He founded the discipline of
cognitive ethology, and his two early books combined rigorous and compelling argument with an almost encyclopedic array of references to animal behaviors that showed evidence for thinking, planning, awareness, and creative problem-solving.
He spotlights research fields that are growing: anthrozoology, the study of human-animal interactions (human-animal studies), ethology, the study of animal behavior, and
cognitive ethology, the study of animal minds.
In Chapter 2,
cognitive ethology is defined, and focuses on how animals think and what they feel, and includes their emotions, consciousness, and self-awareness.
Cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: A snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead.
The emerging subfield of
cognitive ethology, spawned largely by the work of Donald Griffin (e.g., Griffin 1976), to whom Regan refers extensively, appears to be self-consciously committed to the idea that animals have beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and the like.
Could he now be pushing toward yet another revolution, this one leading to a cognitive paleontology as a sort of parallel to
cognitive ethology? We suspect that revolutionaries are like that, always willing to poke at the assumptions and values that the rest of us have so long accepted that we have grown complacent and dogmatic about them.
It also includes the role of naturalistic ethological data in revitalizing our appreciation for the complexity of animal behavior, the work of psychologists on ape language, and the recent
cognitive ethology sparked by Donald Griffin.
Cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: A snake with two heads and a hog--nosed snake that plays dead.
Aspects of the
cognitive ethology of an injury -feigning bird, the piping plover.