associative learning that have behavioural
as well as functional and structural char-
acteristics are more likely to be conscious
(Bronf man, Ginsburg, and Jablonka, 2016).
Or we might try to grade animals by intel-
ligence, but one danger is that we base
our idea of intelligence on our own spe-
cies-specific abilities and fail to appreciate
other kinds of intelligence, like those of
bees or elephants or octopuses (Adams and
Burbeck, 2012; Godfrey-Smith, 2016). Even
in more familiar creatures, comparisons are
difficult. On some scales, chimpanzees are
put near the very top and birds, with their
tiny ‘bird-brains’, much lower down. It is true
that chimpanzees can work out how to pile
up boxes to reach a suspended banana, but
then ravens are just as good as the great apes (and small children) at planning
ahead in a domain-flexible way for tool use and bartering (Kabadayi and Osvath,
2017). Is one species more intelligent than the other, or more conscious?
And what about suffering? Does one species suffer more than the other? We have
empathy for other people when we see them crying or in distress, which may
be reasonable on the assumption that they
are similar to us. We may also feel empathy
for the dog who squeals when hurt, the
tiger pacing up and down in a tiny cage,
or the lobster screaming in boiling water.
But could any, or all, of them be Cartesian
automata that feel nothing? This is not an
empty question, since we can build a sim-
ple toy dog, wired up so that if you stand on
its foot it whines, but few would believe it
was capable of suffering. A few switches are
not sufficient. But what is sufficient for the
capacity to suffer (Linzey, 2009)?
Does suffering even require a capacity for
consciousness? We may assume it does, but the philosopher John Carruthers
(2004), using a higher-order account of consciousness, argues that suffering is
possible without phenomenal consciousness; most animals are probably not
capable of higher-order thoughts and therefore not conscious, but what makes
pain awful is the first-order content. Marian Stamp Dawkins (2008) agrees that the
problem of consciousness is separate from the problem of suffering: even though
we associate human suffering with the subjective experience of emotions, emo-
tions can also be unconscious.
Does any of this allow us to decide which animals are capable of suffering? The
argument over lobsters has been especially fierce. The screaming noise they
make when boiled alive upsets people but is probably produced by air being
forced out of the shell. Since crustaceans have a simple brain with no cortex,
FIGURE 10.7 • Chimpanzees use sticks and leaves
as tools, for example for fishing
termites out of holes. There is even
evidence that in the past they used
stone tools, and that females may
be more adept with tools than
males. Is this intelligent behaviour
a sign of consciousness?FIGURE 10.8 • NC crows make complex hook tools
in the wild from twigs, and use the
hooks to extract prey from crevices
(J. Troscianko and Rutz, 2015) –
shown here from a camera hidden
inside a tube (J. Troscianko et al.,
2012). Does this make them more
intelligent than other crow species,
or other birds? Does it make them
more conscious? Or does it have
more to do with being able to
hold a tool and see what you’re
doing with it, and then naturally
developing more solutions that
depend on tools?