Animal Personhood and Conservation

Each year as summer winds down I make a pilgrimage to see semi-palmated sandpipers. They’re easy to miss if you don’t know them and magical once you do: tiny brown-and-white shorebirds who gather in mud flats at low tide, running frantically along the contours of each incoming wave, feeding on the invertebrates who will fuel their epic migratory flights across the Atlantic Ocean.

All birds are marvelous, but sandpipers are particularly dear to me. It was slightly more than a decade ago that a flock pitter-pattered around me as I lay on the beach, and there was something about them—perhaps it was the way an inch of water was a raging torrent at their scale—that made me wonder: What is it like to be a sandpiper?

Considering that question would make me reflect on the scientific study of animal intelligence, which was—and still is—escaping from the legacy of the last several centuries, during which conventional wisdom held that animals are little more than biological stimulus-response machines. That wisdom was changing, but the lessons of contemporary research had yet to percolate through popular culture.

I didn’t subscribe to that mechanistic view of animals, of course. I’d known too many thoughtful, sensitive cats and dogs. But I came to realize that I was in the habit of truly recognizing the intelligence, the selfhood, of only a few creatures. It wasn’t customary to think of wild animals that way.

Beauty, transcendence, wilderness, ecology, biodiversity, natural history, conservation: None of these frameworks for relating to the natural world included an explicit regard for animals as sentient individuals rather than units of a species or population. And while some nature-loving people did consider other animals to be thinking, feeling beings, as is the case in traditional Indigenous ontologies, that perspective was too easily dismissed as sentimental anthropomorphism. It belonged in children’s movies and the animal rights movement rather than environmentalism.

Nowadays that separation is difficult to justify. That’s in part because culture is shifting—ours is an age of cute animal videos, the effects of which rest on a certain degree of empathy—and also because of the science, which has flourished. It’s no longer controversial to speak of animals being conscious or self-aware or emotional; sophisticated forms of intelligence are acknowledged not only in a few exceptionally brainy creatures, like dolphins and chimpanzees, but throughout the animal kingdom. Studies abound of bumblebee feelings and garter snake relationships and the cultural knowledge of deer. To see other animals as sharing essential mental properties with humans isn’t anthropomorphism. It’s common sense.

This is relevant to our relationships with all animals, not just those who are wild; and when it comes to nature, one of the obvious connections is to the ethics of hunting, fishing, and trapping. The implications run much deeper, though, beginning with a richer appreciation of nature and the meaning of conservation.

On my latest sandpiper-watching trip, to Tills Point Preserve in Penobscot, I also saw a blue heron resting in a treetop and eastern phoebes flitting at the forest’s edge. A garter snake crossed my path and red squirrels alerted each other to my approach. Knowing that every one of those creatures was a someone, living life in the first person, quite different from myself but also profoundly relatable, made each encounter that much more delightful.

Brandon Keim is a Maine-based freelance journalist and contributing editor at Nautilus. His new book, Meet the Neighbors, is about the science of animal intelligence and our relationships to wild animals and to nature.