Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy's book is a collection of anecdotes, arguments and exhortations which insists on the analogies between human and animal being. The rationale given for this enterprise in Masson's Preface is implausible: it is to bridge the 'tremendous gap between the common sense view (that "animals have such feelings as happiness, anger and fear") and that of official science ... the feelings of animals are a topic forbidden to scientific discourse.' But the authors offer little evidence for their dubious claims. Behavioural scientists are not often permitted to speak for themselves and when they are what they say does not support the views imputed to them. The author of the entry on animals in the Oxford Companion to the Mind, the ethologist Robert Hinde, writes that 'chimpanzees have a conception of the self and can dissemble and deceive others,' and that there is strong evidence that 'dogs have pleasant and unpleasant dreams.' Someone must have forgotten to warn Hinde that such discourse is forbidden.

LRB 6 April 1995 | PDF Download