Animal Intelligence

One area of political economy which Lloyd has not usually been connected to is the relevance of comparative animal studies and comparative animal psy­chology to economic behaviour.

Adam Smith remarks, that man is the only animal which makes exchanges. “Nobody”, he says, “ever saw one dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another, with another dog”... But we may observe, that dogs have a sense of value. Though nobody has ever seen two dogs making an exchange, yet a dog has been often seen to hide a bone. The dog does this from a sense of its value.because he knows that a bone is a good thing which is not always to be had when wanted. In Constantinople, where the dogs act the part of scav­engers, and, it is said, have their regular beats, like beggars in London, no indi­vidual dog ever presuming to trespass beyond his own territory (Lloyd 1834 [1968]: 26).

At the end of the nineteenth century, the evolutionary psychologist George Romanes noted various examples of dogs that had been trained to take coins to a shop and purchase particular items in exchange, such as buns or biscuits. Romanes commented on this in turn that some ‘dogs have an instinctive idea of giving peace-offerings, and that the step from this to the idea of barter may not be large' (Romanes 1878 [1898]: 452). The anthropocentric approach to studying animal behaviour has recently experienced a resurgence in the psy­chology literature and also has some crossovers with the fields of behavioural economics and neuroeconomics (see Shettleworth 2012: 529-530; Barnett 2019). Lloyd explicitly characterised human beings at one point as the ‘rea­soning animal' (Lloyd 1833 [2017]: 12), with ordinary American citizens described as often settling in the woods, indicating the anthropocentric paral­lel he was here seeking to apply.

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