Here is the catch 22 those got you coming and going. If you don’t support it than you’ve got negative data and negative data go like pieces and people will say what would expect from the look of this idea? If you support it then it’s not explainable within the paradigm of science and so you don’t have anything there and I think it would be suicide for graduate students to drew in terms of the best future. Stay with us for Skeptiko.

Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and the critiques. I am your host Alex Tsakiris and all I can think about is Dogs. Dogs, dogs, dogs you know I’ve to it a few months ago, I never paid much attention to dogs now it seems like dogs stuff is all that I do. Pod cast about dogs intelligence and dog emotions, networking with dog owners and dog owner groups trying to find these telepathic dogs. Within my transformation from money standard entrepreneur and science enthusiast I’ve noticed something I guess I’d call them shared lessons and as I was putting together this show on animal emotions with Dr. Marc Beckoff, I thought of a lesson with every entrepreneur learns in one way or another and that’s the lesson with “The Fox and the Hedgehog”. The ancient saying goes that the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing and as any successful entrepreneur will tell you “Success in business is all about being a hedgehog rather than a fox” and as I thought about this saying I couldn’t help but see some parallels in the sides under the bag between skeptics and researchers on the cutting edge of human consciousness. How do you smart well educated people like Richard Wiseman, Steven Novella and even the last episode guest Dr. Stanley Coren. How do they stumble into such obvious blunders as you’ve heard them make on this show. Well certainly a big part of the reason is that they are blinded by an outdated scientific paradigm that they just can’t seem to get away from. But another reason is that they are a little bit too much Fox and not enough Hedgehogs. Let me give you a quick example do you remember many episodes back when I had Richard Wiseman on Skeptiko? If you do than you are called it for the first time in 10 years he admitted the obvious fact that he has failed the bunking produced stat of that matches the scientist he was trying to debunk but then he added this “In this particular instant I’m not that impressed with the data that Rupert has collected, I think he wasn’t really interesting, I think source of methodological problems with it and part of that because you’re trying to do an experiment in the whole world with an animal and just inherent in your part so messy a thing to do.”

Now I suggest you that that was a very Fox like thing to say. I mean it sounds intelligent even scientific and at the same time there’s not lot of substance to it and for me it never rang true either. I mean the experiments these guys did whether they are trying to find out, whether dogs knew, whether their owners were coming home is about as simple as it gets and since then I’ve talked to a lot of animal behavior researchers and asked them about Wiseman’s effort to find some ……out of the results and even the most die hard skeptics in the group had to admit Wiseman was just plain wrong. There’s no rat’s nest of complicating factor between human and animal interaction. This kind of experiments going all the time and a lot more complicated than this and this kind of stuff happens a lot with the skeptics. They are so confident, their fox like reasoning powers and so certain that the conclusion they have come to is right that they never give in with their hedgehogs. The researchers run their frontlines of science to really understand what’s going on. So forgive me if I devote yet another episode to dogs and forgive me if I spent so much time searching for research participants that I don’t have time to do more pod cast. But well I’m just a hedgehog and hedgehogs just dig.

Stay with us we have a very interesting interview with Dr. Marc Bekoff on The Emotional Lives of Animals and a very honest dialogue about how controversial science is done in as entertainer. More in Skeptico in just a minute.

We are joined today by a very distinguish researcher, writer, teacher and animal rights advocate Dr. Marc Bekoff who along with being Professor in The State University of Colorado is the author of many books including The Emotional Lives of Animals and The Smile of A Dolphin and along with Jane Goodall, co founder of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. I started the interview by asking Marc about his long time interest in animals. “My parents always told me that I always minded an animal which was the title of the book I wrote a few years ago. They told me that ever since I was a young young kid I would always ask them what an animal was thinking, what an animal was feeling you know was the animal happy or sad and when I was about 3 or 4 years old I yelled at a man who was hitting his dog and the guy chased my father and so yeah I mean I have always felt it natural and you know connection to animals it just seemed. It always seemed very normal to me to try to guess what they are thinking, what they are feeling you know they are happy or they are sad, do they miss their friends. It never dawned on me that those couldn’t be funny type of questions that we should study.”

You know that’s a real interesting point I really want to focus on because in reading the book I think that’s what was so great about it to me is someone who is intellectually curious but also trying to connect with maybe more than an emotional part or my heart as well. The book does a great job of balancing that because it’s wonderful to hear these stories and you’ve many great ones in the book. But I think a lot of folks like me needed one ok but hold on where is the science behind that and I think you do a good job of making the case that the science is really, really quite overwhelmingly there in favor of animals having quite a rich emotional life.

“It’s funny because a lot of what I saw up with the people, I saw it in we’ve been writing about it for a long time is constantly now being verified by science. Science is basically in a sense catching up to what we already knew and I don’t mean that as an entire science moves it’s just that you know I’ve always accepted myself in classic and now we know based on scientific studies that they are. So you know the mere biology the study of brain imaging is showing you know that certain parts of the brain are very active so when an animal, when people play and when people are saying that they enjoy themselves and lots of animals have the same brain structures and the same chemicals in the brain and there’s no reason to think that they don’t you know have their own feeling of joy for example when they play so science is touching up basically.”

You know that’s interesting about science catching up and one of the things I want to discuss with you is this whole idea of a paradigm shift because as you point out so well in your writings there has been this paradigm shift in science and the work that you’ve done and folks like Jane Goodall have done over the last 30 or 40 years really are viewed quite differently than they were before and I thought it’d be interesting to hear from you what that’s been like going through the whole cycle if you will?

“Right, well it’s been a possible of times I mean when Jane Goodall came out of the field you know at pioneering the studies of chimpanzees and you know where they thought that well maybe she’d last for 6 months you know she’s not going into 49th year you know she had named all the animals. She had not had a University Degree, she just thought it was just absolutely normal to name the animals so you know there was fighting and flow, and gobbling David………………… But when she got back to Cambridge University where she was doing her PhD people said “Oh my you can’t name the animals”. That’s being too subjective you know science is objective and Jane just basically say “No no no I mean I’ve to name these animals. I mean I’m living with them you know they are my friends I am studying them they are not like animals in a cage”. And you know she basically you know occasionally she just refused to not name them, she refuse to re-further them as numbers. And I think you’re right I mean I think that’s what’s happening all the time as when I was in Graduate school and this was a new change of work but I really never I mean I hadn’t paid much attention to the details. I named a cat with whom I was working in you know in my book I mentioned a cat named Speedo who was a really rapid learner and we were doing some brain studies and I never would do them again but I named this great brilliant cat Speedo and it was Speedo who basically told me don’t do this work anymore, don’t cut animals anymore. He looked at me in the eyes and basically said to me why were you doing this and everyone else, the medical school I was at, the number of the animals and when I’d talked about Speedo, I talked about Perky and I talked about Blondie and Harry, they were looking at me like there was something probably wrong but over time things change. Professional Journalist now a lot of them allow the writers to talk about named animals you don’t read sentences like “the researcher studied wolf 38 greeted or something wolf 42”. A lot of first person stuff and Rupert …..I use to have a lot of conversation about those because Rupert told me that I think I have the story right at us but Rupert told me that when his son took biology, he was writing papers in the first person and that the teacher said that you’re not supposed to do that and I’m sure that Rupert and I had that conversation once. You know so things are like changing I mean and they are changing slowly but what’s that paradigm change and of course we are also getting big changes in how animals are viewed. And that’s I guess what I was really referring to or just anyone to say my dog is happy when I get home and that’s no longer such a controversial statement that has to be kind of purse down to well you know anthropomorphizing your animals behavior I mean there are still some of that but the tide is kind of shifted over the other way where we say yeah we can all kind of acknowledge the obvious and you know I thought there was an interesting point in there as well in terms of it is obvious and there’s always been obvious and from a scientific standpoint it’s also kind of curious that even the idea and you point this out in the book and it really struck me that the notion that animals don’t have an emotional life really contradicts another cherished paradigm and that’s one of evolution I mean if animals don’t have, how do we get an emotional life if none of our predecessors had an emotional life. So I think there was never really a solid ground for believing that animals are completely without an emotional experience.

“Right, and that’s a great way to predict, if you look at Darwin, Charles Darwin prefers you know what he calls this notion called the evolutionary continuity and you know essentially you people just would say you know well if we have it than animals have it and so you’re right where did all emotions come from if other animals don’t have it I suppose you could just appeal to whole lot of different process used but they are all almost supernatural, they are all not really science.

Right, yeah in defense of science sometimes skeptics ask a stay believed that more radical ideas than just the obvious in this case that our animals are for the most part what they seem to be which kind of lead me to another point. In your book there’s many, many great stories and observations that you had that both professionally and also just it sounds like a passion of yours that you do all the time and that the bottom line I guess is that you believed that over a period of experiencing and seeing your qualities you know the plural of anecdote is data and I think that’s a wonderful chord maybe you can expound on that from an animal behavior standpoint.

“Oh yeah you know a lot of animal behavioured by research starts with stories and observations. I see a dog do something, you see a dog do something like a certain move and play or a play ball and than other people see it and you begin to get, if you want a database then which you can do more detailed studies, a good example is when I was once riding my bicycle back into bolder story which is when I began my book “Emotional Observation of Animals”. We came around a corner and there was a dead magpie on the road obviously hit by a car and we saw a magpie funeral and one magpie went in and touched the corpse, stepped back and other did the same and other and then one flew off and brought grass back and dropped it by the corpse and another and another and then they all stood silently in vigil and then they flew off and I was with my friend Wad and Wad does not know too much about animal behavior and he’s absolutely stunned. He said to me “Is that common? Do animals do that? Do they mourn? Do they do this?” And I said “Wad you know I’ve seen this a few other times” And right after I published that observation, I was getting you know all over the world people telling me “Oh I’ve seen that magpies and raven and crows. So that sort of if you the basis of the plural of anecdote of data I mean If I had 10 or 20 people independently telling me they have seen magpies or crows or raven hold funeral services like I saw than its real and mean skeptics can deny it till the magpies come home and tell us, but its real you know and we have to do something about it and I had the same observation on my road after a Kruger or a mountain lion killed a red fox, the wife of the red fox I mean I knew they are gonna made it pair and live down above the years and I watched her basically bury her husband if you were. She covers him with pine needles and dirt and leaves and stopped and looked at the body and then oriented herself. So she was intentionally covering him in a certain way, she wasn’t randomly you know throwing dirt and pine needles on him. And after I published all observation, I discovered that someone had seen a red fox do that in England and that somebody had actually seen a lot of wolf do that so you know once again I think to me the messages is that somebody had seen it happen when very few people have the opportunity or the good fortune to be there but a section of people don’t see it happen we can’t conclude that it doesn’t happen.”

Right and I think I should also add as long as we are talking about skepticism in science that you pointed out that we have to be careful how far we go with that and it is easy to kind of step over that line and read more into you know I’ve to say I was in preparing for this I was listening to an interview you did with Duncan Campbell on Living Dialogue, someone who I like and I really enjoy listening to his show for the most part but I think some of your supporters and I think Duncan did this in this case is can take this stories a little bit too far in a highly speculative way that turns some people off I mean we don’t really understand the wisdom of animals and we really can’t be sure of all the cognitive processes that are going on and so maybe you wanna speak to a little bit how you draw that line as a scientist.

“Right that’s a great question. You can’t take the stories too far and sometimes I do and sometimes people do but as a scientist I look for consistency, repeatability and use some reason. I don’t want, I am not looking, I don’t feel like making too much of it you know here’s another story I had in my book an elephant named Bebo who had an injured right rear leg and I observed it with Hamilton from the Samburu Reserve in Kenya and Bebo had an injured right leg and walked like a snail. She was about 17 years old and she could hardly walk and the elephants in her group waited for her, went back and guide her and sat her. She was their fan, they loved her, and they don’t want to abandon her. They emphasized with her and some of my colleagues said “Wow that’s interesting” that you know there must be a reason maybe you know what could Bebo do for them. Well Bebo couldn’t do anything for them, she walked like a snail and if she would’ve been taken down by a lion or a cheetah or a leopard in no time because she couldn’t really defend herself.”

Well you know that leads into this whole point about taking off the white lab coat and still bring in your heart and your emotions in your work, in your field. How do you see that playing out between her folks are looking at that now and is there a shift in a grading the public and private self of the scientist in their work.

“There is a real good move to integrating what you say the public and the private life of scientist and also of animals by the way they are related. You know publicly now a lot of scientists are just saying that you know they know that animals have feelings they know they have pain. You know people who study pain physiology my god if they are studying pain physiology how could they deny that animals feel pain if you’re trying to come up with an animal model of pain. But you know the applying scientific standards but I always you know begin my talks with saying you know there’s anybody in this room feel that dogs don’t feel joy, pain, grief, sorrow or you know jealousy or something like that and even if scientific meanings, hints don’t go up anymore you know they used to but people will be guided and say why we know this feeling, we know this sheer joy but we’re not sure about the more complex emotions like you know jealous into jealousy.”

Right and I think as you point out there’s also somewhat of a double standard in terms of or it’s easier for us to accept the positive emotions of animals when it is maybe the negative emotions cause the more complications we all face up what if animals really can’t experience fear and the anxiety. What does that mean for the animal awaiting their fate at the slaughter house or the calf that is raised in a little bin that we hear about so there is this double standard isn’t there?

“That’s right. There is double standard but you know once again the tide is really changing and I think it’s because of good science and you know people just really being out there and just saying look like you know like you said before if we have emotions so are the animals. Where did our emotions come from? And besides it is also changing people are not expecting that emotions among different animals as the same you know I been writing about dog joy, there’s chimpanzee joy, Alex joy and there is Mark joy, so I just think that we just need to be much more open about consistency and hypocrisy you know we can’t apply Darwinian Continuity to an anatomy and physiology and not behavior so you see, so you must be consistent.”

Then let’s go back to something that you talked about before and that’s empathy and the notion of mirror neurons coming into play. Can you go back and explain a little bit about what the scientist telling us about the empathy that some animals might experience.

“Mirror neurons were discovered almost by accident back in the 90’s and the way they worked when a dozen monkeys had a horrible invasive experiments but maybe we can hope that something good comes out of them for the animals. So when a monkey reaches for a pencil certain neurons fire and when a monkey sees someone else, another monkey or human reach for the pencil, same neurons fire, so they mirror the action of another individual and so you could have apply that when I feel something certain neurons in my brain fires so I wanna play and I’ m happy and I do what we call a playback or a play invitation signal and my play bound mirror neurons fire. So I know what I want and what I feel when I do a play bound and then if you do the play bound and my play bound neurons fire mirroring your action then I know what you feel or what you want (Right at some level right). At some level but that’s how people are applying it saying that mirror neurons providing really good foundation for studying and precision. You know this is kind of studying if you were a research world in that area on fire because now it’s not slushy for me to say I actually feel the pain of my dog. I might, I might be because of you know mirror neurons.

Right and we don’t know right we have no way of knowing whether the mirror neurons are the cause or the effect I mean the whether they’re the radio or the receiver right I mean in terms of human context and there’s still hope just a not known area I am not saying one way or another nonetheless it’s showing up we are somehow connected or have this ability to connect with animals and the I obviously find that fascinating because I think it ties into this work with I am trying to help move along of Sheldrake’s where he is saying you know maybe this connection is measurable at a deeper level than we could even imagine and that’s there some kind of telepathic level and I just wonder if this is maybe suggestive of kind of moving in that direction that if we conform this connections how far do this connections go when I guess we don’t know.

“We don’t know right and that’s why I think the best science has been done this area is you know science with an open mind because basically you know we are discovering fascinating things every single day and so we should be just closing the door on things because they seem to be unseen able. You know I mean you know who would you know the animal behavior field you know stuff that honey bees could do different types of discrimination like seeing different which previously seen as only humans and great apes can do or basic communication you know with such precision the location of food or that Mexican geese could you know remember the location of 90 or 100 different catches of food and remember which ones they went to and not go back to one they want. You know its amazing space of memory.

Right the big story that comes away is we have to be really careful when we start putting limits on our understanding.

“Yeah I like the idea of not putting limits I mean there are limits you know I mean you know a lot of mind accepting the fact that you know its unlikely that a dog or a wolf or a coyote or a polar bears ever going to build a computer. They don’t need to build computers you know it’s just not a part of what they need in their world. But see as we come to understand more of the world we will also come to understand more of what they need and have a go about you know satisfying those needs and that’s what I think is important in the study of behavior getting you know getting the details.”

As you point out in your book it’s not just about understanding the animals and understanding their needs. Its about dealing with the implications because you really can’t get to that one point and they not cross the casman and say wait a minute now that we understand this kind of what we’re going to do about it and from a scientific standpoint I thought what you really kind of raise is this larger question of you know value free science which of course is just ridiculous there is no such thing as value free science and I almost see what you are moving towards is kind of the other extreme and say you know value rich science. No let’s lead in face head on with the implications of what we find out and in this case it’s if animals do share a lot of our same richness of our experience than what does that mean or how are we going to treat these beings and deal with them and change the things that need to be changed in order to make things right.

“For me that’s the old 64 thousand dollar question is you know what we are going to do with what we know and basically what we are learning daily is about how remarkably bright and intelligent the more importantly how emotional and sensible these animals are and they have a point of view, they care about what happens to them. We are going to have to fact that in that dogs have this much interest in you know protecting their families and avoiding pain as you and I do and that’s going to definitely trickle down to how we treat them and what we are allowed to do and you know hopefully people will you know hopefully we won’t need ……you know but you know people will work from their heart that will be the more genuine change.”

Well Marc that’s going to about do it for today and I really want to thank you.

Until this point I really thought the interviews over and I was about to wrap it up but then I had a couple of questions for Marc about how he might help in participate, helping this replicate Rupert Sheldrake’s dogs with no experiments. And in the process he revealed some very interesting, very frank insights about how difficult would be to find a graduate student to follow up on this research.

“Here’s a catch 22 those got coming and going. If you don’t support it than you’ve got negative data and negative data go like a piece and people will say what would expect from the look of this idea? If you support it than it’s not explainable within the paradigm of science and so you don’t have anything there and I think it would be suicide for graduate students to drew and choose the best future. I saw Rupert in one of his studies and I remember I was one of the high breaker reviewers for a paper that he published in the journal Answers which was a really good paper and you know it’s a point I am making one of my book also that I made in one of my books and also in some papers that you know people can be skeptical but once again you’ve got to be consistent you know he put a paper into a professional referee journal, a bunch of referees read it and than it was published what I mean you can’t play the middle from both ends and that’s basically what it comes down to. If I publish a paper and they clear review scientific journal then people will say ok I may not agree with some of that you wrote but at least it was scrutinized you know by your colleague. Well that’s what Rupert did, there’s a couple of his papers specially the one that I know, the one that was in answer journal and it was published and although people read it and thought you know the skeptics said out you know this is bullshit you know this can’t be. My response was wait a minute then why isn’t your work bullshit too though subjective to the same peer reviewed system and you know ………….whole notion that we were just talking about animal emotions of consistency you know I mean sorry you know the best analysis you and I were just doing is that whole thing on answer from and also double talk perfect to say……………………………….that she’s feeling good. I mean sorry you know that doesn’t work anymore.

Well it just touches on some stuff that we are afraid of there and we just have to get over it.

You know what that’s right and when I was saying I’m writing this new book in fact people are going to have to learn to deal with their fears. Absolutely you know its funny in your work it’s like that there are so many religious parallel there’s so comical and setback and you know one side if the science been this movement against the religious idea that were special and unique right because that’s what the Bible has told us….maiden gods …we’re special and unique and then when science comes along we’re like something your work I mean and that’s really the message from your work it’s like hey we’re not so special, we’re not so unique, we’re kind of like ……..you know and then that arouse us again it’s like wait a minute we wanna be a little bit special and unique.

“Right I mean its crazy you know that’s where the paradigm shift is coming I mean I think that ultimately you know we may not be around to see it perform but that’s what’s happening.”

That’s what’s happening. Great way to end that very pleasant chat with Dr. Marc Bekoff, thanks again for him joining us. If you would like more information on his books and particularly his book The Emotional Lives of Animals please check out our website skeptiko.com. You would also find links to our previous shows and to our forums and also please you could also drop me a note. I do encourage you to continue talking about Skeptiko, blogging about Skeptiko, writing reviews for Skeptiko, getting the word out. There is another voice out there that’s contrary to some of this Skeptikal noise that we hear. Next episode we gonna be wrapping up this three part discussion we have been having about dogs with our Skeptic group with Dr. Clive Owen from the University of Florida who you’ve heard some clips before, I think this is going to be a very interesting episode coming up so please stay with me for that one and that’s going to be about for today until next time. Bye for now.