New Research Into Dog Brains

By Amy Fernandez

On October 6, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Gregory Berns. Since then, most dog people recognize that name. He is a professor of psychiatry and economics at Emory. He is best known for his highly respected research in the relatively new field of neuroeconomics, which utilizes innovative technology to study cognitive function. Technical limitations have traditionally hindered investigation of brain function. Berns and his team are working to identify regions of the brain responsible for various responses.

“For the past two years, my colleagues and I have been training dogs to go in an M.R.I. scanner — completely awake and unrestrained. Our goal has been to determine how dogs’ brains work.”

Needless to say, you can’t map brain activity in anesthetized animals. Although that posed a challenge, they successfully scanned twelve dogs for the study. Dogs learn to do many amazing things, so that wasn’t remarkable in itself. But their goal was to map the emotional responses to various cues, and that is new territory. Emotions profoundly influence mental and physical health, but we know very little about the neural structures responsible for them. “In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.” Although these results don’t qualify as proof, they certainly suggest the existence of canine emotions. But anyone who spends time with animals knows this, and scientific evidence won’t alter that belief. However, verifying this process via brain mapping can lead to valuable insights about perception, consciousness, and the cognitive process in both humans and animals.

But Berns had an entirely different agenda for his story. “Dogs have long been considered property. The Animal Welfare Act of 1966 and state laws raised the bar for the treatment of animals, they solidified the view that animals are things — objects that can be disposed of as long as reasonable care is taken to minimize their suffering. But now, by using the M.R.I. to push away the limitations of behaviorism, we can no longer hide from the evidence. Dogs, and probably many other animals (especially our closest primate relatives), seem to have emotions just like us. And this means we must reconsider their treatment as property.” In other words, his potentially groundbreaking research was, in my opinion, a segue into the same old AR song and dance.

Predictably, it triggered a flood of crazy rants and derivative nonsense on AR blogs and chat lists, so let’s skip that. It also prompted interesting debate among law students, since animal law is an up-and-coming lucrative specialty in that profession. As expected, AR proponents among them advocated drastic revisions of our legal system. But equal numbers of commenters questioned the rationality of concepts that Berns promotes such as the canine “right of self determination.” Their discussions provided an interesting mix of well-reasoned opinions, philosophical theorizing, legal strategizing, and self-righteous moralizing about society’s treatment of animals. Like all internet discussions, many of the conversations disintegrated into mudslinging and insulting references to slavery and Nazism. Anyone familiar with dog chat lists knows that drill. These were equally volatile and opinionated, but lawyers were in charge. Whenever the dialogue verged into that territory, someone inevitably invoked Goodwin’s Law, end of story. Sometimes called Goodwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies, it was introduced by internet law expert Mike Goodwin in 1990, and has since become a favorite management tool for online groups. If a participant resorts to that perennially popular tactic of belittling opposing viewpoints with analogies to Hitler or Nazism, that discussion automatically terminates. It’s very effective. However, I’m not sure Goodwin’s Law was applicable in this case because any genuine discussion of animal rights legislation must acknowledge its history.

Animal protection laws first emerged in Victorian England. The cultural trends fueling those legislative reforms also sparked more fanatical social movements like anti-vivisection campaigns. This cause gained wide acceptance in 1850s Germany where it became entwined with emerging social movements that celebrated eugenics and condemned modernization in favor of a more primitive, natural lifestyle. These ideas were coalescing into a frightening ideology by the time the Third Reich came to power and formalized them into law. Obviously, this aspect of Nazism is far overshadowed by larger issues in most historical overviews. But every aspect of this terrifying period in human history has been studied and documented, including the birth of the animal rights movement.

Most research has focused on Hitler’s vegetarianism, opposition to hunting, and adoration for his dogs. Among other things, his well publicized image as a dog lover led to the most ill-advised feature story ever published by the AKC Gazette. The January 1937 lead story Hitler Says His Dogs Are Real Friends depicted the Fuhrer as a simple country squire, and described the entire Nazi elite taking a break from their war council and trooping out to Hitler’s kennels to visit his dogs. “Hitler is never so happy as when playing with his dogs. Only with them does he forget the cares of state.” Most top Nazi officials like Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels shared his views and strongly promoted them as part of their personal philosophy. For instance, during a radio broadcast in August, 1933, Goring threatened to “commit to concentration camps those who still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.”

That year marked the commencement of a decade of nonstop animal protection legislation enacted by the Nazis to centralize and control of every aspect of human/animal interaction from livestock production to moviemaking. The scope of these laws extended far beyond the ostensible goal of humane treatment. They also introduced now familiar tactics to popularize their crusades. Scientists were portrayed as sadists who fabricated stories about medical research as an excuse to torment animals. Although the Nazis imposed draconian measures to prevent civil disobedience, they advocated it to end animal research. They never got around to banning hunting and meat eating but both were aggressively propagandized as indications of immorality and social decay. Veganism didn’t yet exist, but vegetarianism was fanatically promoted as an essential aspect of the enlightened, compassionate social order they were constructing. They characterized animals as role models, possessing all the virtues that had been corrupted in human civilization. They formulated educational programs to indoctrinate children to these beliefs, hosted one of the earliest international conferences on animal rights, and co-opted every aspect of veterinary care from docking and cropping to euthanasia. A law enacted in November, 1933 decreed that domestic animals must be “painlessly” put to death when life becomes a “torment”. Government-appointed experts decided what qualified as “torment.” By 1942, Nazi control extended to laws that banned pet-keeping by socially unacceptable groups. To prevent their torment, these pets were confiscated and euthanized. Calling it “an innovation in legal theory” the Nazis introduced the concept of human obligation to protect animals because of their inherent rights, rather than their tangible link to humanity. Nazi animal protection laws were legally sophisticated and impressively detailed, but their most outstanding feature was harsh penalties attached to minor crimes. They far exceeded any rational concept of justified punishment. Mistreating animals was considered an unmistakable indication of a defective, anti-social mentality. Consequent punishments were rationalized as essential deterrents for incorrigible members of society.

Surprisingly, some animal protection laws enacted by the Nazis remained on the books after WWII. The underlying ideology that fostered them has also endured. For instance, eugenics theories that labeled familial traits as good or bad have been revived and promoted by the Council of Europe. Their 1987 treaty on animal welfare, known as the European Convention for the Protection of Pet Animals, advocates state control over many aspects of pet ownership. It also discourages breeding, exhibiting, or owning numerous breeds that they have classified as degenerate and unnatural. Far more worrisome is the continued dedication to the Third Reich’s ambition to elevate the social and legal status of animals. Honestly, I didn’t expect a brilliant researcher like Gregory Berns to utilize his work to promote something like this, but in my opionion, it was the unmistakable objective of his Times article. “The prospect of ferreting out animal emotions scares many scientists. After all, animal research is big business. It has been easy to sidestep the difficult questions about animal sentience and emotions because they have been unanswerable.”

I don’t agree. Perhaps these questions have not yet yielded to scientific proof, but it’s generally accepted that animals are intelligent, sensitive and emotionally responsive. The truly scary aspect of this situation is the fact that intelligent people willingly embrace these dangerous, irrational beliefs. Superficially, the paradox between Nazi veneration for animals cannot be reconciled with their depraved indifference for human life. Sociologists have described this dichotomy as blurring the lines. Breaking down the cultural and legal distinctions between humans and animals was promoted in the name of social justice. In fact, destroying these conventional moral boundaries led to a collective mentality that rationalized and tolerated unspeakable behavior. AR proponents have carefully distanced themselves from former champions of their cause like Richard Wagner and Adolph Hitler. They obviously recognize the unshakable negative perceptions about Nazi figureheads. Yet they demonstrate an unbounded capacity to ignore the historical parallels between Nazi animal protectionism and their current ideology.

Click here to read the complete article from the Canine Chronicle November/December 2013 Issue, Vol. 38 Number 11.

Short URL: http://caninechronicle.com/?p=40562

Posted by Alex on Dec 30 2013. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.