If the balaclava'd guerrilleros of the Animal Liberation Front run short of targets once they've seen off the laboratories full of victimised mice, they might consider picketing the rare but potentially newsworthy venues in which academic psychologists on the professional ascent try to make up their minds whether animals, too, have minds that can be made up. Whether, in short, they have cognitive skills, enabling them to think and to swap concepts with one another or, better still, with their academic proprietors. For a long time it seemed to be only the chimpanzees who endured this privileged form of captivity, and who, according to whether you were hearing it from a believer or a sceptic, in some cases did and in other cases didn't prove eventually able to communicate with their warders.

LRB 8 February 2001 | PDF Download