Cognitive Ethology

This chapter addresses a theoretical problem that arises when we treat non-linguistic animals as thinkers in order to explain their behavior in psychological terms. Psychological explanations work because they identify beliefs and desires that show why the action in question made sense from the agent’s perspective. To say that an action makes sense in the light of an agent’s beliefs and desires is to say that it is the rational thing to do (or, at least, a rational thing to do) given those beliefs and desires. And that in turn means that, in at least some cases, an agent might reason her way from those beliefs and desires to acting in the relevant way. Most models of reasoning, however, treat it in terms of logical operations defined over linguistic structures, which makes it difficult to see how it might be extended to non-linguistic creatures. This paper develops a framework for thinking about the types of reasoning engaged in by non-linguistic creatures. It explores non-linguistic analogs of basic patterns of inference that can be understood at the linguistic level in terms of rules of inference involving elementary logical concepts. The three schemas discussed (reasoning from an excluded alternative and two types of conditional reasoning) are highly relevant to animal practical reasoning, and I show how animals might apply them without deploying any logical concepts.

Dai tempi di Aristotele fino alla prima metà del Novecento, occuparsi di fenomeni culturali, studiare culture passate o esistenti, ricostruirne la storia e analizzarne linguaggi, produzioni e tradizioni ha significato occuparsi esclusivamente di culture umane, e l’uomo è stato considerato l’unico “animale culturale”. Oggi, a poco più di mezzo secolo dall’inizio di quella rivoluzione scientifica che, negli anni Sessanta, condusse alla scoperta dell’esistenza di tradizioni e usi differenziati in varie specie di primati, cetacei e uccelli, anche se l’etologia culturale è disciplina ancora giovanissima, possiamo considerare ampiamente riscontrata l’ipotesi dell’esistenza di culture non umane, e altamente probabile che tutte le specie di mammiferi e uccelli sociali esistenti abbiano sviluppato al proprio interno, da milioni di anni, diverse tradizioni comportamentali e comunicative.1 Sappiamo, altresì, che tali differenziazioni degli usi, tramandate attraverso l’apprendimento sociale in diverse popolazioni di una medesima specie, non sono prerogativa esclusiva di mammiferi e uccelli. Ricerche svolte negli ultimi quaranta anni hanno evidenziato l’esistenza di tradizioni locali intraspecifiche in varie spe
1Come vengono definiti oggi i concetti di “cultura” e “tradizione” in ambito etologico? “Chiamiamo «tratti culturali» quei modelli di comportamento condivisi da membri di popolazioni animali che dipendono in qualche misura da apprendimenti socialmente mediati e informazioni socialmente trasmesse. Chiamiamo «variazione culturale» quelle differenze fenotipiche tra individui, osservate all’interno di, o tra, popolazioni, che sono in qualche misura, attribuibili a differenze socialmente apprese. Usiamo i termini «tradizione» e «cultura» come sinonimi»” (Laland, Kendal, Kendal 2009, pp. 178, 179; traduzione mia).
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ANIMAL STUDIES 26 cie di pesci teleostei, in particolare tra specie delle grandi barriere coralline (Helfman, Schulz 1984; Bshary, Wickler 2002; Laland, Atton, Webster 2011), e ciò fa pensare che fenomeni analoghi potrebbero essere riscontrabili in tutti i vertebrati acquatici e terrestri, che dai pesci ossei derivano.

Even a cursory look at the extensive literature on mindreading in nonhuman animals reveals considerable variation both in what mindreading abilities are taken to be, and in what is taken as evidence for them. Claims that seem to contradict each other are often not inconsistent with each other when examined more closely. And sometimes theorists who seem to be on the same side are actually talking at cross-purposes. The first aim of this paper is to tackle some important framework questions about how exactly the mindreading hypothesis is to be stated. It emerges in sections 1 and 2 that there are three importantly different versions of the mindreading hypothesis that need to be distinguished. The first (which I call minimal mindreading) occurs when a creature’s behavior covaries with the psychological states of other participants in social exchanges. The presence of minimal mindreading is not in itself evidence for the presence of what I term substantive mindreading. Substantive mindreading involves attributions of mental states. There are different levels of substantive mindreading, varying according to the category of mental state attributions that they involve. Section 2 explores different types of substantive mindreading, according to the extent to which they involve explicitly representing the agent’s backgtround psychological profile. This gives us a principled way of distinguishing propositional attitude mindreading from perceptual mindreading.

It is clear that much of the reasoning behind attributions of mindreading abilities to nonlinguistic creatures is analogical in nature. We see in section 3 that much of the discussion in this area proceeds on the basis of a double analogy between animal cognition and human cognition. Researchers assume both that animals solve many problems of social coordination that are analogous to problem solved by humans and that since humans solve those problems using mindreading strategies, so too do non-human animals. How we apply the second analogy, of course, depends upon our interpretation of the particular mindreading strategies that humans employ – in particular, it depends upon the centrality of propositional attitude psychology (or folk psychology) in human social understanding and social coordination. There are good reasons for thinking that the role of propositional attitude psychology in human social life is very much over-stated. This has repercussions for how we think about substantive mindreading in nonhuman animals. It very much weakens the analogical case for identifying propositional attitude mindreading in nonlinguistic creatures. 

Suspicion of claims of propositional attitude mindreading in non-human animals turns out to be well-founded. In section 4 I present a revised version of an argument I have given elsewhere (Bermúdez 2003) to show that the most sophisticated form of substantive mindreading (the type of mindreading that exploits the concepts of propositional attitude psychology) is only available to language-using creatures.

Le società animali presentano un’incredibile molteplicità di articolazioni sistemiche e strutturali, tese a regolare le dinamiche interattive, comunicative, affiliative che si vengono a creare e che inevitabilmente richiedono predicati funzionali specifici. Quando parliamo di comportamenti prosociali intendiamo una varietà di espressioni, non necessariamente attribuibili a una medesima famiglia motivazionale o a un ciclo funzionale specifico, che si caratterizzano per il fatto di vedere l’individuo spendere delle risorse per il gruppo, sia che tale atteggiamento comporti un ritorno vantaggioso per il soggetto agente sia che sia più difficile riscontrare tale ristorno o addirittura sia palesemente in contrasto con gli interessi dell’agente. I comportamenti prosociali presentano un panorama articolato di situazioni: dalla cooperazione per raggiungere un obiettivo comune alle pragmatiche comunicative tese all’ingaggio o alla regolazione sociale, dalle espressioni epimeletiche alle offerte e agli atteggiamenti rassicuranti-protettivi che si riscontrano nel corteggiamento.

This paper discusses the role that Konrad Lorenz, already known as the founding father of comparative ethology, played from the 1940s in the birth and development of a new research area, important for its philosophical and scientific fallout: Evolutionary Epistemology (EE).
The first and second sections examine the auroral phase of this process: the successful collaboration between the young Lorenz and the philosopher E. Baumgarten; their attempt to rework the Kantian doctrine of knowledge in the light of the Darwinian theory of selection and evolution; the landing of Lorenz to a first formulation of his “phylogenetic apriorism” with the essay Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology (Lorenz 1941). In this paper, Lorenz elaborated the theoretical core of an original synthesis between Darwinism and Kantism and ethology and theory of knowledge, which later led him to conceive the anatomical, morphological and behavioral differentiation of the species as a “process of acquisition of knowledge” in Behind the Mirror (Lorenz 1973).
The following sections examine the development of EE from the 1970s to the 2000s. In the early 1970s Lorenz’s “Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge” seemed to converge with the reflections independently developed by the philosopher K. Popper and the psychologist D. Campbell. From the dialogue between the three scholars stemmed the first program of Evolutionary Epistemology (EE): an “integrated theory” that aimed at clarifying both the continuities and differences between biological evolution and human socio-cultural development.
The final section shows how, apart from some common general assumptions, a number of fundamental divergences emerged among the EE’s founding fathers, specifically regarding their explanation of the internal organization of living beings and of the human social, cultural and scientific evolution, which, notwithstanding their efforts, turned out to be impossible to reconcile.

Título del libro: Naturaleza humana, naturaleza animal
Compiladores: Antonio Diéguez y José María Atencia
Editorial: Biblioteca Nueva, Madrid, 2014

Índice

Julián Almaraz
La profecía incumplida de Darwin
José María Atencia
Aspectos del simbolismo animal: El animal y sus máscaras

Carlos Castrodeza
Humanos, animales, plantas, derechos, deberes

Antonio Diéguez
Pensamiento conceptual en animales

Pedro Fernández-Llébrez
¿Conciencia animal?

Víctor Gómez Pin
Más allá de los códigos de señales animales: Lo irreductible de la condición humana

José Lasaga Medina
Homo sapiens: El animal enfermo

Alfredo Marcos
Naturaleza humana y derechos de los animales

Pascual Martínez Freire
¿Son los seres humanos animales racionales?

Ramón Muñoz Chápuli
Naturaleza humana, naturaleza animal

María Victoria Parrilla
La filosofía y (eso que llaman) el animal

Jorge Riechmann
Acerca de la condición humana

Jesús Zamora Bonilla
Como el ave que escapó de su prisión. O sobre el puesto de la libertad en la naturaleza

Resumen del libro

En las últimas décadas del siglo XX, en buena medida debido al cuestionamiento del proyecto humanista que formó parte central del ideario de la Modernidad, al que se culpó de algunos de los desastres globales originados en nuestro ámbito cultural (guerras mundiales, totalitarismo, deterioro medioambiental…), la reflexión filosófica ha vuelto sus ojos sobre una vieja cuestión, pero esta vez para replantearla en términos nuevos: la cuestión del lugar del hombre en la naturaleza, y muy particularmente, de sus relaciones con los animales.

Los avances logrados por algunas disciplinas biológicas, como la etología cognitiva, la primatología, la paleoantropología, la ecología del comportamiento, la neurobiología, etc. han dado pié a diversos autores para sostener que, tal como cabía esperar desde una perspectiva darwiniana, no existe una separación esencial entre hombres y animales. Que incluso en sus capacidades cognitivas, que son las que el pensamiento tradicional señalaba como exclusivas y distintivas del ser humano, existe una continuidad bastante grande entre los distintos organismos vivos, incluyendo al propio ser humano. Los estudios sobre cognición animal vienen mostrando que compartimos con los grandes simios no sólo la capacidad de razonamiento con un cierto nivel de abstracción, sino también sentimientos de empatía hacia los congéneres que pueden situarse en la base de la moralidad. Ello ha llevado incluso a que crezca el número de los que defienden la necesidad de conceder ciertos derechos a los animales.

Estos planteamientos, sin embargo, han generado un intenso debate, que en múltiples ocasiones no ha quedado reducido al mundo académico, sino que ha saltado al mundo de la política y de los medios de comunicación de masas (basta recordar la reciente polémica suscitada en España a raíz de la prohibición de las corridas de toros por el Parlamento de Cataluña). Algunos críticos ven en este intento de acercar la naturaleza animal a la naturaleza humana una pendiente deslizante que puede conducirnos desde la modesta, y quizás razonable, pretensión de rebajar el antropocentrismo de la época moderna a un abierto antihumanismo cuyas consecuencias políticas y culturales pueden ser peores que los daños que se pretenden evitar.

Este libro recoge una serie de trabajos de destacados especialistas en estas cuestiones. Pretende con ello poner al día al lector en los argumentos centrales que han sido esgrimidos en el mencionado debate, y ayudar con ello a que éste tome una posición personal que sea producto de una reflexión bien informada.

Los temas centrales que son presentados y discutidos en el libro son los siguientes:
- Separación o continuidad ontológica entre seres humanos y animales
- Derechos de los animales
- Capacidades cognitivas en animales desde el punto de vista de la ciencia actual
- Concepciones de los animales a lo largo de la historia
- Emociones y libre albedrío en animales
- ¿Existencia de una naturaleza humana?
- Animales y ecología
- Conciencia animal

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book summary in downloadable .doc]      Our instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection— evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not in today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons—that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization.

Affective Ecologies is an exploration of our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, the book develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology in order to give us a better understanding of how we interact with such narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds. How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and ecodystopian texts? These are the central questions that are explored in the three parts of the book, questions that are important for anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives.

Social scientists and folk views have long had it that there is an association between religiosity and prosocial behaviour, but hard evidence for such a relationship is limited. Studies show that religiosity is correlated with self-reported prosociality, however this relationship is not very clear when it comes to observed prosocial behaviours. Experimental studies reveal a link between religious priming and prosocial behaviours, and remarkably such effects hold irrespectively of degrees of religiosity. Building on and combining the strengths of previous field designs, I report here the results of a field experiment in Mauritius examining the effects of religious environments on cooperation in a naturalistic setting. These results were consistent with previous findings that religious cues may increase cooperation. Importantly, this effect was not dependent on degrees of prior religiosity. Plausible interpretations of such effects are discussed.

This article characterizes briefly the central aims of the semiotic study of animal life. Semiotic sciences in general can be defined as approaches to the study of various forms of knowing (as different from physical sciences, which study various things in the world), considering that knowing is possible only due to semiosis. The semiosphere is the sphere of knowing (knowing being always related to learning and acting). The basic types of knowing (as well as semiosis) include the vegetative, the animal, and the cultural. Zoosemiotics is focused on the animal type of knowing. Animal knowing is characterized by its use of iconic and indexical relations, whereas the extensive use of symbols is a prerequisite of specifically human (cultural, language-based) semiosis. However, the human or- ganism also includes animal knowing as an inevitable part of its knowing. Knowl- edge cannot be credible if it is exclusively symbolic; it requires that iconic and indexical semiosis be involved.

El egoísmo psicológico es una teoría que afirma que nuestras acciones morales son motivadas, siempre y sin excepciones, por deseos últimos (ultimate desires) que buscan satisfacer el interés propio. Dicho de otra forma, los deseos últimos que motivan la acción moral son siempre deseos que buscan satisfacer el bien propio y nunca el bien de los demás, a menos que sea por el interés propio. Al ser una teoría sobre los deseos últimos, el egoísmo psicológico presupone que hay deseos que no funcionan de forma instrumental, es decir, deseos que no son satisfechos con el fin de satisfacer un deseo mayor, sino que son satisfechos como el fin último de una acción moral (ver Stich et al 2010: 150-51). El egoísmo psicológico busca explicar la naturaleza de la motivación moral. Este punto es importante, ya que distingue al egoísmo psicológico como una teoría que busca explicar como de hecho son las cosas, es decir " no es una teoría sobre lo que debiera ser el caso, sino que es en cambio sobre, de hecho, lo que es el caso " (Feinberg 2013: 167, cursivas en el original). El egoísmo psicológico no dice nada acerca de que sea bueno, o mejor, o más deseable ser egoísta, sino que, dada la naturaleza del ser humano, este siempre actúa moralmente por motivos egoístas. Tampoco hace ningún juicio valorativo sobre dicha motivación, es decir, no afirma ni asegura de ninguna forma que sea moralmente aceptable o no estar motivado por motivos egoístas. Esto se puede resumir en que el egoísmo psicológico es una teoría descriptiva, no normativa, ya que intenta dar cuenta de cómo y por qué los seres humanos actúan moralmente dada su naturaleza (ver Sober 2000: 129). 1.1 Antecedentes del egoísmo psicológico El egoísmo psicológico es la base de teorías ampliamente aceptadas en ciencias sociales y filosofía, por ejemplo, en economía es un principio del cual se parte para explicar las acciones de los agentes el que estos actúan de forma egoísta, y que ninguna otra motivación es útil para predecir las acciones de un agente (ver Sober 2000: 129, Stitch et al 2010: 147).

Eberhard Trumler fu un etologo allievo di Konrad Lorenz. Una certa corrente cinofila continua a riferirsi a lui, nonostante il concetto di relazione sia cambiato di molto dai suoi tempi. In questo articolo rifletto su alcuni punti tratti dal suo libro A TU PER TU CON IL CANE...

Some 2200 years ago, people belonging to the Pazyryk archaeological culture gathered together to bury their dead in mounds on high plateaus in the remote Altai Mountains in the center of Asia. Entire horses—and often groups of horses—were sacrificed at these funerals and interred with the men and women, presumed leaders and commoners alike. By employing an human-animal studies approach to these burials, in this chapter I digress from the archaeological position which views nonhuman animals as calories or constructs to one which includes animal others as impactful upon human social realities.

After grounding this approach in multidisciplinary theory, I bring into the discussion facets of horses, and of human-horse relationships, through both ethological studies of horses and an inside auto-ethnographic research strategy which uses my position within the context of those I shall term working riders: riders who live with and care for horses and possess the ability and knowledge to school them to be ridden. I touch on aspects of human-horse intersubjectivities and situate particular elements of the Pazyryk horse burials. I then attempt to phenomenologically recreate the actual killing of the Pazyryk horse from the perspective of the humans—and the horses—and suggest some mental and emotional processes that might have caused certain behaviors of both at the burial ceremony. Finally I reflect on the viability of creating relational archaeologies of human-animal interactions which allow for both essentialist and constructionist perspectives.

Donald Redfield Griffin (1915–2003), Windows on nonhuman minds, in Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes (eds.), Process Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of Mind (Whitehead Psychology Nexus Studies II), Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 219 sq. [This is one of the last publications of D. R. Griffin, received in March 2002.]

Prior interpretations of the tattoos of nonhuman animals etched upon the preserved human bodies from the Pazyryk archaeological culture of Inner Asia have focused on solely human-generated meanings. This article utilizes an ethnoarchaeological approach to reassess these tattoos,
by analogizing the nature and possibilities of human-ridden horse intersubjectivities in the present with those of the past. As enlightened by people who live with horses, including the author, the process of learning to ride can be seen as an interspecies apprenticeship process, where both humans and horses pass along social knowledge as thoughtful actors with defined roles. From this perspective, the horse tattoos are presented as polysemic materializations of the
bonds between particular Pazyryk horses and people, of blended identities, and of cosmological values related to time, memory, and belonging. The article concludes that exploring smaller-scale
human-nonhuman animal interactions in the present allows for fresh interpretations of similar interactions in the past and provides a means for archaeology to move beyond the objectification of animals as sets of resources or symbols.

A partire dalla formulazione dello sguardo di Lacan, siamo condotti alla scoperta di quello felino e dei complessi, privatissimi risvolti che provoca il rispecchiarsi in esso. In altre parole, chiedersi chi sia il gatto passa ineludibilmente per il domandarsi chi siamo noi che lo guardiamo (o che ci specchiamo).

Starting from the diachronic impact of salt on humanity's numerous activities and spiritual reflexes, the author calls for establishing a new humanist discipline: the anthropology of salt. This first exertion lists the themes developed around salt and the sciences/disciplines involved primarily or sectorially in researching this mineral. The anthropology of salt is a discipline of the future, which will gradually become autonomous as the inter-and trans-disciplinary approaches to common salt will prevail over the mono-or multidisciplinary ones.

The human being is part (and not above) of the animal kingdom. This also concerns emotion, as the title recalls, a tribute to Charles Darwin’s work, in particular of On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Expression (1872). Diversification and inter-species variety (Emotional Divergence Hypothesis) could characterize emotional families (i.e. set of short-term states that share neuro-vegetative patterns, expressions, and behavioral reactions and that are aimed at responding to particular macro-categories of input). In phylogenetic terms, utility explains the function, but the cause depends on forces (i.e. natural selection, non-random coupling, genetic drift, mutation, and gene flow) and constraints (e.g. pleiotropy) that shape evolution. The emotion is a stochastic or random process, initiated by inputs (elicitors) of different types (e.g. sign stimuli, i.e. limited aspects of the environment), composed of elements (coordinated pre-activation, expression, and experience) that reveal its main functions and that produces coordinated effects on the organism's systems (e.g. perception and attention, learning and memory, goals and priorities, complex behavioral responses). The integrated model described above is “tested” on three emotional families (fear, anger, and joy) and three sign stimuli as possibly elicitors (Fear of the Snake, Zeigarnik’s Stimulus, Facelike Pattern). Although several features are still unclarified (e.g. hemispheric specialization and ontogenesis), an integrated approach that considers all these elements (e.g. elicitors, neuro-vegetative patterns, and so on) could improve the understanding of why and when the emotional process starts. Consequently, this may enhance research protocols, clinical treatments, people’s well-being, and quality of interactions (also with other animals).

This study utilises relational and human–animal studies approaches—a goal of both of which is to decentre the human as but one element functioning within a web of connections to create human social realities—to explored aspects of the archaeologically visible burial practices within the human–horse burials carried out by the Pazyryk Iron Age archaeological culture of Inner Asia. To do this, I bring into the discussion facets of horses, and of human–horse intersubjectivities, as enlightened by ethological studies of horses and an inside auto-ethnographic research strategy utilising my position as a lifelong horse person. I present characteristics of sociality possessed by both humans and horse—including elders, empathy and emotion—that might be seen as essential qualities impacting the ways in which individuals from the two species come together. From this standpoint, I suggest some mental and emotional processes that might have caused certain behaviours of members of both species at the burial ceremony, enlightening several previously unexplained aspects of mortuary patterning. Finally I reflect on the viability of creating relational archaeologies of human–non-human animal interactions which allow for both essentialist and constructionist perspectives.

In Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes “people tell and discuss stories in every culture as far back as the record goes.” Donald Brown agrees in his comprehensive cross-cultural anthropological survey, Human Universals, by including mythmaking, a kind of storytelling, in his list of practices that humans everywhere do. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio even puts a kind of “wordless storytelling” at the very root of his model of human consciousness. Any behavior that is shared by all people everywhere must have a basis in our most shared heritage, our biology. This project applies a classic biological heuristic, Tinbergen’s Four Questions, to gain a fresh perspective on storytelling and to explore story as a signature activity of mind. Two experimental paradigms are developed and preliminary data presented in an effort to answer the question posed by Salmon Rushdie’s character Haroun of Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “what good are stories if they aren’t even true?” That is, what might be the biological value of the human compulsion to engage in narrative? The data support the notion that interpreting stories together primes subjects for joint action tasks, opening a connection of narrative to evolutionary processes of group selection. Finally, by focusing on space as an intersection of cognitive science and narratology, the project examines narratives ranging from spontaneous natural language utterances to the highly developed examples of literary art found in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World to explore how our biology shapes and is reflected in our stories.

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

The field of religious studies has recently begun to explore a number of aspects of the relationship between animals and religion. The bulk of these explorations have been focused on reconsidering human ethical relationships with animals in light of religious values or exploring the textual and ritual meanings of animal bodies against the background of human religions. Another line of inquiry, the topic of this paper, looks at the religious experiences of animals themselves, and draws these questions into methodological conversations within the study of religion generally. This paper surveys a variety of approaches to animal religion from two disciplinary perspectives: comparative religion and cognitive ethology. From comparative religion, building on the work of Kimberley Patton, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Creek, Cherokee, Christian, and Islamic understandings of the religious lives of animals are explored in turn. From cognitive ethology, two approaches are developed: across-species look at animal responses to death, building on the work of Marc Bekoff, and a specific look at religious practices within the order Primates. Ultimately, the paper concludes, the study of animal religion must proceed by thinking along two lines found throughout these accounts: the differences between animal bodies (what Jacques Derrida calls the “het-erogeneous multiplicity” of animals) and the orientation of religious bodies to affect. Rather than thinking of religion as one thing, we must conceive of religion as multiple, corresponding to the multiplicity of embodied lifeways found among animals. And rather than thinking of religion as inextricable from belief,we must begin to explore the emotional patterns that make up religion among animals—human and nonhuman. These thematic anchors of animal religion have direct implications for the study of religion itself, especially in light of what Manuel Vásquez has called the “materialist shift” in religious studies.

In this lecture, Roberto Marchesini will discuss topics such as human identity, our relationship with other animals and the environment, by channeling the vibrant Italian traditions of humanism, materialism, and speculative philosophy. The lecture will open a dialogue between the humanities and the natural sciences and it will also challenge the separation and oppression of animals with a post-humanism steeped in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance. A new vision of the human will be offered as a species informed by an intertwining with other animals. The human being is in fact not constructed by an onto-poetic process, but rather by close relations with otherness. The human system is increasingly unstable and, therefore, more hybrid.

Attempts at combining Uexküll’s ideas with those of Peirce within a
single quasi-discipline called ‘biosemiotics’ are ill-founded. Peirce’s
‘interpretant’ sensu lato refers to two qualitatively different mental
states, one relating to indexes and icons (INT 1) and the other to
symbols (INT 2). Animal communication is dyadic – the referent is
a directly induced mental state (INT 1). Glottocentric
communication is triadic because the connection between symbol
and INT 1 is mediated by INT 2. Whereas the gradualist view of
glottogenesis is erroneous, Müller’s and Chomsky’s saltationist
theories may imply that the idea of language Rubicon is antievolutionary.
However, the views of Pavlov and Vygotsky and of
their modern followers, Deacon and Tomasello, while being
Darwinian, support the saltationist scenario. The emergence of the
second signal system, of symbols, and of INT 2 was a
psychological leap. In human communication, apart from the
semiotic triangle (INT 1 – INT 2 – symbol), the dyadic relation
between non-symbolic signs and INT 1 still holds.

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.

A contemporary discussion of play or ritual in animals and early humans will do well to begin with an appreciation of these classic concepts as formulated by the founders and pioneers of ethology (see also Renfrew, Chapter 2 , this volume). As an academic fi eld, ethology-the naturalistic study of behaviour from an evolutionary perspective (Burghardt 2005 , 10)-had only a half-century lifespan (roughly from the 1930s to the 1980s) before being incorporated into the newer fi elds of evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology and cognitive psychology. Yet the close observations and descriptions of play and ritualised behaviours in animals by early etholo-gists have informed interesting and stimulating recent theory in a variety of subjects in humans (e.g. . . . . .
[this is the first paragraph of the article: there is no abstract; the article is Chapter. 7 in the book RITUAL, PLAY AND BELIEF, IN EVOLUTION AND EARLY HUMAN SOCIETIES (editors Colin Renfrew, Iain Morley, and Michael Boyd), 87-98. Cambridge University Press: 2018.

This chapter asks critical animal studies scholars, intersectional nonhuman animal advocates, and anyone who recognizes that profit drives the overwhelming majority of violence against other animals to take seriously their exploitation while refusing to reduce nonhuman animal subjectivities to representations of suffering and victimization. This kind of beyond suffering approach, which some advocates and scholars may see as fiddling while Rome burns, is a necessary antidote to capitalist objectification of nonhuman animals. That said, suffering should not be dismissed or neglected in efforts to end exploitation. Rather, we must discuss suffering, but we should do so in conjunction with other, richer versions of other animals' experiences beyond suffering. This including but beyond suffering approach strongly resonates with other social justice movements that have long resisted both the homogenization and the reductionism of various subjects to pure victims. These movements, which have fought hard against dehumanization, recognize that objectification manifests as denial of full or even partial subjectivity and thus exclusion from the realm of full humanity.

The article explores, in general, about the elementsthat elicite the behaviour of the behaviour disfunctionalities in urban dogs, considering those who live in residences and in streets.

The author suggests that the main elements are the environment proposed by gumans and in consequence the interspecific relationship.

Anthropologists are paying increasing attention to human/animal entanglements, rather than treating animals merely as vehicles through which to explore human social life. We suggest that this emerging multispecies focus is best served by research that considers not only humans’ responses to animals but also their responses to us, and which attempts to access animals' subjective experiences. Following the interdisciplinary methods of ethnoprimatology, we used a combination of ethnography and ethology to study orangutans' relationships with one another, and caregivers' interpretations of orangutans' bonds, at Auckland Zoo, New Zealand. Drawing on two examples, we argue that integrating ethnography with both qualitative and quantitative descriptions of animal behavior can be useful for representing both species' daily lives, and for comparing interpretations obtained from different research methods. We conclude that although we were not able to capture the experiences of our human and orangutan participants equally, paying attention to both species highlighted how humans' interpretations of animals' motivations, relationships, and behavior differ depending on their roles and the tools they employ for understanding animals' experiences. We also suggest that using anecdotes and empathy in research with animals goes some way towards acknowledging animals’ agency and collapsing artificial distinctions between us and them.

Questo saggio introduttivo costiuisce una sintetica riflessione sulla genesi della prospettiva antropocentrica in filosofia - a partire dal pensiero antico fino alla definizione del concetto di autocoscienza riflessiva nel XVII° secolo - e sulla sostanziale incapacità del pensiero filosofico tradizionale di pensare la natura in sé, e di conseguenza la dimensione animale

Pour répondre aux défis des recherches éthologiques contemporaines, D. Lestel propose d'élaborer une ethnographie des mondes animaux. Selon l'A., si la thèse des cultures et de la subjectivité de l'animal est nécessaire pour démontrer la faisabilité de ce projet, elle peut être repoussée comme une échelle devenue inutile et incertaine une fois franchie l'illusion anthropocentrique. La focalisation ethnographique ne requiert aucun des descripteurs qui ethnologise l'objet d'investigation. S'il semble hasardeux de transposer des concepts anthropologiques, il paraît au contraire fécond de tenir systématiquement l'attitude de l'ethnologue sur son terrain au sein d'une communauté animale dont la difficulté principale est l'habituation ou l'acceptabilité négociée de l'ethnologue-éthologue sur les lieux de son enquête. C'est de ce travail de description et de négociation que pourront être dégagés des concepts bien fondés.