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Almost everyone has encountered an injured animal in their life. The response one feels is often a deep sense of sympathy. Yet, how could we ever know what it is like to be a bat? What is it like to be a sick bat? In a forthcoming book chapter with Heather Browning that combines work from our respective dissertations (while I study animal health, Heather studied animal welfare), we tackle just this question—that is the perhaps hardest question in the life sciences. From our article:
What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. Within the literature, there is a common tendency to draw a distinction between ‘disease’ and ‘illness’. While disease is often taken to be an objective judgement (i.e. one of pathology), illness is taken to involve the subjective experience of pathological states: i.e. an awareness that something is ‘wrong’ with one’s body, often through the experience of pain. (Veit and Browning 2020)
Everyone who ever owned a dog must have felt a strong sense of sympathy when they give you "dogs' eyes." It seems like we know that they want to get out, want to eat, want to be cuddled.
Animal researchers in the past were worried that we might just be anthropomorphising the animals around us. But to deny that any such emotions would likewise be a mistake. Dogs, however, coevolved with humans. We are able to tell what our counterpart feels. Many dog owners report an awareness in their dogs, when they've been injured or feeling depressed.
But can we use science to say anything informed about the inner lives of animals? Can we really have an objective science of subjective mental states?
We believe that this question can be answered in the affirmative, even though it is one of the most difficult—perhaps the biggest difficult scientific problems. Philosophers have discussed the problem of 'qualia' of subjective feelings for a long time. Some have even denied that there is anything like that—that feelings are a sort of illusion foisted upon us by our brains. Whatever one's take on these positions, feelings are the most direct encounter we have with the world. It feels like something to think, to touch, to smell—but unlike the phenomenological study of these sensory modalities in humans, animals are unfortunately not able to give verbal reports.
In a future post, I will illustrate how we can take a scientific approach to these matters (a mixture of qualitative behavioral assesment and other tools that I will introduce). For now, I will leave you with our conclusion that we think needs to be heard:
Animal experience is real and needs to be taken seriously—both for ethical and scientific purposes. While we cannot literally hear their voices, there are good phenomenological, yet nevertheless qualitative empirical methods, that can help us to, at least indirectly, make them heard. (Veit and Browning 2020)
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