Last week’s Sunday Review in the New York Times included a piece tuck under Opinion entitled “Dogs Are People, Too.” Gregory Berns, the article’s author, a professor at Emory University, describes how he trained his dog to enter and remain still inside an MRI machine long enough to scan brain activity. The results, repeated on other trained dogs, indicated that dogs share the same level of sentience as a human child. Berns’ conclusion: dogs are persons. I tend to agree. Although I’m no longer a pet “owner,” I grew up with dogs (and cats, birds, reptiles, and hamsters). There was never any question in my mind that our dogs could think. The also shared emotions with people—as Holmes would say, it’s elementary. Obvious. Staring at you with puppy-dog-brown-eyes-right-in-the-face obvious. Science, however, has always had an uneasy relationship with consciousness, the ghost in the machine. Dogs, many declare, are just machines. They salivate at the sound of a bell, for goodness sake!
Berns, however, has found the holy grail of scientific proof. The brain scan is accepted as a measure of human conscious activity. It is difficult enough to lure a human into an MRI and have her or him hold still. Dogs, however, are smart. They can be trained to do this too. Berns has succeeded and now has evidence that the emotional centers in dogs’ brains respond much like human brains. If they are emotional beings, as many of us knew all along, they are persons. Berns points out that this has legal implications. We make laws about unborn humans, but we treat fully alive canines like, well, dogs. Consciousness is part of the animal, and perhaps even the plant world. That stands to reason, if not scientific proof.
Christianity is largely responsible for advocating the concept of human superiority. We are, after all, made in the image of God. The Bible tells me so. Although scientists tend to abandon the Bible, they retain the myth of human superiority. Some concepts are just too convenient to relinquish, even in a rational world. We assume, since animals don’t talk the way that people do, that they are not thinking creatures. Even scientists appear afraid, at times, to take on the immaterial concept of thought. If the materialistic view is correct, thoughts are only electrochemical signals. Only this, and nothing more. As time nears to get dressed for work, I’d like to send my electrochemical signals out to get the paper. If I do the paper will still be on the lawn when I get home at the end of the day. I’ll have to fetch my own slippers, I guess.
Need I say more?
