The Journal of Animal Consciousness Vol 1, Issue 2 Vol 1 Issue 2 | Page 6

Introduction
Consciousness in animals came to the forefront just a few
years ago when the Cambridge Declaration of
Consciousness (henceforth, ‘Cambridge Declaration’) was
signed in July 2012. It proclaims the support of various
scientists that non-human animals (from now on referred
to as “animals”) have consciousness and awareness to the
degree that humans do. The list of animals includes “all
mammals, birds, and many other creatures, including
octopuses”; these animals were deemed to have a nervous
system capable of consciousness (Safina 2015, p. 23). The
research upon which this Declaration was based utilized a
materialistic approach, primarily examining and measuring
responses within the neurobiological substrates of
conscious experience in the animals. The irony is that
some of the underlying research that led to the conclusions
outlined in the Declaration was based upon experiments
conducted upon animals held in captivity, including
dolphins.1
The Declaration was seen as rather incredulous by many
scientists, and lay people alike, as what it was stating had
seemed obvious to many for a number of years.2 We come
from a recent philosophical history that tells us animals are
non-thinking, soul-less creatures – basically automata – so
perhaps this was indeed a bit of a surprise to many people.
It has only been since the mid-20th century that sentience
has been recognized in animals.3
Yet, according to
Duncan, a detailed review of history gives us a different
story: at least in mammals there has been an acceptance of
sentience for centuries among philosophers such as da
Vinci, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and others (Duncan
2006). On the other hand, Duncan equates Aristotle with
René Descartes when he says “there is a clear line of
philosophic argument for non-sentience from Aristotle
through Thomas Aquinus [sic] and Rene´ Descartes to
Immanuel Kant” (Duncan 2006, p. 12). What is not
understood here is that Aristotle said “that only humans
had rational souls, while the locomotive souls shared by
all animals, human and nonhuman, endowed animals with
instincts suited to their successful reproduction and
survival”. (Allen and Trestman) [emphasis mine]
It was Jeremy Bentham, the English social reformer, who
got to the crux of the matter, asking the questions: “The
question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can
they suffer?” (Bentham 1823, p. 311) [emphasis original].
Operating on instinct for a significant portion of one’s life
does not equate to lack of thinking, feeling, and willing;

any animal that can feel suffering is conscious. This
history of animals being automata is primarily rooted in
the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650). It was
during the mid-1600s that he introduced via his
masterpiece, Meditations, what has come to be known as
‘dualism’. For Descartes, the world was only knowable
through the activity of reason. He saw a dichotomy
between consciousness and matter, being essentially two
different substances that can only be brought into cohesion
externally.
This is what has become known as the
Cartesian Duality, or the mind/body split problem.4
Descartes denied sentience to animals, effectively
rendering them ‘reflex machines’. This philosophy held
sway among the majority of scholars until the mid-20th
century when Donald Griffin argued that animals are
conscious much as human beings are in his book, The
Question of Animal Awareness (1976, Rockefeller
University Press).
As discussed more thoroughly in the following section, the
‘discovery’ of consciousness in animals has been seen as a
boost to the equine assisted therapy profession. The
current state of EAP/L concentrates primarily upon the
benefit to the human patient/client. In recent years there
has been some acknowledgement of the impact upon the
horse in human-centered therapy situations. In this paper I
maintain that this acknowledgement does not go far
enough when we consider the animal from a
phenomenological perspective. From that perspective, I
will address the impact to the horse as a result of equine
assisted therapy for humans. I will also address some of
the potentially negative impacts upon the human patient/
client as a result of the typical analytical view of the horse.
Then I conclude with an outline as to a phenomenological
and synergistic approach to equine assisted therapy. To do
this, I bring in several concepts that are not normally
associated with the horse world in general nor with EAP/L
specifically.
The first major one is to view the horse through the lens of
Goethean science with regard to