Abstract
An understanding of our relationship with animals, and of the uncertain boundary between our dependence on them and our exploitation of them, demands an awareness of the historical extent of the purposes of our interaction. An examination of this past relationship provides a context for a better assessment of the present-day importance many of us place on animals as other beings who ultimately have independent interests and a discreet power over our own human behaviour: they have become agents who affect the quality of our own lives. Our study, knowledge and manipulation of animal behaviour lie at the centre of the human–animal relationship, as demonstrated by the variety of situations in which attempts have been made to acquire a better understanding of animal behaviour in order to secure human interests. From the standpoint of the historian, this variety demands much interdisciplinary analysis concentrating on the late-nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In this chapter, some British examples will be discussed in relation to developments in the United States, where scientific studies of animal behaviour soon stole the lead from Britain at the beginning of the last century.
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Notes
- 1.
He was nevertheless “aware of the collectivist ideological uses of social insects”, and “employed ‘disinterested’ experimentation to cast doubts upon the utopian depictions of co-operative, altruistic communities of ants and bees” (Clark, 1997).
- 2.
Lloyd Morgan’s desk became a forum for most of those involved in psychological research with animals in Britain until the 1930s. All types of investigators as well as some foreign workers corresponded with him. New publications were exchanged and admired, and points of disagreement discussed. The following correspondence is preserved in the Bristol University History Collection (as referenced). Charles Sherrington wrote in 1901 in appreciation of his newly received copy of Animal Behaviour (DM 612); and much later both he (in 1923) and, via his wife, an infirm Henry Head (in 1929) expressed great interest in Lloyd Morgan’s published studies of “emergent evolution” (DM 128/346 and DM 128/415). In 1913, Margaret Washburn referred to Lloyd Morgan’s criticisms of her The Animal Mind, to her misgivings about Watsonian behaviourism and to her appreciation of Lloyd Morgan’s Instinct and Experience (DM 128/290). Much further correspondence on each other’s work took place between Lloyd Morgan and C. S. Myers, E. B. Poulton (Hope Professor of Zoology at Oxford), William McDougall, J. A. Thomson and others (DM 128/various numbers and DM 612). Lloyd Morgan remained at the centre of a network of correspondence on matters concerning animal behaviour long after he ceased his own experiments.
- 3.
Rollin (1989, pp. 67–68) observes: “One can indeed find elements of this reductionistic, ‘no frills’ philosophy throughout European culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, art, architecture, design, music, and literature had become extremely extravagant…. Much early twentieth-century culture can be seen as an attempt to eliminate or trim away that excess.”
- 4.
See, for example, “Report by Professor Sir Ernest Rutherford FRS and Commander Cyprian Bridge RN, on Visit to the USA in company with French Scientific Mission, May 19th to July 9th, 1917.” BIR 28208/17. Public Record Office ADM 293/10.
- 5.
The Admiralty’s use a little later of Cambridge University staff for hydrophone personnel selection and training, staff who were themselves responsible for overseeing animal work in the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory, demonstrates that a sufficient network existed for the employment of animal psychologists, had that been preferred. But the application of psychological expertise did not extend into this area, and in another, concerned with the identification, acceptance and treatment of what later came to be known as “shell shock”, the psychologists’ analysis was resisted.
- 6.
L. C. Robbins (later Baron Robbins of Clare Market) was Chairman of the Committee on Higher Education (1961–1964), which was partly responsible for the major expansion and reforms of British university education in the 1960s.
- 7.
Meanwhile, in the United States, attempts had been made during the Second World War to train pigeons to guide missiles: “The pigeon––an organism––is essentially an extremely reliable instrument, rugged in construction, simple and economical to obtain, and easily conditioned to be entirely predictable in behaviour [and which could] be made into a machine, from all practical points of view” (B.F. Skinner cited by Capshew, 1993, pp. 850–851).
- 8.
This involved the issue of guidelines for the use of animals in research to members and correspondents of the ASAB (1981 and 1986), BPS (1985) and EPS (1986).
- 9.
For example, following pressure from its membership, a leading ethologist, Patrick Bateson, was commissioned by the British landowning conservation charity, the National Trust, to assess the suffering occasioned by hunting stags with hounds on its land, so that Trust policy could be informed and decided upon (Bateson, 1997).
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Wilson, D.A.H. (2011). British Animal Behaviour Studies in the Twentieth Century: Some Interdisciplinary Perspectives. In: Blazina, C., Boyraz, G., Shen-Miller, D. (eds) The Psychology of the Human-Animal Bond. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9761-6_2
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