If you enjoyed this you should check out Carl Safina's book "Beyond Words" (review here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-lives-animals/

If you enjoyed this you should check out Carl Safina's book "Beyond Words" (review here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-lives-animals/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-liv...). While we shouldn't simply assume animals have minds, what we have tended to do instead is just as bad: assume they do not. In the West, Descartes famously declared animals are automata. Safina shares this quote from Voltaire in response: ``` Voltaire disdainfully called out Descartes’s contradictions of logic, even referring to him and his followers as “barbarians”: “What a pitiful, what a sorry thing to have said that animals are machines bereft of understanding and feeling,” wrote Voltaire. He continued: Is it because I speak to you, that you judge that I have feeling, memory, ideas? Well, I do not speak to you; you see me going home looking disconsolate, seeking a paper anxiously, opening the desk where I remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You judge that I have experienced the feeling of distress and that of pleasure, that I have memory and understanding. Bring the same judgment to bear on this dog which has lost its master, which has sought him on every road with sorrowful cries, which enters the house agitated, uneasy, which goes down the stairs, up the stairs, from room to room, which at last finds in his study the master it loves, and which shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its leaps, by its caresses. Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? Has it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. Safina, Carl (2015-07-14). Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (pp. 79-80). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition. ```