. The whole enterprise of keeping cetaceans for entertainment and/or research just doesn’t work and the scientific data are abundantly clear on this issue.

You can read the whole interview here.

Human/Nonhuman Chimeras: Saving Our Bodies, Losing Our Souls

Lori Marino on January 27, 2017

I’m a neuroscientist and a new paper in the journal Cell has me worried. The paper details the creation of a human/pig chimera by implanting human pluripotent stem cells into a pig embryo.

While the paper describes very preliminary steps towards the development of human/ungulate chimeras, the goal of the research program is to generate pigs and cows with human organs. Since cows and pigs are similar in size to humans, these organs could then be harvested and transplanted into humans as well as used for research on human disease, development and evolution. The key organs targeted in this research are heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, lungs and brains. Pigs and cows would become, essentially, living containers for human organs.

Another expectation of this kind of research is that these chimeras will serve as improved models for testing drug treatments, as well as boosting the availability of tissue for research and providing an unlimited source of organs.

Pigs and cows would become, essentially, living containers for human organs.

This research is part of a larger trend toward increasingly invasive and manipulative practices, from the domestication of animals for food, thousands of years ago, to the current culture of genetically modifying animals of many kinds: monkeys who show symptoms of autism, transgenic mice with altered vocalizations so that they “stutter”, cows who produce “humanized” milk, and mice injected with human brain cells that cause them to learn faster than normal.

The possibilities have many researchers giddy with excitement. But they also raise serious ethical dilemmas regarding the moral status of these part-human animals. The chimera test subjects have to be human enough to serve as effective models for health research, but not so “substantively humanized” that they qualify for protection from this research altogether.

Certainly, we all want to alleviate human suffering. But the need does not dictate the solution. As we continue down the path of this unprecedented manipulation of sentient beings, we simultaneously limit funding for alternative solutions to our health problems, including prevention, consensual human trials, incentives for organ donation, microchip testing, and in vitro research. All too soon, when we look back on the path of chimeric research that we’ve chosen, we may not like what we see. But it will be too late.

A particular area of concern is the creation of chimeras with human brain cells. These organisms may be capable of self-awareness to the extent that they understand their identity and circumstances, which will produce unbearable suffering. Will we know when the phenomenology of such a being has crossed, what for almost all people would be, the generally-accepted line of decency and morality? If we cannot say with certainty that this will never happen, we need to stop right now before we find ourselves in a world where there is no line.

These concerns about chimeric research do not negate the already potent ethical issues associated with mainstream invasive animal research. Tens of millions of animals are sickened, injured, genetically manipulated and killed in biomedical labs every year. And a robust body of scientific literature has shown that other animals are more self-aware, emotionally and cognitively complex than we previously thought, leading to the inescapable conclusion that we have already crossed a number of moral lines. Chimeric research will only exacerbate the suffering of animals and move it into areas of unforeseen consequences for which we are totally unprepared.

Unless we confront these issues now, we will find that our unrestricted efforts to save our bodies from sickness came at an unwelcome cost: the loss of our souls.

It’s the Year of the Rooster in More Ways than One!

admin on January 3, 2017

In case you haven’t been reading your Chinese placemats lately, 2017 is the Year of the Rooster. And we are kicking the year off with a new peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious journal Animal Cognition, entitled “Thinking Chickens: A Review of Cognition, Emotion and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken,” authored by Dr. Lori Marino.

Dr. Marino, Executive Director of the Kimmela Center and Lead Scientist for The Someone Project, reviewed dozens of peer-reviewed studies of cognition, emotion, personality and social behavior of domestic chickens. And while chickens are generally considered low birds on the totem pole when it comes to our appreciation of their intelligence, the scientific evidence leads to the very different conclusion that they are more intelligent, complex and sensitive than most people give them credit for.

Marino concludes that “Chickens are just as cognitively, emotionally and socially complex as most other birds and mammals in many areas.” For example, chickens:

  • Demonstrate self-control and self-assessment, capacities that indicate self-awareness;
  • Communicate in complex ways, including through referential communication, which may depend upon their ability to take the perspective of another animal;
  • Can reason and make logical inferences. For example, chickens are capable of simple forms of logic acheterdufrance.com that humans don’t develop until about age seven;
  • Appear able to anticipate future events;
  • Are behaviorally sophisticated, discriminating amongst individuals, engaging in clever social strategies and learning from other chickens;
  • Have complex negative and positive emotions, and exhibit emotional contagion and simple empathy;
  • Have distinct personalities.

Dr. Marino concludes that “chickens share a number of cognitive capacities with other highly intelligent species such as dogs, chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and even humans. There is good scientific evidence to suggest a need for further non-invasive comparative behavioral research with chickens in natural settings, as well as a complete re-framing of current views about their intelligence and our overall relationship to them.”

This is the third paper produced with grant money from Farm Sanctuary’s The Someone Project, an endeavor aimed at using scientific evidence to raise the public’s understanding of farm animal cognition and behavior. The first two papers focused on the cognitive and behavioral complexities of fish and pigs, respectively, and generated international attention.

A white paper based on this publication is also available.

"I Am NOT an Animal!" Symposium

Lori Marino on December 8, 2016

Why is it that despite the continuing work of animal protection, conservation and ecological groups, the situation for most of our fellow animals continues to go from bad to worse?

And why are we humans unable to come to grips with what’s happening and to change our behavior?
These are the critically important questions we’re setting out to answer at a two-day symposium coming up in February in Atlanta, Georgia.

The conference, entitled “I Am NOT an Animal!”, explores the idea that at the core of our fraught relationship with our fellow animals is the deeply-rooted psychological need to tell ourselves that “I am not an animal!”

Our speakers are leaders in the fields of human-animal relationships, animal legal rights, animal cognition and conservation, and the psychology of our relationship with other animals. They include Carl Safina, Hal Herzog, Steve Wise, Randy Malamud, Sheldon Solomon and Michael Mountain.

For more information, background, videos, bios, complete agenda, and registration details, please go here.