People talk to their pets every day: praise when they’re doing well, reassurance when they’re confused, and affection when they cuddle. We also talk to the animals when they misbehave. “Why did you do this?” someone might ask their dog. Or we can scold the cat: “Don’t touch him!” – while moving a family heirloom across the room.
So is it ever appropriate to punish or scold an animal?
When people talk about “punishment,” it implies more than just the loss of privileges. This term implies that a person is asked to learn a lesson after breaking a rule that he or she can understand. But the fact that an animal’s understanding differs from a human’s raises questions about what lessons they might learn and what, if any, ethics it is to scold animals.
These topics include what researchers know about the cognition of different animals. But they go beyond that, raising questions about what moral status animals have and how people who interact with animals should educate them.
As an ethical theorist, I have explored these and related questions with some of my colleagues in psychology and anthropology. I think it is important to distinguish three types of learning: conditioning, teaching, and training.
conditioning
A type of learning called “classical conditioning” was popularized by psychologist Ivan Pavlov in the early 20th century. Pavlov repeatedly rang a bell while offering food, causing dogs to salivate just from the sound of the bell. This type of learning occurs by associating just two types of stimuli: in this case, a sound and a snack.
When scientists talk about punishment, what they normally mean is “operant conditioning,” popularized shortly thereafter by psychologists Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner. In operant conditioning, positive or pleasurable stimuli are used to reinforce desired behavior, and negative or painful stimuli are used to deter undesirable behavior. For example, we might give a dog a treat to reward him for following a sit command.
But the type of learning that operant conditioning aims to achieve lacks a crucial component of human punishment: responsibility. Punishing people is not just to deter undesirable behavior. They are trying to drive home that someone has violated, that the individual’s behavior deserves punishment.
So can non-human animals act against the rules? Do they ever deserve to be scolded? I claim that they are, but there are important differences from human misbehavior.
Instructions
Training many animals, such as horses and dogs, goes beyond conditioning. It involves a more complex type of learning: teaching.
An important point that distinguishes instruction from conditioning is that the instructor addresses his trainees. Pet owners and animal trainers talk to cats and dogs, and even though these animals have no knowledge of grammar, they can understand what many human words mean. Keepers also often listen to their pet’s vocalizations to understand their meaning.
Of course, people condition cats and dogs; Consider spraying water on a cat gnawing on a houseplant. The goal is for the cat to associate a forbidden snack with an unpleasant experience and thus leave the plant alone.
But training pets can go beyond changing their behavior. It may aim to improve animals’ ability to reason about what they should do: A trainer teaches a dog how to move on an agility course or how to get through a new pet door, for example. Teaching involves understanding, whereas learning based on pure conditioning does not.
An animal’s ability to be trained arises from the nature of its mental life. Scientists don’t know exactly which animals’ cognition includes understanding, actual problem solving, and the ability to reason or infer.
But research on perception—how humans and other animals transform sensory information into mental representations of physical objects—has helped philosophers and psychologists distinguish thought from more basic mental capacities such as seeing and hearing.
As philosopher Gary Varner argued in his 2012 book “Personality, Ethics, and Animal Cognition,” it is extremely likely that some nonhuman animals, including dolphins, monkeys, and elephants, think. My research suggests that the distinction between thinking and non-thinking animals aligns well with the distinction between trainable animals and the most conditionable animals.
This difference is very important in terms of how different pets should be treated. An owner must of course care for his pet frog and pay attention to its needs. But they don’t have to get to know the frog the way they have to get to know a dog: by addressing it, listening to it, and reassuring it.
Although the owner may scold the dog to hold him accountable for his actions, he must also hold himself accountable to the animal, including taking into account how the pet interprets events.
Education
Some non-human animals have demonstrated impressive cognitive abilities in experimental settings, such as recognizing their bodies in mirrors and remembering past experiences. For example, some birds are sensitive to details such as the perishability of cached food and how long ago it was stored.
Yet scientists lack strong evidence that animals have critical thinking abilities or the concept of self, which are basic requirements for true education. Unlike conditioning and teaching, education aims to enable the learner to explain the world, evaluate and argue for reasons for decisions. It also encourages people to wonder “How should I live” and “Was this action justified?” They are also prepared to ask and try to answer ethical questions such as:
A cat or dog cannot ask these questions. Most of the time people don’t deal with these questions either, but they can. In fact, caregivers pay close attention to these issues during child rearing, for example, asking children: “Would you like it if someone did this to you?” or “Do you really think it’s okay to act this way?” they ask.
Assuming that animals do not think, do not criticize, and therefore cannot receive education, I would say that they have no moral obligations. Since animals like dogs and cats can figure out how to behave better, it’s fair to say a pet is breaking the rules. However, from a moral perspective, an animal cannot commit a crime because it has no conscience: it can understand some of its actions, but it cannot understand its own mind.
In my opinion, addressing an animal and acting with an understanding of how it interprets events is central to the ethical education of pets. But if someone treats an animal as if it were responsible for justifying itself to us, as if it could offer excuses and apologies, it anthropomorphizes the animal and asks too much of it. Pet owners often do this sarcastically, saying things like “Now you know you shouldn’t do that”; This is the same expression they might use for a child.
But unlike a child, an animal’s transgression is not a failure to fulfill a moral obligation. In human relations, we seek relationships of mutual justification, where reasons are shared, excuses and apologies are evaluated. But no matter how tempting we may be to think otherwise, that is not the nature of our relationships with our pets.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
Written by: Jon Garthoff University of Tennessee.
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Jon Garthoff does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic duties.