We know more about animal cognition than ever—it's time to consider the moral implications

Pondering what needs to change in the coming decade, I become depressed. Normally, I am an optimist, but so much seems to be going wrong in today's world, from its ugly politics to the ecological mess we have created, and the way we treat those who look different from us. I have no authority to speak on these issues, except when it comes to one category of creature that looks even more different and is treated even more shabbily. Pope Francis hinted at the connection when he said: “Our indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings."

Changes in our attitude towards animals are long overdue. This applies equally to certain academic disciplines, which still place our species closer to the gods than to the rest of the animal kingdom, as well as to how we treat the animals in our care. The only possible exception is those we keep at home. They often lead pampered lives, whereas all other animals are left out in the cold.

On old-fashioned farms, animals had names, pastures to graze in, mud to wallow in, or sand to dust-bathe in. Life was far from idyllic, but it was appreciably better than it is nowadays when we lock up calves and pigs in narrow crates of stainless steel, cram chickens by the thousands into sunless sheds, and often don’t even let cows graze outside anymore. Instead, we keep them standing in their own waste. Since these animals are mostly kept out of sight, people rarely get to see their miserable conditions.

There are continuities between the emotional lives of humans and other animals. Take the video clip of Mama, the alpha female of the large chimpanzee colony at Burgers Zoo in the Netherlands, and her embrace with my professor, Jan van Hooff. From the public reaction to this encounter, I learned that many people were both intensely moved and surprised that apes express themselves the same way we do. While I fully understood the first reaction, the second took me by surprise. Science has been saying for 50 years that chimps are our closest relatives, so why wouldn't this include their emotional lives?

The facial expressions of humans and chimpanzees not only look strikingly similar, but they also convey similar emotions of affection, fear, anger, disappointment, disgust, and even fun. Apes laugh with the same open-mouthed face as ours while uttering chuckle-like vocalisations. There was a time when the textbooks stated that our species has far more muscles in the face than other primates because we need to convey so many subtle emotions. But now we know from a post-mortem anatomical study that chimpanzees have exactly the same musculature and an identical number of muscles in the face. The implication is, of course, that they are able to convey the same shades of emotion, and probably need to.

We can't recognise all of the current progress in the field of animal cognition—with a new discovery almost every week—and keep ignoring the moral implications. Many scientists would like to leave this issue entirely up to society, but we need to get involved because the situation is dire. Of the entire terrestrial vertebrate biomass on earth, wild animals constitute only about three per cent, humans one-quarter, and livestock nearly three-quarters. Whereas the emotional complexity of apes may strike many of us as natural, the same argument holds for myriad other species, including the ones we consume.

I am no radical. I am not against eating meat or against medical research on animals, although I think both could be reduced. Ideally, we'd cut meat consumption by half and move towards a thorough re-thinking of how we keep and treat animals. For me, the keywords would be “respect” and “well being.” We increasingly have the science to measure the latter, so why not make use of it?

Here I place my hopes on transparency. We barely know what’s going on at many farms and facilities, which makes it easy to act as if nothing is the matter. We need research facilities with open-door policies and farms with an obligation to show how they keep their animals. Ideally, supermarket meat packages would feature a scan bar that allows us to call up pictures on our smartphones so that we can judge the animals’ living conditions for ourselves. If all locations with captive animals would become as public as zoos, matters would improve in a hurry.

These goals seem achievable in a ten-year time frame, and would put us on a path towards being more considerate for the other species on the planet.