If Goofy Could Talk

Frank Cioffi

• When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy
  Cape, 268 pp, £14.99, September 1994, ISBN 0 224 03554 1
• The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
  Weidenfeld, 148 pp, £12.50, May 1994, ISBN 0 297 81461 3
• The Tribe of Tiger by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
  Weidenfeld, 240 pp, £12.99, October 1994, ISBN 0 297 81508 3

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.