If Elephants Are People, and Bees Are Fish, Are Bees People?
In Part One, I was thinking about Happy, the 51-year-old Asian elephant that lives at the Bronx Zoo. Despite the claims of some animal rights activists, the New York Court of Appeals ruled (5 to 2) that Happy is not really a “person” and, consequently, has not been “illegally imprisoned.”
The plausibility of the activists’ claim, and the merits of the court’s dissenting opinions are based on the answer to just one question: What’s going on in Happy’s brain… or, what most people would call her “mind.”
Whether or not we can know what’s going on in another organism’s “mind” is an unanswerable philosophical question that will be debated as long as there are Philosophy Departments and enough cheap white wine to fuel the late-night arguments. But, frankly, I’m not interested in that debate.
What I am interested in is why anybody would think that Happy has a human-like mental life in the first place. Now, before you get upset with me and say something like “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”, hear me out.
As usual, I’m not taking a stand on whether or not Happy is actually happy or “depressed” (as some claim). I can’t know that for sure. However, I would like to know why people — maybe some that you know — think it’s reasonable to attribute a mental life to Happy but not to other equally fascinating but less charming animals.
We all agreed in Part One that the justification for assuming Happy has a rich mental life — perhaps similar to yours — is based on two facts: Elephants have complex social lives, and they can do a lot of things that require ‘intelligence.’
While I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that Happy and her elephant friends have a lot in common with another animal that I’m pretty familiar with, bees.
Unfortunately, one of the similarities between the two groups is that their populations are declining, and, like elephants, several bee species are in danger of extinction. That’s why the California Third District Court of Appeals ruled that bees could be classified as “fish” under the Fish and Game Code’s definition (which includes some other invertebrates).
This was very confusing to the Twitteratti and a lot of journalists. Some tried to explain that invertebrates like cuttlefish and starfish are fish (they’re not), and that all fish are vertebrates (wrong again, hagfish aren’t vertebrates). The point is that in a decision that seems goofy but well intentioned, California was trying to save the bees just like we’re trying to save elephants. Good for them.
The more important similarity between elephants and bees is that they share the two key characteristics that make Happy seem like a person. They have a very complex social life, and they do a lot of things that require ‘intelligence.’
Their social complexity reaches its pinnacle among the eusocial bees, like honey bees. They maintain remarkably complex relationships between thousands of individuals that make up the three distinct social castes in the hive: the reproductive queen, thousands of nonreproductive female workers, and hundreds of male drones. And, as with elephants, the most intricate social relationships are among the females.
For example, female workers have to work cooperatively to accomplish a series of jobs that change as they get older. Young workers clean the honeycomb brood cells (where larval bees develop), feed the larvae, and, at just the right time, seal each cell with a wax cap after which the larvae develop into adults. The young workers also have to groom, and feed the queen her special diet of royal jelly.
If a hive needs a new queen, workers will identify several larvae that are less than four days old and bathe them in royal jelly throughout their development. This will change the larvae from ordinary workers into queens. The first queen to emerge will locate any other developing queens and sting them to death through their wax cells. If a second queen manages to emerge, the two will fight to the death.
A few days after she emerges, the new queen takes a “nuptial flight” and tries to find the location where males from other hives have congregated. Once she does, she’ll mate with a dozen or more drones while in mid-air, and then find her way back to her hive.
I don’t think elephants do anything that complex… especially that mating-in-the-air thing.
As time goes on, workers assume new, age-specific tasks. They construct the hexagonal wax cells that make up the honeycombs (elephants don’t build stuff), receive and store nectar and pollen, and produce and store honey (elephants don’t collect and store food). The oldest workers forage for the pollen and nectar that’s brought back for everyone to share. Elephants are thought to be altruistic, too.
There’s even a class of “undertaker” bees that find their comrades’ corpses within 30 minutes of death, and remove them from the hive (just like elephants recognize their deceased).
The workers are also remarkably flexible. If the hive loses a lot of foragers (due to pesticides, for instance), younger workers take over those tasks. If a brood disease kills a lot of young workers, older bees can reassume those jobs.
I could go on. But, to my mind, the bee’s social life seems a bit more complex than the elephant’s.
How about the intellectual stuff?
Well, most famously, scout bees leave the hive, locate a food source (a patch of flowers), fly back to the hive guided by their memory of key landmarks, communicate information about the food source to the other workers and then lead them to the newly discovered flower patch. Elephants must envy those bees.
Elephants, Bees, and Personhood can also be taught the basic concepts of addition and subtraction, they can learn to pull a string to access an artificial flower full of nectar by watching other bees do it, they can be trained to roll a ball to a specific location in an arena to obtain a reward, and they can learn two abstract concepts simultaneously like right/left and same/different. These abilities rival those of any elephant.
So, it seems to me that bees are as remarkable as elephants. Personally, I’d be tempted to say that a honeybee is as much a “person” as is Happy.
Why, then, do we see these animals so differently? Why are we so enamored by elephants and not by bees? I would hate to see anything bad happen to any elephant, but I’d be pretty scared if anything happened to bees given the fact that they’re major crop pollinators. I’ve grown accustomed to food.
I’m also curious as to why the people who are concerned about Happy’s psychological well-being are not protesting Bug Zappers which indiscriminately kill dozens of types of insects including bees. And, then there are bee traps…
Given all this information, I wonder if — like Happy — bees get “depressed”, too.
That’s your call.
Click here for more information: https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/if-elephants-are-people-and-bees-1c9