Thanks to a Facebook friend, I came across this article in the Times Online which reports on zoo­log­ical find­ings that dol­phins’ brains, cul­tural and emo­tional com­plex­i­ties, and behav­iours are close to those of humans. I think this is sig­nif­i­cant because there are more and more people waking up to the real­i­ties of how we treat non-human ani­mals, and what that implies for us and our humanity, as well as the cor­re­la­tions between cru­elty towards other ani­mals and cru­elty towards humans. If you know me at all, you know this is one of the most impor­tant fields of study, reflec­tion and activism to me. Some excerpts from the Times Online article:

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unac­cept­able to keep such intel­li­gent ani­mals in amuse­ment parks or to kill them for food or by acci­dent when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dol­phins and por­poises die in this way each year.

“Many dol­phin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when cor­rected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zool­o­gist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used mag­netic res­o­nance imaging scans to map the brains of dol­phin species and com­pare them with those of primates.

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In one study, Diana Reiss, pro­fessor of psy­chology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bot­tlenose dol­phins could recog­nise them­selves in a mirror and use it to inspect var­ious parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought lim­ited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that cap­tive ani­mals also had the ability to learn a rudi­men­tary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dol­phins can solve dif­fi­cult prob­lems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply com­plex social struc­tures and a high level of emo­tional sophistication.

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Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dol­phin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by con­trast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.When it comes to intel­li­gence, how­ever, brain size is less impor­tant than its size rel­a­tive to the body.

What Marino and her col­leagues found was that the cere­bral cortex and neo­cortex of bot­tlenose dol­phins were so large that “the anatom­ical ratios that assess cog­ni­tive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dol­phins such as the bot­tlenose had the same con­vo­luted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to inter­con­nect with each other. “Despite evolving along a dif­ferent neu­roanatom­ical tra­jec­tory to humans, cetacean brains have sev­eral fea­tures that are cor­re­lated with com­plex intel­li­gence,” Marino said.

There was a time when women, black people, men­tally ill people, chil­dren, were all in var­ious ways regarded as “sub human”, as inan­i­mate objects, to be used, abused, and dis­carded. Today, we still have some seg­ments of pop­u­la­tions arguing for the lack of any rights of non-human ani­mals. This will change, in time, and our cur­rent prac­tices of cruel fac­tory farming, animal testing, breeding for enter­tain­ment, etc., will, I can say with a some con­fi­dence and a lot of hope for the sake of humanity, become more obso­lete, and become as illegal and socially unac­cept­able as slavery, child labour, ped­erasty, misogyny and eugenics are now.