The title of Jonathan Balcombe’s book refers to an extension of empathy to animals. What he wants is for us to become less exclusively concerned with human beings and human welfare, and more concerned with the lives of animals. The book consists of three parts, the first two of which concern the nature of animals’ lives and the third of which concerns our attitudes towards animals. Although there are hints dropped here and there along the way, it is not until the end of the third part that Balcombe really makes clear the true point of the book. He does indeed discuss the inner lives of animals at length, as his subtitle would suggest, but the point is not so much to inform as it is to persuade. His ideal reader should end up not only educated about animal psychology but vegan.

Balcombe’s strategy is curious. Roughly half the book aims to convince the reader that animals are much more intelligent than people have tended to believe. It does this not so much by the power of argument, although there is some of that, as by the weight of multiple anecdotes. These are often moving, funny, or fascinating, but their sheer number causes a certain weariness. On its own, each anecdote proves little, but cumulatively they do have an effect. Animals start to come more alive as agents with real concerns and interests of their own, not mere automata responding to environmental stimuli. Simultaneously, though, anecdote fatigue begins to set in. What helps to jolt the reader back to alertness is the occasional weak argument amid the descriptions and stories. Just as the reader begins to be convinced that animals think intelligently, Balcombe will describe the implausibly articulate thoughts allegedly going through a human infant’s mind, and the effect of many of his stories is undone. For instance, on p. 68 Balcombe mentions that human infants copy adult behavior in an intelligent way. If an adult switches a light on or off with their head then the infant will use the same method, but if the adult who does this has their hands full, then the infant will use its hands instead. This is a sophisticated response, and it seems reasonable to call this and similar behavior in animals intelligent. Balcombe goes farther: “Presumably,” he writes, “infants can reason that the adult used her forehead because she had no choice.” To attribute intelligent behavior is one thing, but to presume on this basis that an infant engages in propositional reasoning is something else. The extra step does not seem justified. It is similarly implausible that any fish thinks, as Balcombe hypothesizes on p. 110, anything like “There’s my cleaner buddy. It feels good when he gives me those massages. I’m getting in line.”

Perhaps this does not matter, though, as Balcombe goes on to suggest that it is irrelevant whether animals are intelligent or not. “It has never seemed right to me to use an animal’s perceived intelligence as a yardstick for how we may treat it,” he says on p. 179. What matters, he believes, is animals’ ability to suffer. So the first half of the book, as moving and eye-opening as it is, is not really relevant to the argument after all. Then again, it is not exactly the argument that is best or most important about the book. J.M. Coetzee writes in the foreword that Balcombe “is prepared to give animals the benefit of the doubt” (p. x) which, while true, is perhaps a polite way to say that he does not exactly prove what he sets out to show. As Coetzee goes on to say (p. xi), “For a scientist, he is remarkably open to what we can call the appeal of intuitive, trans-species fellow-feeling, an appeal that some of his colleagues would dismiss as projection.” It is this appeal that stands out in the first two parts of the book. Again and again, using examples from a wide variety of species, Balcombe pushes us to pay the kind of attention to animals that we might normally only pay to our pet dogs or cats. We can hardly help but pay this attention unless we stop reading, and when we do so we find that not only cats and dogs can be thought of as having lives, but bats, elephants, whales, birds, and fish too.

Part II of the book is about animals’ lives together, which includes both their intellectually impressive abilities to communicate and the ethical aspect of their lives. These are not only intelligent beings but also moral beings. This paves the way for Part III, in which nature is presented as something much more appealing than a battle for survival, human beings are shown to be much worse than we might like to think, and the argument is made that we should desire less economic and population growth, and care more about conservation and, especially, the lives of animals. Not the lives of species, but of individual animals, fish, and birds. None of Balcombe’s arguments about the cruelty of experimenting on animals, the health benefits of vegetarianism, or the environmental cost of meat-eating is new, but this does not detract from their strength.

What is most original about the book, though, and most valuable, is the use it makes of stories about animals, some from scientific research and some from newspaper reports. There may be more of these than one can comfortably take in at a single sitting, but they do bring home the fact that animals are far from being mere objects or resources for us to exploit. In this way Second Nature makes a powerful case, and is a useful supplement to more philosophically rigorous defenses of animal rights.

© 2012 Duncan Richter

Duncan Richter, Department of Psychology and Philosophy, Virginia Military Institute