Do Animals Have Souls?

Do Animals Have Personality?

In the scenic Rocky Mountain town of Banff, Alberta, the site of Canada’s oldest national park, it is not un common to see elk grazing on lawns or near riverside trails. Why are elk wandering about town? The town may act as a refuge from wolves—a species that usually goes out of its way to avoid human contact. But elk “ townies,” as the locals refer to them, are a new phenomenon. Prior to the 1...

Do animals have cognitive maps?

Drawing on studies of humans, rodents, birds and arthropods, I show that 'cognitive maps' have been used to describe a wide variety of spatial concepts. There are, however, two main definitions. One, sensu Tolman, O'Keefe and Nadel, is that a cognitive map is a powerful memory of landmarks which allows novel short-cutting to occur. The other, sensu Gallistel, is that a cognitive map is any repr...

Animal Minds Do Animals have Emotional Lives?

Do animals have insight, and what is insight anyway?

We cannot test animals for insight's distinctive phenomenology, the "aha" experience, but we can study the processes underlying insightful behaviour, classically described by Köhler as sudden solution of a problem after an impasse. The central question in the study of insightful behaviour in any species is whether it is the product of a distinctive cognitive process, insight. Although some clai...

Opposing views on animal experimentation: do animals have rights?

Animals have moral standing; that is, they have properties (including the ability to feel pain) that qualify them for the protections of morality. It follows from this that humans have moral obligations toward animals, and because rights are logically correlative to obligations, animals have rights.