Animals' attitudes to risk are profoundly influenced by metabolic state (hunger and baseline energy stores).
In an interview in Guardian Weekend in September he called the Chinese people a "sub-species" over their treatment of animals and attitude toward animal welfare.
Or you could realize that when Mr. Leonard writes about cats, dogs and coyotes, even the animals have attitude.
"Whereas previously they were targeted by misinformed landowners who believed they were targeting their animals, now attitudes have changed," says Emily Brennan, director of biodiversity conservation at the London Wildlife Trust.
Pinker notes that on issues such as civil rights, the role of women, equality for gays, beating of children and treatment of animals, "the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today's conservatives are more liberal than yesterday's liberals".
They represent a growing awareness that our treatment of animals and attitudes towards them are evolving into a more healthy respect for life in general.
To assess the animals' risk attitudes, we measured the amount of safe reward that led to choice indifference ("certainty equivalent," CE), for a low and high expected value (EV) gamble.
If humans are nothing more than animals with an attitude problem, no soul, no image of God, nothing genuinely, meaningfully exceptional about us -- then a clean sweep of us from the surface of Mother Earth might make sense.
Since the elaboration of in vitro skin models has arisen as an elegant response to the requests of activists wishing to ban the use of laboratory animals, the first attitude has been to create in different institutions or companies different models of epidermal cell cultures, each research group claiming that its own model was certainly the best for very specific reasons.
Although the issue is delicate, it seems highly plausible that some non-language-using animals have propositional attitudes or at least that some attitude ascribing sentences about non-language-using animals are true.
