Consciousness, Animal | 139 for problem behaviors Humans need to appreciate the uniqueness and wonder of their animal companions Further Reading American College of Veterinary Behaviorists, www.dacvb.org American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior, www.avsabonline.org American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior Position Statements Accessed November 6, 2008 www.avsabonline.org Animal Behavior Society, www.animalbehav ior.org Hart, B L., and Hart, L A 1988 Perfect puppy: How to choose your dog by its behavior New York: W.H Freeman & Company Landsberg, G., Hunthausen, W., and Ackerman, L 2003 Handbook of behavior problems of the dog and cat New York: W.B Saunders Company Lindsay S, R 2000 Handbook of applied dog behavior and training, Vol 1: Adaptation and learning Ames: Iowa State Press Serpell, J 1995 The Domestic Dog: Its evolution, behaviour, and interactions with people Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Melissa Bain CONSCIOUSNESS, ANIMAL There would be no concern for animal welfare and no political movement towards animal rights unless people were convinced that some animals are conscious, sentient beings whose feelings and experiences have the positive and negative subjective qualities that make some experiences pleasurable and others unbearable What convinces people that this is true? For many it is plain common sense—they believe they can see when an animal is happy or sad But others have been trained to be skeptical of such appearances, and they seek scientific justification for claims about animal cognition and consciousness Although consciousness is not the only morally significant property, others might include satisfaction of desires and goals, consciousness is perhaps the most significant for animal ethics The 19th-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham summed it up with the question “Can they suffer?” although, perhaps “Can they experience pleasure?” is just as relevant The past decade has seen the establishment of the field of animal cognition through the publication of textbooks, anthologies, and a dedicated journal While much of the work on animal cognition is centered on primates, domestic dogs are rapidly becoming a model species for asking evolutionary questions about cognition, and there is fascinating work on birds, especially members of the crow family, and on insects, especially honeybees, and other species too numerous to mention here However, most of the scientists contributing to this boom have explicitly bracketed questions about consciousness and have focused instead on cognition, roughly defined as the capacity of animals to flexibly and adaptively exploit the sources of information in their physical and social environments Many, but not all, of the scientists doing this work share the common sense view about animal consciousness, but most of them believe that the topic is scientifically intractable Nevertheless, as the range of flexibility and adaptiveness of animal cognition comes into better focus, it is hard to think that this doesn’t tell us something about animal consciousness Scientific progress in understanding the molecular, neural, genetic, and hormonal mechanisms underlying animal behavior has been even more rapid over the past decade Because of its clinical significance, pain has been studied intensively, but there has also