The Case for Dolphin Consciousness

Excerpted from David Kaiser

The largest brain ever to appear on the planet belongs to the sperm whale (Physeter catodon), a member of the Cetacean Order, whose brain can weigh up to 9200 g, with an average of 7818 grams. One scientist has suggested, solely on brain weight, that the sperm whale possesses a higher development of conscious-ness than humans, despite a relatively low brain-to-body weight ratio: 37,093.0 kg to 7.8 kg, (Lilly, 1967). Opinions vary as to how indicative brain size and other neuroanatomical correlates are of brain function and overall intelligence. How to measure a creature's intelligence, or level of consciousness or sapience, is problematic (as noted by cf. Jerison, 1986); the relationship between the brain and the mind is not an obvious one. Ignoring dualist arguments, consciousness is a brain function, a product of a specific organization of neural groups, but its anatomy and phylogeny are unclear. Consciousness in its present form in Western cultures may have emerged recently, during historic times but features of consciousness may be prevalent to different degrees in other mammals, specifically in larger-brained species such as apes and higher primates, carnivores, elephants, and whales.

Dolphins demonstrate many behaviors that show signs of conscious awareness. For instance, behaviors which are illicit and punishable are often performed only when a dolphin believes no one is around (e.g., Savage-Rumbaugh and Hopkins, 1986). When a dolphin squirts water at a human (to show annoyance), he will often raise his head out of the water to curiously observe the effect his behavior had on the unsuspecting victim (personal observation). Both examples show an awareness of effects one's behavior has on others. They also have voluntary penile erections, which may suggest that they are conscious of things of which humans are not.

Whatever cases are made for or against dolphins possessing human-like sapience, it is interesting to remember that they already possessed their present mental life (presumably) 15 to 25 million years ago.

This belief that mental experiences are a unique attribute of a single species is not only unparsimonious; it is conceited. it seems more likely than not that mental experiences, like many other characters, are widespread, at least among multicellular animals, but differ greatly in nature and complexity. -- D.R. Griffin, 1981.

All Dogs Go To Heaven?

Although it might have been 'staged' I have to say that there are a lot of people out there who go to church and say their prayer with far less intensity than this young boy's friend.

Animal consciousness is not being aware of what's on the TV or in the news. It doesn't work that way. It's about seeing the importance and recognizing it, sometimes without knowing what it's (life) is all about.

We all have pets we talk to. We even believe they understand us. Is it only extended to our pets? I remember watching a National Geographic episode, which took place around a watering hole. There were many kinds of large and small animals. Elephants, for one and turtles, for two. In this case there was a small turtle beneath a large elephant. As the elephant began to move forward, one would have thought that the elephant would have simply crushed the small turtle without care or concern. Instead, the elephant carefully and determinedly, stepped around the turtle, careful not to crush it.

Two completely different species. One acknoweledges the other and gives life. Consciousness is not just being self-aware, it is also being 'other-aware'.

Maybe the above is just a cute photo. But even if just a game, the dog participated. And got a result.

We attribute more awareness to our domesticated pets. But the truth is they have no reason to be more aware than their distant 'wild' relatives.

Watching Whales Watching Us in California

Joel Reynolds

Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Posted July 13, 2009 in Reviving the World's Oceans , Saving Wildlife and Wild Places

In New York Times Magazine ("Watching Whales Watch Us"), author Charles Siebert lays out a compelling case for what many people have long suspected: that great whales are conscious, social, interactive animals with complex social structures and cultures. The article is beautifully written and full not just of anecdotes of remarkable whale-human interactions but interviews with leading scientists who have documented that whales teach, learn, cooperate, grieve, and even use tools in their quest for food.

Using the 'friendly gray whales" at Laguna San Ignacio on the west coast of Baja California as the touchstone, Siebert covers a range of topics in making his case -from military sonar (calling NRDC's litigation to control it a "turning point" in the relationship between humans and whales) to commercial whaling to personal and historical anecdotes of interactions with these massive creatures in the wild. He suggests the remarkable proposition that these ancient creatures, once hunted virtually to extinction by humans, may somehow have learned now to forgive and even trust us, in spite of our centuries-old efforts to slaughter their ancestors for oil and other whale byproducts. Siebert argues that whale-human relations have long been characterized by a "stark dualism: manic swings between mythologizing and massacre; between sublime awe and assiduous annihilation, the testimonies of their slayers often permeated with a deep sense of both remorse and respect for the victims."

And nowhere is this more clearly the case than at Laguna San Ignacio.

At this extraordinary place - now a World Heritage Site, a biosphere reserve, and the last undisturbed breeding and calving lagoon of the California gray whale - this large baleen species that migrates each year along the west coast from Alaska was hunted by whalers like Charles Scammon, who would trap the calves in the shallow lagoon as a means of enticing the full-grown mothers within range for harpooning. After reaching near-extinction at levels below 1,000 whales, the species began to rebound when commercial whaling was outlawed in the mid to late 20th Century, with the eastern Pacific gray whale stock now reaching an estimated 18,000 gray whales at least - one of the most dramatic recoveries of any large whale species. It is in this lagoon today that whale-watchers come every winter to ride the protected waters to see and even touch 40-ton, 45-feet long wild animals and their babies in their natural habitat.

As but one example of the continuing, post-commercial whaling threats to these magnificent animals, it was in this lagoon that, in the 1990's, Mitsubishi Corporation and the government of Mexico proposed to build the world's largest industrial salt works - 116-square miles of industrial development, with 17 enormous diesel pumps sucking 6,000 gallons per second from the lagoon 24-hours a day; a million-ton stockpile of salt; a two-kilometer pier into the Bay of Whales where ocean-going tankers would dock to receive the salt for transport to Japan; and billions of gallons of toxic salt brine, stored in ponds adjacent to the lagoon and eventually dumped into coastal waters. Together with the largest environmental coalition ever formed in Mexico and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, NRDC mounted the largest public campaign in its history to challenge and, against tremendous odds, ultimately defeat the salt works project. Now, ten years after President Zedillo of Mexico announced that the project would be abandoned, NRDC and a coalition of international and Mexican non-profits have undertaken a conservation initiative to preserve in perpetuity one million acres around the lagoon through easements and land acquisition - to ensure that the whales will be protected from a return of the salt works project or any other major development.

This is a success story, but the international struggle to protect and restore whale populations around the globe will never end. Charles Siebert's article is a powerful statement of why that struggle, by NRDC and others, is essential.

Some Basic Scientific Facts about Whale and Dolphin Consciousness

This is an excerpt taken from David Noha:

I have seen numerous statistics on whale and dolphin brains; unfortunately these are the kinds of statistics that people get emotional about and hence tend to exaggerate. Several smart science authors I trust have repeated this general point: neuron counts in the neocortex are about ten times higher in humans than chimps, about the same in humans and bottlenosed dolphins, and some whales have up to ten times as many as humans. Of course neurons have synapses, around 5000 per in humans (increasing with age) and I haven't seen numbers on cetacean or sirenian synapse counts.

What "consciousness" is, of course, is not a question we have one solid answer to. Symbolic reasoning may be a better characteristic to consider. Those who argue against animal reasoning typically cite primate research and ignore dolphin research. Dolphins have certainly been shown to have the capability of understanding sentence structure and prepositional relations.

For me, the deeper moral issue is decided by the principle of parsimony (akin to Occam's Razor). If the preponderance of evidence suggests that whales and dolphins may be conscious, we shouldn't be murdering them. Since we can identify the neocortex as the seat of consciousness, or at least symbolic reasoning, and we can observe a rough correlation between cortical complexity and behavioral complexity, I think it's rather obvious that we should look before we leap/kill for the two classes of animals with neocortices similar in complexity to humans: dolphins and whales.

Thoughts from Adam Henne

Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends. They know and fight back against their enemies. And perhaps most stunningly, given all of our transgressions against them, they may even, in certain circumstances, have learned to trust us again.

I just picked up at the library, but have yet to read, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce’sWild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. I’m intrigued by the way animal behavior researchers are letting go of their fear of anthropomorphising animals and beginning to acknowledge and investigate their social and even moral relationships.

Especially compelling about this whale story, beyond their social complexity and apparent morality, is the appearance of new relations with researchers. When a whale consciousness encounters human consciousness, what does that look like? There’s a now widely available essay by Derrida in which he discusses his relationship with his cat –L’Animal que donc je suis. His cat meets his eyes, his cat sees him stepping naked out of the shower, his cat is the archetypal alien Other. But! An Other undeniably engaged in a two-way relationship with Derrida, a relationship whose very nature is premised on the incommensurable difference between their species. What does it mean to be seen by your cat? Or, as it appears in the Times article on whales:

The baby gray glided up to the boat’s edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbill-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge, ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I’d never felt so beheld in my life.

To me, the ur-text on understanding relationships between species is Donna Haraway’s recent-ish When Species Meet. Like everything she writes, it is brilliant, rigorous, fun, and impossible to summarize. Building off (way off) of her earlier Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway examines the nature and quality of relationships between humans and non-humans – in particular the way that history and power have interleaved with evolution and ecology to produce strange and sometimes beautiful hybrid assemblages. Like especially, of course, the domestic dog. What Haraway does that Derrida (not to mention Buber) do not is consider what kind of responsibilities emerge from the relationships we generate. What we as humans owe to dogs, for example, for having enrolled them in our 10,000 year co-evolutionary strategy.

What might this tell us about whales?

Teresa Wagner's blog about Whales

One of the most transformative and pivotal things the whales told me many years ago is that “higher consciousness is not related to species, breed, intelligence or ego. It’s the result of a soul’s choice to accept and embrace opportunities to grow, regardless of the form (or formlessness) a soul may be experiencing at any time.”

Before hearing this from the whales, I had placed them and their wise messages on a towering pedestal, assigning them a greatness I thought achievable only by whales and perhaps saints and bodhisattvas. They called me on the carpet for this view!

I was told that “wisdom is not meant to be shrouded in mystery, intellectualized, or admired from afar as if unattainable, but to be utilized and lived.” Furthermore, they admonished me (affectionately!), “not to idolize or worship others’ greatness but to access it as guidance as I find my own greatness and live it.”

Another significant message came when a client asked “What is the future of the whales?” The response was:

The whales will be fine.
The tides have turned.
The energy of light consciousness on earth has passed the 50% mark.

50% doesn’t represent numbers of people or animals who have changed, but the amount of light that has been generated.

Great compassion has been increased within the consciousness of many who are witness to violence and wrong doings on earth. It may not appear so. But there is light greater than we can see.

The energy of love and light emanated from beings on earth now is greater than the energy of confusion and fear. The light in the heart of one being with pure intention to share love with others can serve and help millions in one moment.

What Do you do think?

I was traveling on the dirt back roads of Entre Rios, a province of Argentina. The land is flat and fertile and it was summer. As we were rolling along the road and with three other passengers, I suddenly saw a huge four and one half foot (1 1/2 meter) lizard on the road, struggling.

I signaled our driver to stop and back up, as we were traveling about 60 km/hr, which is about 45 miles per hour in the U.S. No one had seen the big lizard except for myself.

When we stopped near him, I realized that he had been hit by an earlier car. There was no blood, but I could see he was struggling to gather his wits and get to the side of the road. By now my wife was next to me. He was slightly hissing and looking at the both of us, but I could see he had not recovered from the impact and was having difficulty moving to the side of the road.

I looked at him and with my mind, I said " I can help you but you have to trust me." The large lizard stopped thrashing and lay there, looking at me.

"You can speak with me?"

"Yes. You are in pain."

"Yes, I am. It is hard for me to move."

Looking at this huge lizard, I had never come in contact with one before. Apparently they are native to Argentina and called 'Tegus'. I knew that they are related to the monitor family, and so if bitten I would possibly receive a very infectious bite or even poisonous one, as well as the fact that this kind of lizard, once having a hold of anything, does not let go.

I knew I could not leave him there in the road to take his chances. He was beautiful shades of reds and greys.

"You will have to trust me. I can leave you here, but doing so you may be hit by the moving machines once again. Your life may end. Or you can trust me. Allow me to pick you up carefully and I will put you off this path. I cannot care for you, but I can move you to safety, where you may have a chance to recover."

The lizard looked at me.

"Then do it so."

"What are you going to do?" asked my wife.

"Trust, me, Dine."

And with that I carefully knelt down and gently placed one hand under the rear legs of the massive lizard. All the while he watched me. Then, ever so softly, I said "I am now putting my hand under your neck. Then I will lift you carefully and take you to the side."

The lizard never took his gaze from me.

"I will trust you, but if you squeeze I will bite. I hurt."

"I understand my friend, trust me."

With that I lifted the large lizard up. By now our friends in the car had their heads out and watched me in amazement as I gingerly carried the creature to the side of the road, gently placing him on soft tufts of wheat grass. All the while he looked at me. His breathing was now smooth and not erratic.

As I took my hands away from him, I said

"I am going now, the rest is up to you."

We exchanged glances.

"Remember you are not alone. We are never alone. There is a great hand that guides us all, as it guided me to you."

Getting back into the car, my friends looked at me in amazement. We then went on our way.

So tell me, are animals really just wild and they bite and they have no awareness. What was that which just happened?

You tell me.