One of the joys about being a writer is that I get to meet some very interesting people, such as the farmer Rosamund Young. Her book The Secret Life of Cows became a recent bestseller many years after it was first published by a small independent press, sold modestly and quietly disappeared from view: the fate of most of even the more fortunate books. It’s second life came after the writer Alan Bennett discovered an old copy and raved about it: the fate most authors are left dreaming of.
Rosamund’s book is a series of observations of how cows and other farm animals live, from a farmer’s point of view. She attributes to the animals pretty much all the attributes of humans. Some are stupid, some clever. They form bonds, especially parental ones. They are described as proud, hurt, amazed. They communicate desires through facial expressions and behaviour. She is neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but her life living with the animals gives her some kind of authority to claim these things that neither those “experts” have. But what kind of authority is it?
I interviewed Rosamund for an event on Sunday, during Bristol’s brilliant Food Connections festival. I was interested in how unashamedly she used anthropomorphic descriptions. This kind of writing is viewed with suspicion by scientists and philosophers, but Rosamund is perfectly aware that cows are cows, humans are humans, and that the two may experience the world very differently. Nevertheless, her observations convince her that in their cow-like way, “every animal has a limitless ability to experience a whole range of emotions, judged only in its own terms.” She doesn’t use anthropological language because she foolishly believes cow minds are like human minds, but simply to make vivid the fact that their experience of the world has more in common with our own than we might imagine.
This made me remember a remarkable short chapter in David Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, “Of the reason of animals”. Hume did not so much elevate the animals to the supposed level of humans as claim that much human “reasoning” is no more rational than that of other animals.
His basic premise for this is the claim that “All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of Analogy, which leads us to expect from any cause the same events, which we have observed to result from similar causes.” This is Hume’s famous claim that our reasoning about cause and effect is based neither on observation – since we only see events following one another, not the causal powers linking them – nor on a deduction, since there is no logical connection between a cause occurring and its effect following.
It “seems evident” to Hume, and to anyone who cares to look, “that animals as well as men learn many things from experience, and infer, that the same events will always follow from the same causes.” In a line that sounded very much like something Rosamund might have said, he adds “The ignorance and inexperience of the young are here plainly distinguishable from the cunning and sagacity of the old, who have learned, by long observation, to avoid what hurt them, and to pursue what gave ease or pleasure.”
Animals learn by experience, as humans do. Still, he maintains “It is impossible, that this inference of the animal can be founded on any process of argument or reasoning”, such reasoning being “too abstruse for the observation of such imperfect understandings” given that “it may well employ the utmost care and attention of a philosophic genius to discover and observe them.” Hume therefore concludes that animals “are not guided in these inferences by reasoning.” But here’s the twist: “neither are children; neither are the generality of mankind, in their ordinary actions and conclusions: neither are philosophers themselves, who, in all the active parts of life, are, in the main the same with the vulgar, and are governed by of the same maxims.”
It is also often pointed out that “though animals learn many parts of their knowledge from observation” they also do a lot on “instinct” which we “are so apt to admire as something very extraordinary, and inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding.” But here’s another twist: “our wonder will, perhaps, cease or diminish, when we consider, that the experimental reasoning itself, which we possess in common with beasts, and on which the whole conduct of life depends, is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power, that acts in us unknown to ourselves.” In other words, our ability to infer connections of cause and effect is itself an instinct, one which we could not do without but which neither has to be learned nor can be demonstrated by logical argument.
It seems to me that Hume provides some kind of philosophical justification for the ways in which Rosamund describes her animals. She does not think like Hume but I think they came to very similar conclusions about the intelligence of animals.
Or perhaps not so different: both carefully attend to what animals are actually like. Hume didn’t need to be a farmer to see how the reason of animals resembled that of humans. Nor is being a farmer in close proximity to animals enough to guarantee someone will make the same observations. Rosamund recalled her mother’s father, a farmer who believed that animals felt nothing, even when he was surrounded by beasts that cried and screamed.
There is an important lesson here. So often we are told that people without a lot of direct experience of something can’t comment on it, and that those on the frontline have privileged access to knowledge that others must defer to. But of course people on the frontline disagree, like Rosamund and her grandfather.
We should never defer to anyone simply on the basis that they have more experience than us. We need to look for signs that they have attended carefully to what they have experienced and understood it properly. To do that, we have to carefully attend to what they say, and what we know of what they speak of.
To do that, we may also need to see how the way they express things might not be how we would. That’s what I had to do with Rosamund. On the face of it, her anthropomorphism was hopelessly naive. In fact, it was just a manner of speaking which expressed a deeper understanding of animals that is rooted in the best kind of attentive experience. Rosamund doesn’t write like a philosopher, but she pays attention like the best of them.
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