Transcriber: Elena Montrasio Reviewer: Patrizia C Romeo Tomasini
I was very envious of Claude having his iPad with him.
I've got my 1979 iPad with me.
It's very good, it even comes along with a stylus and everything.
The reason I'm using this is, one, because it gives me confidence,
but secondly, also,
in the first part of my talk, I'm going to talk about some philosophy,
and as I'm not a natural philosopher,
one of the things I found is,
if I quote philosophers, and I get them wrong,
especially if they're still alive,
there's a very strong chance they will name a paradigm after me,
which is a highly negative one.
So, I'm going to be very careful,
and I have to read a few things out, so forgive me for that,
but it will help us, as we go along.
The other thing I have to say is, as Joanna just said, you know,
as scientists, the reality is,
most of the time, we're doing things as best we can,
but I have to say,
after 20 years of working in the conservation of whales and dolphins,
we've most probably been getting it wrong.
So that's my first challenge to myself.
The second is that the title of the talk
is 'The rights for whales and dolphins, necessity or exaggeration?'
Well, I actually think now, after 20 years, it's a necessity.
You can decide whether it's an exaggeration.
I'm going to try and cram about five hours of talk
into the remaining 16 minutes or so,
and you can judge at the end of it.
The challenge, I said,
was that I've spent 20 years talking to fishermen, to governments,
trying to reduce by-catch by 2%,
trying to end whaling or get whaling down by 50%,
and we've talked about whale stocks,
big populations of these creatures out there.
And the thing I've realised,
is actually we're most probably talking at absolutely the wrong level.
And the more we learn about these creatures,
the more we realise that we have to talk about them as individuals.
And I'll try and explain a few of those things, as we go through.
First of all, I ought to say, whales and dolphins, what are they?
Well, they're mammals, they are like us,
they have live young, they feed them milk, they're warm-blooded.
I say that, but some people don't know that,
some people still think of them as fish,
and I'll explain a bit further, in a moment.
The history of our relationship with whales and dolphins
also goes back a long way.
If we go back to the Romans,
there's a poet, the Oppian of Cilicia,
who talks about the gods looking down on the killing of dolphins
like the same as the killing of humans,
Aristotle, in The Greeks,
talked about dolphins saving other dolphins.
Even in the Arctic nations, say the Inuit, in Greenland,
they venerated Sedna as their goddess,
and it was her fingers, which fell into the water,
that became the whales and dolphins that then fed her.
Even in China, Baiji,
now a dolphin which is what's called, well, it's almost extinct.
There are a few of them left,
but basically we'd say it's functionally extinct.
There aren't enough of them.
The Baiji was a princess, who was going to be married off
to somebody she didn't want to, and she jumped in the river.
A dolphin that's been venerated, but, as human beings,
unfortunately we built things like the Three Gorges Dam.
We've polluted the water,
and now we don't have very many of them left.
So, when I'm talking about this new way of thinking about conservation,
I want to introduce the concept of personhood.
Now, there's a long history of personhood in sort of moral philosophy,
but this is where I have to quote someone.
And there's a professor, Thomas White, out of California,
who's a friend, and a colleague,
and therefore I really do have to care what he says, right?
Or else I'll never get invited around for dinner.
And he said, 'A person is a who, and not a want'.
If I got it right, 'A who and not a what', sorry.
Actually his words were,
'A person is any being, no matter what their species,
who has traits that imply a high level
of intellectual and emotional sophistication'.
I know it's a Saturday, after a Friday, at a university,
and if you look around,
is there intellectual and emotional sophistication?
I would hope so, in a group of students coming from Loughborough University.
But he sets a really high standard,
he talks about creatures needing self-awareness,
an ability to express both positive and negative emotions,
displaying self-consciousness and personality.
He says they have to show abstract thought,
and solve complex problems.
Well, he's setting the bar really high for us guys
that want to show that other creatures, apart from humans, fulfill that.
Tom's been studying dolphins, as well as human beings,
and he comes from a department that looks at the ethics in business, actually.
And he says he has found that in dolphins,
and I agree with him.
In trying to talk about what is personhood,
we have to distinguish the language.
And one of the things we have to think about
is the word between human and person.
I haven't got many slides,
but hopefully they're nice ones, and you'll enjoy them.
And two of the questions we have to ask are,
'Are all humans persons?', and 'Are all persons humans?'
The first one is a medical ethical question.
And you might just say,
'Yeah, of course everyone, every human's a person'.
Well, is a fetus a person?
That has a context of both religious, medical, and your personal views
that come to play, in relationship to that one.
The second one is about animal ethics.
And the use of the word 'person',
I like it, because it also desensitizes the debate
from being one of using language, that takes away a species bias.
Because if I say, 'I'm human and you're an animal' -
I liked Joanna when she said,
you know, as a primate, as an ape, that was studying, it puts us in the mix,
a graduation, as Darwin would have said,
between the basic and the very advanced, whatever 'advanced' actually means.
So, we try to remove the species bias by talking about persons.
Language is also limiting.
In Japan, the word for 'whale' is 'kujira', and the kanji -
there's two parts of the kanji character for 'kujira', 'whale';
it means big fish.
So you imagine, if you're growing up in Japan,
and you're learning about whales and dolphins,
you learn about 20 characters
as you're going through your academic studies,
up to, before university.
You learn about 20 characters for animals,
and the one for whale is 'big fish'.
So you can imagine the contextual difficulty
of trying to then debate an issue about why this group of 'people',
as we might call them, or non-human persons,
should be defended.
But why does personhood matter?
Well, because personhood creates a state of moral standing -
moral standing means there's sense of the individual -
and the individual creates an entitlement.
You'll notice I haven't really used the word 'rights' yet,
but I think that the moral standing that creates the entitlement
then leads to rights.
And I'm not talking about whales and dolphins having human rights.
I'm talking about them having cetaceans rights.
And this can be subtly different, both similar and different.
We can also examine person versus non-person.
So, for example, if I was to say it's about your ability to suffer,
if I mocked the people in the front row --
I can't quite see you.
So, if I say anything nasty, please forgive me.
If I made horrible comments about them,
I'm sure that I could cause them to suffer a little bit,
or I'd embarrass them, at the very least.
Personal hurt, if I really went to town.
If I was to mock, say, my pet goose at home in the same way,
I'm not quite sure she would really take it,
unless I was being aggressive towards her.
if I was to mock Loughborough University,
well, actually, Loughborough University is a legal person.
So I have an inanimate object here, in Loughborough university,
which is protected.
We have the lovely front audience here who are also, I hope protected,
and yet my goose, as another non-human, isn't protected.
So, there's a scale in the way
that we can think about persons and non-persons.
Personhood also, as I said, creates a moral standing,
and therefore we have a recognition of needs.
In human terms, we would say we will have basic human needs,
which we have to recognize, and honor each other.
When it comes to cetaceans,
we say those needs most probably have to do
with access to food, access to freedom.
Maybe we shouldn't imprison them in captivity, in captive display.
But also, we increasingly recognize there's a thing about social cohesion.
These creatures are social animals.
This image is a beautiful image,
and this dolphin can't communicate with you
through facial features, just like you would.
It can only communicate in other ways.
If we took a step further back with this photo,
it'll actually be through the frame of a concrete tank.
So, what appears to be an -
I was about to say 'animal', slipping it to my own rhetoric there -
but this non-human person looks pretty happy,
but actually, is it?
And that's one of the questions we're trying to fathom
as we try to understand.
So, I've talked about the philosophy bit,
which is, in many ways, the more difficult bit.
But let's just say they have the capacity to suffer,
but can we prove any of the other issues, in terms of beings' self awareness?
And that's why we need to look at the modern-day study of dolphins.
Dr. Lori Marino and Dr. Diana Reiss, out of the US,
have done a huge range of work here.
And what they've been finding is that, they say, there's three standards:
self-awareness, 'Am I I?'.
Is this dolphin an individual in itself?
Has it got self-recognition? Can it center one's attention on itself?
And has it the ability of metacognition?
Can it reflect on its own thoughts,
and think about other things, like the future,
and think about other creatures' feelings?
Well, if we were to examine the dolphin's brain here -
this is a bottlenose dolphin,
which is one of the most commonly known dolphins,
I think most people would recognize -
what you'd find is a very, very complex brain.
And this is the problem, also in comparisons.
When we do comparisons we tend to go,
'Compared to a human, this brain is a third of the size'.
But, in terms of encephalation quotient, pardon me,
its brain is - humans' is about a seven,
this is the ratio of the brain size to the rest of the body.
With a bottlenose dolphin, it's about five.
So that's one to the dolphin, and one to the human.
But again, the problem with that context of that scientific type of study
is we always start with the human measurement,
and then we're comparing.
So, if you take, say, birds,
which, many species, like parrots, appear to have high intelligence,
you're talking about quite low sizes of brains to the rest of the size of the body
and so, maybe those aren't the best comparisons.
Some of the recent work, which is getting really exciting,
is the study of neurons in the brain.
And what they found recently is a series of things called spindle cells.
And spindle cells are neurons
which appear really to do with the emotional cognitive behaviour.
And we know, in humans, that if these neurons get affected,
then we see it in dementia patients,
and patients who've lost their ability to relate socially.
There's only three other groups of creatures that have them:
that's the great apes,
elephants, and whales and dolphins.
So there's something about that group,
where social ability,
the ability potentially to empathize with each other,
is crucially important.
So, OK, the biology is sort of going, I think, in the direction I want to go,
but what about behaviour?
Well, we can do tests.
So, dolphins like this can be put through mirror recognition tests.
This is where we take the dolphin,
we put a sticker on it, we put a mirror in front of it,
and we'll see if that dolphin recognizes itself,
by noting that the sticker is on it.
You can do it with a whole range of creatures,
and you get varying responses.
With human beings, it depends if it's a Saturday morning, or whatever.
So, you get about a 95% success rate.
With dolphins it's closer to 100%.
We used to do it with elephants; it never worked with elephants.
And what people used to do, was take a mirror, a bathroom mirror,
hold it up to the elephant, with a sticker on him,
and the elephant just stood there.
A couple of years ago, Frans De Waal and his team realised
that taking a small mirror and holding it up to an elephant was a bit stupid.
So what they did, was they took a life-size elephant mirror,
and held it up to the elephant.
And the elephant immediately went, 'Oh yeah! It's over here!'.
Again, the context.
We were trying to use a human methodology,
and our view of the world, looking through our window,
to try and understand the elephant.
In this case, we needed something different.
With dolphins, also, there's what's called the pedal test,
the way I describe it,
where sounds are broadcast to the dolphins,
and they're asked to distinguish
between the previous sound and the sound they're just hearing.
And if the sound is close, they hit the pedal that says 'yes';
if it's different, they hit the pedal that says 'no'.
But what was interesting, they introduced a third pedal,
and without a reward structure around it,
the third pedal says, 'I don't know'.
And the dolphins,
where the sound gets down to the level where we think
that maybe they won't be able to distinguish either,
they hit the 'don't know' sound.
This shows something about self-referential behaviour in dolphins,
that they are able to distinguish
and also answer a question in a different way,
showing quite a level of sophistication.
I'm not a great fan of captivity, by the way.
I think there's some interesting stuff that has come out of it,
but as we learn more about these creatures,
I don't think they ought to be held in captivity and in tanks.
If we look into the wild studies, what we find is some remarkable things.
Have any of you seen the orcas on the old David Attenborough films,
where they come up on the beach,
and they're hunting sea lions in Patagonia?
Well, a study there, which is a long-term study,
noted one year that there was an orca whose jaw had been broken,
and couldn't feed.
So basically, the scientists said, 'Well, OK, that one's gone.
We're going to write that one off, it won't be here next year'.
But they carried on watching.
And what they found was other orcas were hunting,
and then bringing food to feed that orca.
It took about a year, but the jaw recovered,
and then that orca was just part of that society, and carried on.
So what was it, culturally, that led to that to happen?
Well, maybe that orca was the son, or daughter,
of one of the lead females,
and she wanted her genes to continue.
That might be one biological explanation.
Maybe it was just one of the group.
They empathised, and they wanted 'him' to survive, in this case.
More recently, we've had the reverse situation,
where an older dolphin - a film out of out of Korea -
and there was an older dolphin that was ill,
and the other dolphins actually formed a raft underneath the dolphin
to keep her going, and held her at the surface.
Now, we've seen this holding up with calves before,
but never holding up other dolphin that actually needed -
was most probably past reproduction age,
wasn't going to contribute to the community any further,
in terms of biological terms,
but most probably was contributing from a cultural point of view.
And this is the thing we've discovered now:
culture, in these creatures, is actually as important
as some of the biological issues that we've been dealing with.
I just wanted to show you a couple of very quick ones.
This dolphin is called Billy.
Billy, about 20 years ago.
Billy lives off Adelaide, in the port river.
There we have a long-term study, we've been looking at them there.
But he got trapped behind a marina wall, and had to be taken into captivity,
for about three weeks,
and then she was released.
Billy was never made to do any tricks, or anything for food,
while she was in the facility.
But a short time afterwards, Billy started doing this.
Now, this isn't just Billy jumping out of the water,
this is called a tail walk.
Billy is actually up, and racing backwards.
I'm afraid I haven't got a video to show you of this,
but she's going backwards, at a pace.
It doesn't help her in feeding, it doesn't help her in attracting a mate.
She's very, very successful at doing that, she's had a number of calves.
But she just seems to be doing it for fun.
And other dolphins, in that community, have started to learn it.
But why would they do that?
It's using up energy,
it's expending energy they should be using for hunting, we thought.
It might be that they're just having fun.
And if they can have the capability of having fun,
then maybe something else is also going on.
The last short story I wanted to tell you, very quickly, before the end,
is the story of a dolphin called Kelly.
Kelly was in Mississippi, and she was in captivity,
and she was taught, by the trainers,
to clean up the tank at the end of the day.
It was quite a cost-effective method.
You'd say, 'Go and pick it, swim around and pick up all the debris'.
And what Kelly managed to do,
was bring debris, and she'd get fed a fish,
as a reward.
Kelly was quite smart, though, and what Kelly did was
she went down, and she found a big piece of paper,
brought it back, then she got a reward.
She found a small piece of paper, brought it back, and she got her reward.
And something happened in Billy's mind.
Because the next time, Billy went out and found a big piece of paper,
she hid it,
and then started ripping small pieces off,
(Laughter)
and then taking the small pieces back to get her reward.
So, Billy - sorry, in this case Kelly -
I think was doing a little bit of game theory.
I think she was doing some quite basic mathematics,
but pretty good for her.
And she was developing that,
and then teaching it to her other colleagues.
I'll close with those examples,
but the lesson for me, I think, is to say that we have to make a leap.
We can no longer look at whales and dolphins
as just big stocks of animals that are out there.
We can't talk about 'it's acceptable to lose 5%'.
We have 196 bottlenose dolphins off the north coast of the UK.
If we were to lose three of the females,
which are the ones that culturally are passing on information,
we actually might lose the whole of that population.
So we can no longer talk about small percentages.
We have to jump our anthropocentric views,
and we have to start thinking about individuals,
and those subpopulations, the cultural groups that are there.
We have to look into the eyes of these creatures
and be able to understand what it means.
And I think we owe something to future generations.
It's not just to hand over to them
the number of species that were there when we walked upon the Earth.
But we have to hand over to them
all the applied knowledge and experience we've had.
We have to say that conservation has to be tempered
by our ever-expanding understanding of the moral empathy for these creatures.
It's a huge challenge, it's a massive challenge.
But for us, as human beings, I think we can rise to it.
I think they deserve it, and I think we deserve it,
and I think the world will be better for it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)