Frans de Waal: Moral Behavior in Animals

In perhaps the worst idea a Frenchman ever had, Descartes declared animals to be machine-like automatons which had no mind and felt no pain, opening the way to several centuries of cruel treatment, culminating in the industrial-scale animal-testing of the last half-century. More recently, there are some arguing today an equally absurd idea, that all morality comes from religion; animals (and "non-believers" alike) have no sense of morality. Franz De Waal shows just how wrong these notions are.