I had some encouraging news about my culture concept - namely that philosophers in the Netherlands are thinking along similar lines. This encouraged me to write a short essay for a competition run by my department.
I do not expect to fare well in the competition, but the work gave me three things: practice in writing to a strict word-limit; the framework for the dissertation and something that I can expend into a paper to discuss with the Dutch philosophers.
Therefore, it was time well spent.
I will post in here, in two parts.
Part 1.
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Animal cultures merit ethical consideration
Culture has not been greatly considered in animal ethics – to be more precise, non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cultures have received very little attention. In this paper I will argue that animal cultures merit ethical consideration.
My argument does not rely on a specific ethical theory. A consideration of animal cultures could be embraced by the most widely discussed approaches in animal ethics as well as by environmental ethicists. I will simply assume the non-controversial position that animals (as individuals and/or species) merit moral consideration.
More controversial, perhaps, is the claim that animals have cultures. Although this is still debated in some quarters, there is enough agreement for biologists and ethologists to recommend that animal cultures should be considered in conservation and for the United Nations to issue recommendations to that effect (UN India 2020; Brakes et al. 2021). I will regard this as sufficient to open a discussion. I will not explore what if anything this implies for human cultures.
I will begin by defining what I mean by ‘culture’ and offer brief examples of aspects of animal culture. I will proceed to explain why animal cultures matter and thus why they should be considered in ethical decision-making. Finally, I will present circumstances in which the ethical rubber hits the cultural road: cases where a consideration of animal cultures seems ethically to be required.
I
In this section I will clarify what I mean by ‘culture’ and offer examples to put flesh on the bones of the argument.
‘Culture’ has various definitions, but for this paper the most apt is that used by cetacean biologists Luke Rendell and Hal Whitehead:
Information or behaviour—shared by community—which is acquired from conspecifics through some form of social learning. (Whitehead and Rendell 2015)
Social learning can be vertical (parent to child); oblique (older group members to younger group members) or horizontal (between members of the same generation). Some or all of these have been determined across a plethora of species (Whitehead and Rendell 2015). Culture, scientists state, usually leads to ‘the production and propagation of adaptive behaviour’ (ibid.).
Having offered a definition of what I mean by culture, I will now provide some examples to illustrate the role culture plays in animal lives. This can broadly be categorised under two headings:
· Group Life
· Survival
a) Shared, socially learned information and behaviour for group living in a specific population.
There are various ways in which groups of social animals can form workable societies. For example, although chimpanzee societies tend to be more hierarchical than those of bonobos, there are cultural variations between different populations: some relatively pacific and egalitarian, others engaging in strict dominance hierarchies (Leeuwen, Cronin, and Haun 2018).
Mating behaviours are also learnt. For example, bowerbirds take up to seven years to learn how to make a bower that will attract females. Young males visit many bowers and may assist in their construction (Collis and Borgia 1992).[1]
Animals also learn how to communicate within their group, using complex communication systems or languages (Meijer 2019; C. Slobodchikoff 2012). Bird songs are largely socially learned (Thorpe 1961) [2]. Humpback whale songs are culturally transmitted (Garland et al. 2011). Sperm whales communicate which clan they belong to, who they are as an individual and what family group they are in (Whitehead and Rendell 2015). Dolphins who co-operate with human fisherman have a different ‘dialect’ from those of the same species who do not interact with fishermen (Romeu et al. 2017). Prairie dogs’ communications differ in different populations (C. N. Slobodchikoff and Coast 1980).
Through social learning, animals develop the skills required in their particular cultural group.
b) Shared, socially learned information and behaviour necessary for survival.
Hunting and foraging skills are transmitted through social learning and may be culturally variable. For example, meerkats learn how to catch scorpions and seal-eating orcas learn specific skills (Whitehead and Rendell 2015; Thornton and McAuliffe 2006). Chimpanzee groups inhabiting the same environmental conditions smash nuts and create tools in culturally diverse ways (Whiten 2005).
Migration routes and the locations of food and water are learned. During a drought in Africa, only the elephant families led by older matriarchs survived intact: the others, who had lost older females to poaching or culling, had lost the knowledge of drought resistant waterholes (Foley, Pettorelli, and Foley 2008).
Cultures may incorporate interspecies relationships. For example, coyotes and badgers in some populations hunt together (Minta, Minta, and Lott 1992).
In general, cultures can adapt to changing circumstances. Urban populations of many species have adopted novel behaviours which are transmitted socially, allowing them to successfully inhabit urban areas (Schilthuizen 2018). [3] Thus, cultural diversity (like genetic diversity) may enhance the resilience of a species.
Cultures can also drive genetic evolution: the case of lactose tolerance in dairy-farming human societies is the typical example. A like example for animals is that of orcas, whose ‘dietary traditions… have favoured population-specific genes influencing morphology and digestion.’ (Whitehead et al. 2019)
It’s important to recognise that even animals traditionally considered asocial (like bears) spend a prolonged period learning from their mothers and do interact at certain times with conspecifics (Stonorov and Stokes 1972; Vitale, McKinney, and Linden 2018).
One caveat: certain cultures may lessen well-being and/or decrease the chances of survival.
In the case of well-being, baboons live in strict social hierarchies, enforced through dominance behaviour. This imposes significant stress on individual baboons. One group lost the older males through disease and the community became more egalitarian. There was significantly less conflict and stress. New baboons who entered the group adopted this ‘pacific’ culture - but this new culture did not spread to other groups (Sapolsky and Share 2004).
In the case of survival, orcas who eat primarily salmon are struggling to find sufficient food due to declining salmon numbers. As numbers decline and genetic diversity is lost (they do not interbreed with non-salmon eating orcas), their population risks extirpation (Whitehead et al. 2019). The well-being of individuals is also diminished by the difficulty in finding food (Hanson et al. 2021).
Cultural evolution, like the genetic variant, is an amoral process. And yet, I still wish to argue that animal cultures merit ethical consideration. In the following section I will explain why.
[1] Some animals also learn parenting skills by assisting in the care of young (Caffrey and Peterson 2015; Canestrari, M. Marcos, and Baglione 2005; Haswell and Haswell 2013). [2] The songs of some species lose complexity when populations decline and fragment (Laiolo and Tella 2007) – an example of cultural decline. [3] For millennia other animals have derived benefits from food sources and habitats provided by humans (O’Connor 2013); interactions with or existence alongside humans may be normative and beneficial for some animal cultures.
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