A growing number of people, including academics and non-academic folks, are very interested in what nonhuman animals (animals) are thinking and feeling. Two of my recent posts—"The Eclectic Father of Cognitive Ethology" about Donald Griffin's seminal work and an interview with Jonathan Birch titled "The Edge of Sentience: Why Drawing Lines Is So Difficult"—have generated a good number of emails asking me to say more about the study of animal minds and the field of cognitive ethology.

The interdisciplinary science of cognitive ethology is concerned with the evolution of cognitive processes. Since behavioral abilities have evolved in response to natural selection pressures, ethologists favor observations and experiments on animals in conditions that are as close as possible to the natural environment where the selection occurred. No longer constrained by psychological behaviorism, cognitive ethologists are interested in comparing thought processes, emotions, sentience, consciousness, beliefs, and rationality in animals. In addition to situating the study of animal cognition in a comparative and evolutionary framework, cognitive ethologists also maintain that field studies of animals that include careful observation and experimentation can inform studies of animal cognition, and that cognitive ethology does not have to be brought into the laboratory to make it respectable.1

In an essay I wrote with Colin Allen titled "Cognitive Ethology: Slayers, Skeptics, and Proponents" we considered three main views of the general field of cognitive ethology. These delineations have stood the test of time but there have been some major changes I consider below.

Slayers: Slayers deny any possibility of success in cognitive ethology. In our analyses of their published statements, They sometimes conflate the difficulty of doing rigorous cognitive ethological investigations with the impossibility of doing so. Slayers also often ignore specific details of work by cognitive ethologists and frequently mount philosophically motivated objections to the possibility of learning anything about animal cognition. Slayers don't believe that cognitive........

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