The Evolving View of Animal Minds

The evolution of scientific thought regarding animals has taken a remarkable trajectory—from viewing them as mere machines, to recognizing their capacity to suffer, and now to acknowledging them as agents in their own right. As Brandon Keim writes in his powerful essay, “When That Chickadee Is No Longer ‘A Machine With Feathers’,” we have moved far from the Cartesian perspective that relegated animals to automatons. Scientific discoveries now demand we see animals not only as deserving ethical treatment because they feel, but increasingly as self-directing agents capable of intentionality, learning, and even forms of social cooperation and deliberation.

This evolution in thinking is not simply philosophical; it has practical implications for how science is conducted. In earlier times, anthropomorphism was viewed with suspicion—a naïve projection of human emotions onto animals. Today, however, it is being reframed, as my colleagues and I argued in 2020 in an article titled “Are They Really Trying to Save Their Buddy? The Anthropomorphism of Animal Epimeletic Behaviours,” as a critical or reflective hypothesis, rather than an error. Used carefully, anthropomorphism is not about making animals human, but about opening scientific space to investigate their possible subjectivities, intentions, and social strategies with intellectual humility.

The recognition of animal agency invites a fundamental shift in research design. Rather than treating animals as passive objects to be acted upon, we can see them as participants in a collaborative process. Allowing animals freedom of movement, choice, and even consent not only reshapes our ethical obligations but also improves the reliability and richness of scientific data. This approach fosters reciprocity—an exchange of knowledge and responsiveness between species that breaks from hierarchical, extractive paradigms.

My colleague Michael A. Huffman and I have explored this co-constructed relationship through the concept of co-culture. As we have noted, animals and humans do not merely coexist; they can share knowledge, transmit behaviors, and evolve together culturally. Whether it is a macaque learning from a deer in the wild or a raven decoding human routines in urban environments, these interspecies interactions reflect mutual adaptation and even shared meaning. We no longer simply study animals—we learn with them, and they learn from us. These are not separate cultures, but intertwined ones.

This reconfiguration of our relationship with animals has implications beyond science—it extends into how we value animals in society. As my colleagues and I argued in 2024 in the journal npj Sustainable Agriculture, animals are not just sources of material or natural capital (meat, labor, or ecosystem services), but also social and cultural capital. They play roles in our emotional lives, social cohesion, education, and identity. Recognizing this multidimensional value is essential to reshaping conservation, agriculture, urban planning, and ethics.

In short, we must stop working on animals and start working with them. This paradigm shift will challenge long-standing assumptions and practices in science, policy, and society—and open the door to a richer, more ethical, and more sustainable coexistence. Science must not only measure the minds of other beings; it must also cultivate the moral imagination to meet them.

Cédric Sueur

Is the chickadee a feathered machine? Brandon Keim answers “no” in his article, itself a lucid encapsulation of his book Meet the Neighbors: Animals’ Minds and Life in a More-Than-Human World. A leading journalist of animals and the environment, Keim’s work traces a fascinating history of science catching up to the reality of animal minds, thought, emotion, and culture.

The reality of minded animals has clear implications for science, ethics, and public policy. Myths of human exceptionalism are debunked. No longer do people have easy justification for treating animals as nothing more than means to our ends. Old moral and scientific orthodoxies of human supremacy are untenable. People, as it turns out, owe direct duties of care and respect to other animals and the broader community of life.

Keim strikes a hopeful tone—what we know about animals now means we can do better by them into the future. Yet this newfound awareness was not a linear path of scientific investigation leading to ethical principles and better policy decisions. It was ethical and social concerns over animals that spurred science to take the agency and well-being of animals seriously.

Key to Keim’s insights is what we might call compassionate coexistence.

His sense of compassion is not constrained by a literal meaning of “feeling for or suffering with” others. There is nothing wrong with such empathy; indeed, it is a key element of reason properly understood. Yet Keim has something more expansive in mind—an ethic of care for other lives. In a similar manner, coexistence is not ghettoized to wild places alone, or to a bare tolerance of wild lives. Rather, coexistence extends to all the places where humans and nonhuman persons live together.

As a result, compassionate coexistence is a vision for what the philosopher Mary Midgley termed the “mixed community” of people, animals, and nature. It applies to both wild and domesticated lives, animals who are native or nonnative to their place, animals as individuals as well as constituents of social and ecological communities, and to the broader community of life.

In all this, Keim is striking a resonant chord with compassionate conservation. This emergent paradigm challenges traditional conservation for dismissing the well-being of animals and treating them as mere instruments of human interests. Compassion and coexistence become touchstones for how humans ought to interact with all animals in our individual and collective lives.

This does not mean we treat animals in precisely the way we treat humans. It does not myopically focus on individual animals versus their social or ecological communities. It does not magically end all human-animal conflicts, or the need to manage the human relationship to domestic and wild lives. Nor does it imply the adoption of particularistic values and ideologies like sentientism or veganism.

Keim is not seeking to impose a new moral or scientific orthodoxy. Rather, he is asking us to face up to the reality of animal minds, personality, personhood, and culture. To think and feel again about how we ought to live with others in a more-than-human world. He is asking us, as it were, to act on the knowledge that the chickadee was never a feathered machine.

William S. Lynn