Animal Consciousness: Are Animals Sentient Beings?

Published by
Anna LeMind, B.A.

Is animal consciousness real? The problem of consciousness still remains confusing and is divided not so much among academic schools, but according to their philosophical approaches.

What is it all about when we talk about consciousness? Is it a necessary part of complex cognitive processes of understanding the world? Are there different types, forms, and levels of development of consciousness? Do animals have consciousness?

In fact, the mystery surrounding the last question is gradually dissipating as more and more features we associate with human thinking and human consciousness can be found in animals. And quite often, these animals are not chimpanzees or orangutans similar to humans. These can be wolves, dogs, and even parrots.

Autistic People: A Distinct Level of Consciousness

Professor Temple Grandin, a prominent scientific figure in the world, is the main character of a bestseller “Anthropologist on Mars” by an equally famous neurologist Oliver Sacks.

Professor Grandin is an autist and an expert in animal behavior. The unique combination of these qualities allowed her to hypothesize that the autistic mind is closer to animals than to the consciousness of people with normal brain development.

Temple Grandin further developed her idea in the book “Thinking in pictures” (1995), and later in the book entitled “Animals in Translation” (2005). By the way, a big-screen film about the life of the famous scientist, played by Claire Dance, was released in 2010.

Temple Grandin identifies four hierarchical levels of consciousness: consciousness within one sensory system, the consciousness that integrates information derived from all sensory systems of the body, consciousness linking this information with emotions, and finally consciousness capable to process these experiences in thought and language.

The researcher places herself and other autistic people only on the second level, where the integration of various types of information takes place, but this information cannot be released through emotions or be automatically translated into linguistic symbols.

That’s why the first book by Grandin is called “Thinking in pictures“. We can, of course, choose not to agree with this classification. However, the theory looks quite versatile and helpful in figuring out how consciousness works in animals.

Examples of Animal Consciousness

The Corvidae: Child-like Consciousness

The cognitive abilities of the Corvidae (crows) are studied by the Cambridge zoologist Nicola Clayton.

Sophisticated and ingenious experiments on ravens, crows, and jays allowed her and her colleagues to identify the types of behavior that are usually associated with the presence of self-consciousness developing in children at the age following the first years of their life.

For example, if a jay notices that it had been watched while it hides its food, it always returns to the “stash” and re-hides it inconspicuously from the prying eyes. It is interesting that this behavior is manifested in these birds only after they steal some other bird’s food stash.

This shows that corvids have a complex ability to model another creature’s mental predisposition. This property entails the perception of what others may know and may not know and how they will act based on this knowledge.

It is clear that such perception should be an essential attribute of self-consciousness and consciousness in general.

Children can develop ways to model the perception of another person’s mental state on average only by the age of four. In fact, it was recently shown that two-year-olds, even when their own experience tells them that the other person cannot peep at them from behind an opaque mask, are unable to adequately interpret this piece of information and use it as part of their behavior.

Another funny example of exceptional animal consciousness of the crow family is their ability to predict changes in the environment caused by their own behavior. They can throw pebbles into a bowl to make the water level rise and get to the food floating on the surface. Humans reach this type of intelligence at the age of up to seven years.

In short, corvids clearly show examples of behavior that can be expected only from creatures with some form of consciousness. To say the least, when seeing this in our own children, we would be astonished by such an amazing ability.

Corvids have episodic memory, and even able to come up with quite complex and multi-step actions, for example, to provide breakfast for the next day. And although not all birds are as “intelligent”, these amazing cognitive abilities are not only present in corvids, but also, for example, in parrots.

The Canidae: Living as a Community

However, the greatest number of studies on animal consciousness and intelligence is conducted on mammals.

During the 2013 conference “The emergence of consciousness in animals and human behavior” in Brussels, American ethologist Marc Bekoff presented the findings of his study devoted to the honesty of coyotes and wolves that live in the Grand Teton National Park.

The scientist showed that during their games, these animals use a number of approaches to improve the chances of playmates to make their activities more interesting and beneficial for all.

More powerful wolves can deter a strong effect of their bites, and sometimes, during the game, they can even temporarily switch roles, when the dominant male will give up his position of the winner to a submissive male.

It turns out that canids are not only aware of their rank within the social hierarchy and related behavior but can even put themselves in another member’s spot and adopt corresponding behavioral patterns. Just like children playing the hide and seek game.

From his observations of coyotes, Marc Bekoff came up with four rules, which always serve as guiding principles of animals’ games:  “be an initiator”, “play fair”, “follow the rules” and “admit it if you are wrong“.

According to the scientist, the cub, which does not comply with these rules, after turning into an adult, cannot form stable social relationships and maintain a good position in the social hierarchy. As a consequence, the mortality rate of these individuals is much higher than of those members of society coyotes that follow these rules.

Hungarian scientists experimented with dogs that are more familiar to us, studying their behavior during interactions with subjects quite different from them: humans and robots. The authors showed that with time, dogs exhibit certain expectations, perceptions of worthy and unworthy behavior, social role, etc.

Bonobos: Empathy

However, chimpanzee species, both common and dwarf (Bonobo), are genetically and anatomically closer to us. No wonder they are the most popular subjects of studies on consciousness.

Recently published results of studies by American scientists describe how bonobos living in the temples of the Republic of the Congo console each other.

The temples are inhabited by a large number of these chimpanzees, many of which are brought here at a young age, after the death of their mother. Here, they are cared for and nursed by people.

Scientists have found that the emotional balance of bonobos is directly related to the willingness to soothe and comfort others after angry outbursts or unsuccessful battle with a rival. This balance and empathic abilities are better developed in the young, who grew up with their mothers.

The ability to be empathic, or empathy, is a key trait for almost all of our social interactions. It allows not only to comfort others but also to put ourselves in their shoes, understand and predict their possible reaction to these or other circumstances. This is a crucial part of modeling the mental state of others mentioned earlier.

No wonder that while summing up the findings presented at the symposium in Brussels, prominent American philosopher Daniel Dennett urged not to rely on a strict distinction between “developed” animals possessing “almost human” consciousness, and all the other “bio-robots” deprived of this ability.

According to Dennett, consciousness evolves very slowly and represents a required property for any large interconnected neural networks of any complex brain.

It is quite noticeable that modern scholars don’t try to study animal consciousness itself but rather some of its manifestations. The ability to recognize oneself in the mirror, the ability to plan one’s actions, empathy, and so on are all the traits that we believe we gain through consciousness.

With this approach, Dennett is absolutely right: these or other aspects of animal consciousness can easily be found in fish, and even in invertebrates.

According to this idea, consciousness by itself ceases to be discrete, something that is either there or not and turns into a vague, gradual structure, with its complexity growing slowly and gradually.

The types and forms of consciousness may be numerous and different from what we tend to expect and include more categories than the four proposed by Temple Grandin. In fact, their number can be as great as the number of animals with a well-developed nervous system.

View Comments

  • Fascinating, and interesting that all these examples involve social animals using what we might call social consciousness: an awareness of their place in a social system. I'm not sure that social consciousness is the same as true consciousness, though, which seems to involve the ability to form a conception of oneself as an abstract yet objective agent. Or something...

  • Very nice to read of such dedicated study in relation to an interesting subject. I feel there is an essential basic key to the understanding of 'consciousness'. Mind, consciousness and spirit, also the processes they facilitate, are all exterior to the material space-time, and exterior to brain (a biological computer that is itself within space-time). I have reached this conclusion from two decades of seance communication with superior entities ...

  • It is possible that another explanation for these behaviours exist. The problem is we interpret the behaviour based on what we think of as "consciousness." Another interpretation of the behaviour may strictly be a form of adaptation that indicates greater learning ability or intelligence than previously thought. We have always thought of brain size as an indicator of higher functioning but now studies show this not to be the case. Smaller brains can have higher functioning and display higher adpatibility, creativity and social cohesion than previously thought. Darwinian models are in sore need of updating based on these studies and previous suppositions based on brain size. We are beginning to see that even dinosaurs with very small brains developed social awareness, supposed empathy and might have even had some form of consciousness. We just don't know and can't really get in their heads so it is still conjecture. It is also conjecture to say that parrots and crows show consciousness when really it might just be intelligence or adaptibility masked as higher functioning. It all depends on your point of view and presuppositions. The game is afoot to understand what it all means.

Published by
Anna LeMind, B.A.