Review

Randall Munroe’s dress

I have already commented on the use of a pseudo-quote from Dostoyevsky in reference 1 at reference 2.

I now move onto more substantive matters.
For me a slightly irritating book, well padded out with animal stories – not to mention shaggy dog stories – which only bear in a marginal way on the advertised subject – what it is like to be a dog. But there is some good stuff and there is enough to convince me that Nagel’s famous essay (references 5 and 6) about (not) knowing what it was like to be a bat was unduly pessimistic and that we might well learn what it is like to be a dog, maybe even what it is like to be a bat.

So, in between the stories, we are told of interesting tests and experiments with dogs and sealions, with some of them involving the scanning of the brains of live animals, some of them the scanning those of long dead animals. Dogs, it seems, can often be trained to keep still in an MRI scanner, no mean achievement given the amount of noise that the things make.

Noting that animals, mammals even, dogs even, vary a good deal in their ability to deal with the sort of tests we routinely administer to children. So, for example, most dogs will follow the pointing of a finger while most monkeys will not. A lot of animals can do the A-not-B test of reference 7, while elephants, despite their large brains, cannot.

One of the objectives of this work was to try and find the regions of dog brain which were activated in the course of various cognitive tests, for example the A-not-B test just mentioned. Were dog brains much like human brains in so far as this sort of thing went? With the not unreasonable thought being that the more human-comparable neural activity arising from higher grade behaviours that you could find in dogs, the more likely it was that being a dog was comparable to being a human.

There was some discussion of what it is that animals see with their eyes. With Berns explaining that some animals – like frogs – use their eyes in ways which do not involve building a picture of the world at large, in the way that we do, at all. Much lower level stuff, with much more direct connections between the eyes which see things and the muscles which do things.

There was an allegation that dogs do not get Alzheimer’s. Which I believe to be false, another example of the sloppiness noticed at reference 2.

There were a number of helpful tutorials. For example, on scanners and scanning. On why we have brains at all. On why they are as big as they are.

Quite a lot on domoic acid poisoning, of which there have been outbreaks affecting both people and sealions and which might be the result of agricultural runoff promoting the wrong sort of plankton or the wrong sort of algae.

It is possible to get sealions to dance; that is to say to get them to bob up and down to a beat and, within reason, to change the bobbing appropriately when the beat changes.

It is possible to teach dogs lots of words, although there is some dispute about what exactly they can then do with them.

The book prompted a variety of interesting digressions. Into the evolution of self-control and cylinder experiments with hundreds of animals. See reference 8. Into the strange appearance of Randall Munroe’s dress. Into the work of Jay & Maureen Neitz on colour vision.

The book peters out after around 180 of the 260 pages, leaving aside acknowledgements, notes and index. Peters out in tales of strange animals and a plea for the rights of all the animals presently used in teaching and in research – which does not add much to the argument, but may well please animal lovers.

There is also a more serious point. What difference does it makes to the rights of animals if we come to know that they are conscious, at least after a fashion? That they know pain and fear in much the same way as we do? With it seeming quite likely that at least some animals are so conscious; perhaps the learned border collie who features in references 3 and 4.

References

Reference 1: What it's like to be a dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience - Gregory Berns – 2017. With the book supported by reference 9.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/a-little-sloppy.html.

Reference 3: Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents - John W. Pilley, Alliston K. Reid – 2011.

Reference 4: http://www.chaserthebordercollie.com/.

Reference 5: What is it like to be a bat? – Thomas Nagel – 1974.

Reference 6: https://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-not-B_error.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/cylinder-test-experiment.html.

Reference 9: http://gregoryberns.com/.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story.