Scientists think dolphins deserve “non-human person” status
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.
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