Animal awareness

Abstract

AbstractThe problem of demonstrating that animals are consciously aware of their environment or themselves in a similar manner to ourselves has proved to be a relatively intractable one since we have mainly been constrained to rely upon observation of an animal’s behaviour as an index of its awareness. It can usually be argued that even complex behaviours need not necessarily involve an animal being aware of either environmental cues or its response to them. Indeed, simple organisms or computers can perform complex responses to environmental cues when they are clearly not aware of them in the sense that we are ourselves. What can particularly distinguish conscious awareness from simple stimulus-response guided behaviour is the ability of an animal to experience some form of emotional response to an environmental cue or to its own actions. In this review I will summarize some of our experiments on sheep which show that the way their brains process visual and olfactory social and non-social cues from the environment is integrally related to and organized by the emotional significance of what is perceived. I will also argue that the way their brains process complex social stimuli from the environment in order to recognize individuals is very similar to ourselves although these processes are very strongly influenced by changes in their motivational state. From these observations I will maintain that sheep are almost certainly capable of conscious awareness of their environment although perhaps this awareness is mainly restricted to present events and needs with a limited capacity to reflect on the past or future.