I am the subject of my own experiences. I directly perceive objects from my point of view alone and can only infer other perspectives by reasoning from my own. At the same time, my experiences take place in a world inhabited by other beings who are also the subject of their own experiences, to which my inferences can only approximate. Since inference proceeds from evidence, I can better approximate the lived experience of other beings by using a better array of evidence. It is the array of evidence, an ordered collection of data, not an individual piece of evidence, that improves my approximation. On average, an individual piece of evidence is insufficient. “Knowing” that birds in general do not perform as well as adult humans in problem-solving tests does not let me approximate the intelligence of the gull in front of me. Therefore, what matters is comprehensive data.
Human exceptionalism crumbles under a comprehensive evaluation. Human exceptionalism is the belief that humankind is an exception to everything that surrounds us, and is closely related to anthropocentrism, the belief that we are at the center of the world. Anthropocentrism has its roots spanning from the Judeo-Christian tradition to the current technocratic culture and has enabled humankind to exploit the lives of non-human animals at an astronomical scale.
More than 90,000 cattle are slaughtered daily in the United States alone, along with 300,000 pigs and 23 million chickens, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The live weight of cattle slaughtered in 2026 is between 1,410 and 1,470 pounds; a conservative estimate of 35 percent packaged beef per-live-weight yields 44.4 million pounds from cattle slaughtered each day. Since the standard serving size for beef is four ounces at its raw weight, we can estimate that around 177.6 million servings of beef are produced daily. This is in addition to 49 million servings of hog meat and 100.2 million servings of chicken.
The justification for our mass slaughtering of non-human animals lies in human exceptionalism. To be precise, we first began exploiting animals because our technology allowed it and secondarily searched for grounds in human exceptionalism. The thesis of human exceptionalism would suggest that humans alone possess certain superior abilities, namely the ability to reason abstractly and act as moral agents.
But, this thesis is challenged by experiments where animals demonstrate cognitive abilities or features that have been thought to belong exclusively to humans. Speaking of avians alone, a 2020 paper by neuroscientists Onur Güntürkün and colleagues at Ruhr University Bochum, “The surprising organisation of avian brains,” reported that pigeons and barn owls have a “layered, corticallike organization” that resembles the “layerlike and columnar organization” of the human neocortex. This is striking considering that the neocortex is a six-layered structure thought to belong exclusively to mammals, and that the human neocortex is thought to be superior to other mammals’ because it takes up the highest proportion of the brain.
Another paper, “A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird,” was published in 2020 by a group at the University of Tübingen experimenting on carrion crows. The crows were trained to tilt their head when a red light followed a gray light, but not when a blue light followed a gray light. They were also trained to tilt their head when a blue light was shown without a gray light preceding it and not to tilt when a red light was shown alone. The crows were able to correctly tilt their heads in response to the specific stimulus even when the gray light was shown at an intensity below what they can sense. The researchers argue for an “avian consciousness,” and that “more and more pillars of human exceptionalism” have fallen over time.
Under a comprehensive evaluation, we can take these experiments as challenges to human exceptionalism; they are evidence that birds are constituted in a way that makes consciousness a possibility. Surely, we should define what consciousness means, but if we include under its heading the ability to act toward an interest, and in the case of carrion crows, the ability to categorize those interests, the discovery must change how we interact with birds.
In the campus setting, this could mean leaving a cup of water outside in the summer so that a bird can rehydrate itself before carrying on its day, or keeping a curtain down to prevent them from inadvertently striking into the window. More broadly, we can also change our behavior by trying out the vegan options widely available in the dining halls.
~ Benjamin Ha `27
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