Revisiting Animals through Cognitive Ethology and Animal Photojournalism

For the first event of the spring season of “Hayvanât Talks,” we hosted ethologist and photographer Deniz Tapkan Cengiz.

Tapkan began her talk by explaining how she draws on her diverse expertise in wildlife photography, cognitive ethology, and political activism to reexamine animals and rethink her relationship with them. She noted that these perspectives enable her to elevate animals to the status of subjects in her work, rather than presenting them as mere objects of consumption.

Continuing her talk, Tapkan discussed the international animal photojournalism agency We Animals and how its work documents animal exploitation and domination across contexts, locations, and sectors. She noted that the We Animalsteam, which she joined five years ago, documents animals’ experiences, agency, and subjectivity from a perspective that highlights these aspects across different regions of the world and various fields. Deniz Tapkan Cengiz stated that the experience of animal photojournalism has a personally transformative aspect because it brings one into direct proximity with animal suffering; she also noted that this process creates a “post-traumatic” effect by making one a witness to the violence animals are subjected to.

Continuing her talk, Tapkan discussed research in cognitive ethology and highlighted the multifaceted nature of the relationship cognitive ethology has established with animals and their cognitive experiences throughout its history as a discipline. The speaker briefly touched on the history of these studies, explaining how the discipline of ethology evolved from a perspective that overlooked animals to one that, over time, came to center on their cognitive experiences.

Tracing the history of ethology back to Darwin, Tapkan stated that Darwin’s work on evolution essentially opened the door to the subjectivity and historical agency of animals. She described the next phase in the history of ethology as the principles introduced by Lloyd Morgan’s “Morgan’s Canon” for interpreting animals’ psychological processes. Tapkan noted that Skinner and the behaviorists’ studies of animals disregarded and condemned animals’ cognition and psychological processes to obscurity. She described the fourth stage as the period when cognitive ethology became institutionalized, and research on animals shifted toward the study of patterns.

Deniz Tapkan Cengiz also referred to Jane Goodall’s work as a major turning point and an invaluable development in the growth of ethology. She emphasized that Goodall’s field research marked the first time in ethology that animals came to be perceived not merely as subjects of experimentation, but as beings with names and personalities, that is, as subjects in their own right. She also underlined the importance of Goodall’s experience in turning the discipline back toward fieldwork. Continuing her talk by discussing the foundation of cognitive ethology and its reestablishment of the animal mind as a legitimate field of academic inquiry, Tapkan highlighted the importance of the work of figures such as Frans de Waal and Marc Bekoff. Drawing particular attention to debates on anthropomorphism, she stressed that the closeness and similarity between the cognitive traits of animals and humans should not be overshadowed and argued that concern over anthropomorphism should not prevent an understanding of the shared emotions and cognitive affinities of animal and human experience.

In the later parts of her talk, Deniz Tapkan Cengiz shared recent scientific findings on animal cognition with the participants. Beginning with a study showing that honeybees can distinguish between paintings by Monet and Picasso, Tapkan drew attention to academic research demonstrating a wide range of cognitive abilities across many different species, from the self-control skills of cuttlefish and the tool use of octopuses to signs of self-awareness in chickens and the memory capacities of chimpanzees. She continued this part of her talk by giving examples of cognitive abilities in animals that humans do not possess—such as echolocation, magnetoreception, and the use of smell to find migratory routes—and pointed to ongoing discussions about rethinking and reinterpreting animal intelligence through these capacities.

Tapkan also referred to her own work in her talk. Before describing her research on sheep's fear, she explained that her choice of this topic stemmed from her long-standing involvement in vegan culture and her desire to initiate a dialogue in academia about animals’ emotions and personalities. Tapkan’s study, which tests whether sheep prefer familiar or unfamiliar sheep in certain situations, or which choice they make when they must choose between returning to the flock and going to a sheep they know, examines the cognitive processes involved in sheep recognizing one another through live encounters. By observing how familiarity shapes animals’ behavior, Tapkan explains the strongly determining role of this knowledge in sheep, as a sign of the sophistication of their cognitive capacities. Referring once again to the vegan culture of which she is a part, Tapkan particularly emphasized the effort they made, while conducting these experiments, to design environments in which the sheep would experience as little stress as possible.

Deniz Tapkan Cengiz devoted the final part of her talk to a section she called “Animal Politics,” in which she addressed how her work across different fields has manifested in political activism. In this section, she spoke about the animal fights she documented in collaboration with We Animals. Beginning with camel wrestling events held in Çanakkale, she shared with the audience, through striking photographs, the effects on animals of this form of violence, which is “legitimized” through legal and cultural justifications, by documenting the mistreatment, exploitation, and violence to which the animals are subjected. Drawing attention to how this cruelty might be understood from the perspective of the animals themselves, through the cognitive characteristics of camels, Tapkan emphasized that the subjectivity of animals must not be ignored, while also pointing, through her own field experience, to the problems involved in the cultural legitimization of this “spectacle.” She stressed that the cultural structure of camel wrestling is in fact “a systematized and legitimized form of patriarchal/traditionalist speciesist violence.” She then shared striking photographs she had taken of cockfights in Bali, where similar practices and dynamics are at work, and stated that the mistreatment and torture inflicted on animals for supposedly “cultural” forms of entertainment can be seen across all geographies of the world and has an international character.

In the second part of the “Animal Politics” section, she stated that, in light of the experience she gained while working as a zoologist in zoos, she has documented, both visually and verbally, the violence that persists in zoos. She shared examples, through her own photographs, of the living conditions of animals kept in zoos with inadequate facilities. Pointing to the urgency of the situation through examples such as the Gaziantep Zoo, which is still in operation today, she also referred to her reporting and activism in this field.

Tapkan concluded her talk by referring to the central role in her work of the concept of “Umwelt,” which expresses the unique way each species and each individual perceive the world. She defined her work, carried out at the intersection of veganism, animal photojournalism, and ethology, as being oriented toward making animal liberation possible by moving away from anthropocentrism and confronting the social dynamics through which animals are continuously held captive and “confined somewhere.”