by Ziya Tong
Slobodchikoff took this observation one step further. He wanted to see how prairie dogs reacted to something abstract that they’d never seen before, so he built plywood cut-outs of circles, squares, and triangles. Then he and his team strung a cord from a tree to their observation tower, hung the shapes on them about one metre off the ground, and pulled them through the colony like clothes on a laundry line. The prairie dogs responded to the new “threats” coming through with different barks. Incredibly, the animals had distinctive calls for “circle” and “triangle,” even though for the colony the shapes were entirely new.*12
Slobodchikoff had also observed that the prairie dog calls appeared nuanced. He wondered if there was in fact more information in each call, if the call for “dog” was the same for all dogs, or if the calls would be different depending on the breed. So he sent four different breeds through the colony: a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, and a cocker spaniel. When he scrutinized the calls, he found that the prairie dogs’ barks were indeed more than simple alarms indicating “dog.” He had a hunch that they might be descriptors.
With people acting as the colony intruders, Slobodchikoff began to record striking differences in the calls. The prairie dogs had different calls for tall humans and short humans. If the people were shaped differently, the barks were reflective of whether the person was fat or thin. And finally another incredible distinction emerged: the rodents had specific barks depending on the colour of the clothes people were wearing.
By controlling the variables, Slobodchikoff could find out what was happening. He had his lab assistants walk singly through the colony, changing one variable: the colour of their T-shirts. The same people would walk through the colony wearing shirts that were either blue, green, or yellow. The results were nothing short of mind-blowing: the prairie dogs barks were describing the intruders.
Slobodchikoff had deciphered what the animals were saying to each other about us. When an assistant wore blue, the prairie dogs barked, “Tall, thin, human, blue,” and when just the color of the shirt changed, the prairie dogs said, “Tall, thin, human, green.”
Our bubble is the belief of human exceptionalism: that we are the only species aware enough to feel, think, and speak. As Slobodchikoff’s studies show, prairie dogs can accurately describe the world around them, not because they are trained to use labels, but because they are naturally communicating what they see.
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IT’S IRONIC THAT WE SAY someone is as “blind as a bat,” because bats in fact have two ways to see. The man who discovered this, and who in 1944 coined the term “echolocation,” was zoologist Donald Griffin. He spent the first half of his academic career studying the remarkable traits of this sonic vision and the latter part focusing on a particular form of human blindness: the belief that we are Earth’s only aware and sentient beings. This blind spot has been strong in the sciences, particularly among animal behaviourists, who until recently lobbied against evidence of animal consciousness, calling studies that supported such evidence groundless and “unscientific.”
Like many thinkers of the past who have challenged the status quo, Griffin met with a flood of criticism in response to his initial work in this area. His 1976 book The Question of Animal Awareness was later called “The Satanic Verses of animal cognition” by one of his critics. There were those within Griffin’s field who lamented that a once-great scientist had fallen and that this new quackery about animal awareness was likely the mark of “premature senility.” We would do well to remember, of course, that the greatest scientists have always questioned humanity’s central role. The same central tenet of this idea—questioning that the universe revolves around us—is what got Copernicus banned and Galileo jailed.
Human exceptionalism is notoriously persistent, however. We refer to animals as though they were objects. An animal is an “it.” The idea that animals are subhuman, that they lack awareness and intelligence, that they are inferior, has led us to treat them as though they are not only property but biological machines. In the early years of laboratory testing on animals, the logic was that animals were not “feeling” but simply reacting. That when “a dog screams when its body is hurt, its vocalization is not the expression of pain but merely the result of a purely physiological process, rather like the ringing of a clock.” As if our own pain weren’t physiological.
For the primatologist Frans de Waal, this type of thinking is a form of neo-creationism, like a decapitated theory of evolution. As he writes, it “accepts evolution but only half of it…It views our mind as so original that there is no point comparing it to other minds except to confirm its exceptional status.” It’s as if evolution stops at the head, and yet, when it comes to bodies, we feel more confident about what we put in or on our bodies after we have tested it on animals. Indeed, we test drugs on animals before human trials precisely because we believe that the effects can be extrapolated, because of our similarities.
And yet it’s important we also respect that we do have differences and that just as it’s impossible to be in another human being’s head and know how they see the world, it is impossible to know truly how a bat, or a chimp, or a dung beetle envisions the same world. The American philosopher Thomas Nagel famously noted this in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”:
Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life….Bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat….I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.
Our minds are alien to other life forms on Earth, just as their minds are alien to our own. And though we may think that animals like our pets know when we are happy or comfort us when we are sad, we are assuming they can make a mental leap that we ourselves are unwilling to make in the opposite direction.
While we may never know what another animal is feeling or thinking, it is no longer a scientific stretch to say that they do feel and think. We have seen grand revolutions in scientific thinking, but a certain dogmatism still remains when it comes to animal intelligence. Thankfully, the rigid notions of our speciesism are slowly fading away. On July 7, 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was signed by a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists. Together, they declared that “convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors….The weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
The old saying is that “the eyes are windows to the soul.” In science, the existence of a soul may be untestable and unverifiable, but the existence of a consciousness is not. Our own eyes are a window into only one way of seeing the world, a sliver of consciousness among millions of other unimaginable ways of perceiving it.
We cannot trust our senses when it comes to perceiving the bigger picture of reality. Indeed, when it comes to what surrounds us, we have already revealed three big blind spots. Our naked eyes and common sense would have us believe that we are the centre of the universe, isolated and separate from the world around us, and superior to all other creatures. But with the corrective lens of science all three of these assumptions can be overturned.
We have mastered sight in another way, however. We are
a singular species, with cameras and high-tech eyes everywhere. We have the technological lenses to see into the vast distances of outer space, to see the tiniest microscopic organisms, to see right through the human body, and to see the very atoms that make up the material world. But there is one fundamental thing that we do not see. When it comes to how our species survives, we are utterly blind.
*1 The study has since been updated to include 3D renderings of faces. It was found that “the fish were able to continue to recognize that image even when the face was rotated by 30, 60, and 90 degrees, from a frontal view to a profile.”
*2 While previous studies have made this suggestion, a new study scrutinizes the finding. For now, more research is required.
*3 Bees can see in the 600 to 300 nm range. How do we know what a bee can see? “We can find out whether an animal can see light of a particular wavelength by testing whether that light will travel through the lens of its eye. The lenses of healthy humans block ultraviolet light, so we cannot see it. But for other species, seeing ultraviolet can make it easier to see in dim light.”
*4 20/200 vision is legal blindness. A person with 20/20 vision would be able to read the big letter E on the Snellen chart from 200 feet away, whereas a person with 20/200 vision can see it at 20 feet.
*5 That said, comparatively speaking, on tests of human visual acuity, we can see detail very well compared to most species. Researchers who studied six hundred animal species found that human sight is about seven times sharper than a cat’s, forty to sixty sharper than that of a rat or a goldfish, and hundreds of times sharper than a fly’s or a mosquito’s.
*6 This intelligence, scientists have proposed, could be adopted in creating algorithms for robots or autonomous cars, a way for machines to keep track of their whereabouts, without human input or interference.
*7 Mysteriously, the animal with the greatest number of opsin genes is Daphnia pulex, the water flea, whose genome codes a whopping 46 opsin genes.
*8 More specifically, by listening for the returning signal strength, the direction and time for the echoes to bounce back from an object, the brain is able to triangulate and form a shape-image of the object.
*9 In 1938, a Harvard undergraduate student, Donald Griffin, used a sonic recorder to hear the sounds bats were making that were above the frequency range of human hearing. This was the first proof that bats use echolocation.
*10 Untrained bees only “scored” by chance: 30 percent of the time.
*11 Meerkats belong to the mongoose family while prairie dogs are rodents. So while they look similar, they are very different.
*12 The prairie dogs seemed unable to tell the difference between a square and a circle.
4
RECIPE FOR DISASTER
Think, occasionally, of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
—ALBERT SCHWEITZER
THE BODY ON THE AUTOPSY TABLE was unrecognizable. What was once a living, breathing being had been radically transformed. It was up to professor of medicine and pediatrics Richard deShazo, along with two pathologist colleagues, to do the examination. Published in the American Journal of Medicine, the Mississippi study was a first: they were about to slice open and dissect a chicken nugget, for science.
Fixed in formalin, the fast food was carefully sectioned, stained, and placed under a microscope. Troubled by Mississippi’s growing obesity epidemic—Jackson has the highest obesity rate in America, with over a third of the population severely overweight—the team wanted to know more about food in the urban centre and exactly what it was that people were eating.
What the researchers discovered “floored” and “astounded” them. Striated muscle, or chicken meat, “was not the predominate component” of the nuggets at all. The nuggets were mostly fat, bone, epithelium (the cells that line the organs and skin), nerve, and connective tissue. The remaining 40 percent was skeletal muscle.
The chicken, or more likely chickens, in each nugget had been transformed into a batter-like paste. Known in the industry as “mechanically separated poultry,” this was tissue that has been forced under high pressure to separate it from the bone. As deShazo explained in an interview, “You can actually vibrate that stuff off, and you get these chicken leftovers, and you can put it together, mix it up with other substances, and come out with a goo that you can fry and call a chicken nugget. It’s a combination of chicken, carbohydrates, and fats, and other substances that make it glue together. It’s almost like superglue that we’re eating.”
Sometimes we do actually eat glue, a delicious little confection that goes by the appetizing name transglutaminase, or TG. Humans have this enzyme—when you scrape your knee, it’s what allows the blood to clot—though the commercial version is either synthesized from bacteria or made from the blood plasma of cows or pigs. And just as it can mend your knee, it can bind the proteins in scraps of meat together so that separate bits can be shaped into a solid piece that looks like a fancy cut. In a similar vein to how Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was stitched together from different body parts, “Frankenmeat” is assembled from leftover body parts, sometimes of separate animals.*1 It works so well that even trained butchers can have a hard time spotting a loin that has been made from separate scraps. In the food industry, the most common “restructured meat” is filet mignon. At cheaper banquet halls and hotels that serve in bulk, this insider trick cuts the costs on an expensive cut of beef.
When it comes to meat, things are almost never what they seem. All meat is dead, of course, but some is a little more dead than most. In 2015, Chinese authorities cracked down on a fourteen-province-wide “zombie meat” smuggling ring. Customs officials confiscated one hundred thousand metric tons of frozen pork, chicken, and beef that dated back to the 1970s and 1980s and that was being sold off to local food stalls and restaurants. According to the Hong Kong Free Press, the forty-year-old meat had been “pumped full of chemical additives to keep them looking fresh.” In Chongqing, the epicenter of the smuggling ring, a cover for the spoilage was the fact that the region is renowned for spicy cuisine. If the meat had any suspect taste it remained somewhat well-masked, though a more serious issue was that the old meat could also have been diseased, as it originated in areas potentially affected by bird flu, foot and mouth disease, and mad cow disease. Frozen-food smuggling is a high-profit trade. The haul from the Chinese bust was worth a total of ¥3 billion (US$430 million), leading inspectors to believe that it wouldn’t be their last.
While zombie meat is well past its expiry date, what we consider “fresh” is still relative. The tuna glistening on ice under halogen lights in your supermarket looks fresh enough, but it could have been caught weeks or months ago and shipped halfway around the world and back after being frozen and thawed a couple of times. Because the bright red of tuna naturally fades into an unappetizing brown, imported fish is often gassed with carbon monoxide to prevent the flesh from discolouring in transit. While the process itself is harmless, it can lead to health risks, since simulating freshness can potentially mask spoiled fish. It also deceives the consumer, who is unable to tell whether the fish they are buying is a month old or has just been caught.
Carbon monoxide won’t make farmed salmon look more delicious. Wild salmon are pink-fleshed because they eat wild food: krill and microalgae. Farmed salmon are fed soy- and corn-based diets. As a result, their flesh is not pink but grey. But would you buy grey salmon? Merchandising experts suspect you would not, so fish farmers use what’s called the SalmoFan, a Pantone-like fan of colours, much like the paint chips used in interior design, so that farmers can create an appropriately pink salmon. Launched by the Royal DSM company in 1989, it is “the industry’s color reference standard for the visual judging and comparison of degrees of pigmentation in salmon flesh perceived by the human eye.” The process is known as “colour finishing,” and the colours you can select for your salmon come in fifteen different shades, from a soft pink to a rich red-orange. Today, 70 percent of salmon in t
he global market is farmed, and all of it is artificially coloured with canthaxanthin and astaxanthin, which are synthetic carotenoids made from petrochemicals.
For eggs, the same company sells a YolkFan, which provides, as its name implies, a palette of sixteen colours to measure egg yolks. In Asia, customers prefer a paler yolk, while in countries like New Zealand, shoppers prefer a deep orange. To cater to different geographic preferences, egg farmers who want the perfect “golden hue” can add Carophyll red and Carophyll yellow to the feed for caged birds that do not forage outside. Most people assume they can tell the difference between eggs from a pasture-raised hen and a factory-farm raised hen, based on the richness of yolk colour. But with feed additives, we can be duped, and colour alone is no longer an indicator of a healthy egg. In fact, colour is just one more facet of marketing.
Fake freshness in the food industry can be traced to its beginnings in the 1950s and ’60s, when food scientists began coating meat with antibiotics. As Maryn McKenna writes in her book Big Chicken, “Hundreds of scientists experimented with coating meats and fish in antibiotic solutions, misting the drugs onto fruits and vegetables and mixing them into milk.” The process was called “acronization,” and became a favoured method for preserving chicken. After butchering, the birds were soaked in an antibiotic solution. By preventing bacteria from spoiling the flesh, processors were able to increase the chicken’s shelf life, and the time it could be kept for sale.
The method came to a rather ignominious end, however, when slaughterhouse workers began getting staph infections, with boils and lesions searing their arms and hands. It was not the antibiotics themselves that caused the infections but rather strains of bacteria that had become resistant to acronization. The process was terminated shortly thereafter. Today, birds are no longer soaked in antibiotics, but in the United States they are soaked in something else: chlorine. While it sounds repulsive, it is actually safe to eat chorine-washed chicken, as long as the concentration of chlorine remains low, in a solution of twenty to fifty parts per million. The method kills off food-borne pathogens like campylobacter and salmonella to ensure that they don’t survive and spread after slaughter. But in essence, chlorine is a chemical blind spot. It prevents us from seeing what we otherwise might not ignore.