Analysis Of Inside The Animal Mind By George Page

Inside the Animal Mind by George Page This book, Inside the Animal Mind by George Page, starts off by illustrating the relationship between animals and people. The author starts the discussion in ancient times by describing our neanderthal ancestors reliance on animals for daily survival. He points out their obvious importance by mentioning that most cave paintings depict animals such as bison, cattle, and horses. He mentions the people of early civilizations beginning to domesticate animals and brings up mentioning of animals in the Biblical creation story which says that people have dominion over all animals and that God had given them to us for meat. As he moves into the modern, Page takes note of Descartes ideas about how animals cannot …show more content…
Page uses the story of his own dog, Lassie, to back up his opinion of animals having a conscious. He detailed their tight knit bond describing how she would follow him to school, sleep with him, pull the covers off of him so that he'd wake up, and pretty much just do everything together. He talked to Lassie, and she would react with a little woof or a snuggle. She understood him by reading body language and tone of voice. In this sense it was rational for Page to think of Lassie as an emotional, conscious being. Another part of the story that is evidence of Lassie having a conscious is the way she died. The vet couldn't find anything wrong with her and said it must have been from a broken heart as she had been away from Page for so long. However, this also exemplifies anthropomorphic tendencies seen in his endless “conversation” with dog giving it a human-like role. The story of Hans the horse is more evidence of anthropomorphic bias in the study of animal intelligence, and demonstrates the need for a more strict procedure for evaluating animals in a more scientific light. Wilhelm von Osten, Hans’ owner, though him simple arithmetic, or at least he thought he did. If von Osten wrote a simple equation on a card, Hans would answer by tapping at the ground, so if the card said 2+4, then Hans would tap six times. However, a man by the name of Carl Pfungst proved that the horse had not actually been doing arithmetic. Instead, von Osten had been cuing the horse through slight movements such as flaring a nostril or raising an eyebrow. So, when the examiner did not know what was on the card Hans couldn’t read the signals and tapped at random. Although he couldn’t do arithmetic, Hans was still an intelligent animal as he was able to read body language cues to answer the problem. Evidence that came from Ed Thorndike's experiment led to a field in psychology