Animal Mind

The Complexity of the Animal Mind Do animals think? This question has been debated for centuries and no clear answer has yet to be decided. By looking at television, comic books, and children’s literature it would seem that animals do think and act intelligently. The fictional characters are given human movements, behavior, and language. In contrast, science, philosophy, and many other academic fields do not believe animals to think, feel, or behave intelligently. Animals are merely machines that have neither feelings nor conscious thought (Schultz & Schultz, 2008). René Descartes first expressed the view of animals as machines in the early 1600s. It was not until Charles Darwin speculated about animal mental experience in his book The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and the Animals (1872) that science and philosophy explored the possibility that animals were more than machines. George Romanes really initiated this scientific exploration of animals in his books, Animal Intelligence (1882) and Mental Evolution in Animals (1884), when he analyzed the intellectual abilities of different animals and then compared them with the abilities of humans. Since Romanes, the field of animal intelligence experienced several approach changes—Structuralism, Functionalism, and Behaviorism. Ristau (1983) believes that the current approach uses mostly behaviorist methods, but asks different questions. These questions provide evidence that animals are more than a mindless box behaving through innate mechanisms. Ristau (1983; as discussed in Goldman & Hoage, 1986) presents one of the questions currently asked by researchers, “Why might we think that animals think?” For one, similarities between humans and other animals lead us to believe animals think. “Many examples of specie similarities, including humans, are provided by the history of evolution” (Goldman & Hoage, 1986). There are anatomical and behavioral similarities according to Ristau (1983).