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I Think, Therefore I am...Animal?What's Going On In Those Heads?By Hugh Jones |
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French philosopher Rene Descartes is regarded as the father of modern epistemology, or the branch of philosophy dealing with the origin, limitations and methods of human knowing. He found his reality in the statement: I think, therefore I am. He also gave considerable thought to what animals were thinking. But I won't dwell on him, because frankly, I read philosophy, therefore I am confused. Besides, he did his thinking in the 1600s, and research has come a long way since. In the last decade, animal intelligence has become a hot, if controversial and much debated, topic. It's only fitting the PetGazette should take a swing at it. And we enlisted the aid of two sources: Eugene Linden, author of The Parrot's Lament, believes in it. Janet Schmid, founder and director of the Little River Zoo, believes in it. What about you? Have you never looked into your pet's eyes and wondered, what's going on in there? Linden mentions his cat and how, when it wants to come in from outdoors, it gets his attention by leaping up and down. Big deal, my cat Buford knocks on the door, as a proper individual should. Buford (on the cover), a little vagabond off the street, showed up as a kitten from who knows where. We took him in, and he's been a loyal member of the family for five years. When he's outside, he, too, must get our attention. We have a double door (a solid one, often left open, and a glass door with a metal panel on the bottom). It faces the area where we usually sit. Buford stands on his hind legs, where he can just peer in, and knocks on the door with his paw. He can see that we're responding. If he doesn't see us, or it's dark out and he knows we can't see him, he knocks louder. We didn't teach this. He figured it out by himself. Is that intelligence? Yeah, to a point. Could it be reasoning–putting two and two together? Maybe. Still, I don't think Buford contemplates his place in the universe (heck, I'm still pondering mine). Actually, cats and dogs don't rank very high on researchers' smart scale. That's reserved for "higher" animals: the apes, some monkeys, and to a lesser degree, elephants, dolphins, certain whales. Contrary to the insulting term "birdbrain," some birds are considered pretty brainy, in particular the African Grey parrot. You may be familiar with Alex, who has been studied for years. Linden writes about the parrot's impressive ability to count and to discriminate between different objects when asked to choose one from many. And sometimes, when Alex tires of the routine, he gives the wrong answer–on purpose. Here it is: can animals, at least some of them, think? And let's take it further: do they have emotions? (I hear you: "Of course! My pet shows joy, sadness, fear. My pet loves me.") To which the detractor counters, "I can't even prove that YOU are happy or sad, much less an animal. Love? Careful, or you'll slip right into anthropomorphism (the attribution of human feelings, motivation and behavior to nonhumans). Fear? A natural instinct (fight or flight), not conscious thought." To which Schmid replies, "Who's to say what is a human characteristic? We just deemed it that. Of course, we and the animals aren't the same. We're different species. But to say emotions are exclusively human? We made that up because we believe we're the center of the universe. Can emotion not exist outside of ourselves? In order to do some of the things we do to animals, we have to conclude that we're the only ones that feel. Otherwise, how could we justify what we do? We've removed ourselves psychologically from the food chain." From the picnic table where we're sitting, she sweeps her hand around the complex. "Just watch them. When they're happy, they're happy. When they're fearful, they attack. Are we any different? Why do we not consider that a natural instinct in us? After all, we're part of the same system. It's just we're the ones with the big brain and," she smiles, wiggling her hand, "the thumb." Skeptics abound, as well they should. Religious belief holds humans apart from and above the beasts. But who's to say what God instilled in animals? (Descartes believed in God and drew a distinction between humans and animals. He felt, if animals could think, then they should have souls, which was contrary to Christian theology, as he understood it. Thus implying animal automatism, the theory of the body as a machine whose functions are not controlled by consciousness. In other words, animals operate by reflex, an unlearned or instinctive response to stimulus.) The philosophical arguments get much deeper, but I'm not going there. However, it would be interesting to hear a debate between Descartes and Linden, who believes animals deserve more credit than they're getting. In our conversation, Linden told me, "Ever since college, my ambition was to write about the environment and nature. I've always been fascinated with the basic questions posed by Gaugain in one of his haunting paintings: who are we, where did we come from, where are we going? It's always been my belief that the answers lie in nature and animals." He collected his True Tales by talking with people like Schmid, who spend their lives working with animals: zookeepers, veterinarians, researchers and trainers. He found his reality in animals that reveal intelligence and emotions through their natural reactions to the people and creatures around them: proof of animal humor, game playing, deception, scheming and subterfuge, as well as tales of compassion, heroism and love. I don't have space to do more than briefly cite a few. And Linden is fully aware of the pitfalls involving anthropomorphism. In the book, he says it's a natural tendency to see human behavior and motives in other creatures. Using chimpanzees as an example, he says there's a lot of evidence about their intelligence, but it's their misfortune to look like something that failed to become a human being. In the wild, chimps make tools and organize themselves for endeavors like warfare and cooperative hunting. In captivity, they have learned and used words in symbolic ways, an ability previously thought to be exclusively human. Yet, although related to us, they are not us. We must be careful about making judgments based on looks, and we must not leap to conclusions about behavior. For instance, when people see a grinning chimp, they assume it's happy. In chimps, however, a grin typically signifies fear. Despite that, Linden feels anthropomorphism has its place. He says the only way we can appreciate animal consciousness is to assume that it bears some relationship to human consciousness. While we certainly can't learn everything about animal consciousness by considering our own feelings and thoughts, and we risk being misled, we can learn something. When we think of animal consciousness, our only available starting point is our own experience. Indeed, how do we come to understand minds other than our own? There is evidence that some animals are engaged in some form of thought. The thing that's always puzzled me–I know how I think, with language. How does one think in growl, grunt, chirp and hiss? Beats me. Linden writes about a variety of animals in a variety of situations. The anecdotes portray them acting in ways that indicate they are aware of their situation and how their behavior affects it. There's one about an African Grey using our language to an amusing end. Bongo Marie lives in a home with a number of pet birds she doesn't like. She holds an Amazon parrot named Paco in particular disdain. One day, from her cage in the dining room, she watched her owner, Sally Blanchard, cook a Cornish game hen. Bongo Marie slid over to the side of the cage for a better look. When Blanchard pulled the bird out of the oven and began cutting it up, Bongo Marie threw back her head and said with great enthusiasm, "Oh no! Paco!" Trying not to laugh, Blanchard said, "That's not Paco. He's over there." Bongo Marie said, "Oh no" in a very disappointed voice, then launched into a maniacal laugh. Linden says there's little doubt that parrots enjoy getting a reaction from people. He investigates several cases of animals using tools, especially apes. Chimpanzees in the wild have been observed using sticks to fish for termites and stones to break nuts (not as easy as it sounds. It has to be the right stone used against the right surface with the right amount of force–something even Linden found difficult to duplicate). Apes, he says, seem to grasp how to combine the objects in their environment to achieve a goal. Zookeepers have watched them stack barrels, make bridges out of logs and use all sorts of implements to effect escapes. They've seen orangutans use vines as lassos to snag plants and bring them within reach. Captive orangutans, it seems, are master escape artists. Linden gives a number of accounts, too lengthy to go into. But some are amazingly complex, as good as those prison escape movies on TV. And some orangs have achieved a certain fame for their exploits. One, who used a wire he kept concealed in his mouth, was made an honorary member of the American Association of Locksmiths. Zoo designers use them as "consultants" to test new enclosures. Why do orangutans do it? Not to run away, just kicks–accepting and overcoming a challenge, and, perhaps, thumbing their noses at the keepers. But you don't have to go to big city zoos or big apes. Schmid has clever capuchin monkeys, and she's happy to toss them in the face of prevailing wisdom. "Tool use was one of the criteria for separating us from animals, because we hadn't observed it in them. Now that we see it happening in other species, kind of messes things up, doesn't it? "Ginger is an incredible monkey," she says. "She uses tools to whittle sticks, to clean her fingernails and toenails, to dig down into pomegranates for the meat. We moved her in with a group that didn't know how to use tools. She taught them, and they started using them. You can see her working to figure things out. "And I have another, Mr. Bailey, who paints. He carefully dips the brush in the paint, and he uses different techniques. He'll flip the bristles of the brush sometimes. At other times, he'll hold the handle in his mouth and use both hands. When it's done, it's done, and he won't paint anymore. He has a sense of completion. It's amazing to watch, because you can tell there's a thought process going on." Ah, in my imagination, it paints a peaceful vision of innocence. Quite the contrary; monkeys can be violently aggressive. And Linden points to occasions where animals clearly used trickery and deception. From the book: To their credit, animals don't deserve their reputation as moral paragons. I say to their credit because the more sophisticated forms of deceit require consciousness, an awareness of others' mental states and the propositional abilities that go with artful scheming. Conversely, if some animals possess higher mental abilities, they should be capable of putting them to lower ends. Far from an innocent kingdom populated by straight shooters, the animal world is rife with con artists, devious manipulators and dissemblers. Again, he offers numerous examples, some quite elaborate, but I only have room for one: a female gorilla that developed strong feelings about her keepers. Some she liked, some she didn't. Once, she casually walked up to the wire mesh separating her from a keeper she didn't like. Using a come-hither gesture, she beckoned the man to come closer. When he did, she suddenly pulled out a stick she had hidden behind her back and tried to stab him. I use that one because Schmid has seen the same in her monkeys. They'll come-hither you–don't fall for it. "I have a macaque who's the lowest ranking one in the troop," she says. "She caught a mouse one day, but this particular species is pretty good at stealing from each other. Whoever ranks highest gets the best. So she held the mouse cupped in her hands. When the others looked at her, she looked away nonchalantly. When they looked away, she'd go back to looking at her mouse. She was obviously deceiving them. And when it comes to sex, the alpha male thinks he's dominant, but the females deceive him all the time." Hmmm, no comment. Linden admits his ideas might be dismissed as ambiguous in the hard-nosed world of controlled experiment, but other scientists have discovered that some of the apes, maybe even dolphins and orcas share a degree of consciousness with humans that permits them to guess the mental state of others. He says most zookeepers agree, but it's no small matter to prove the concept to a skeptical audience because of what it implies about the mental world of higher mammals. A person or an animal has a tremendous advantage if he's able to reason about unobservable mental states in a rival–to know what he thinks, and then to judge how that rival might be manipulated or encouraged to think something that works to one's own benefit. There's so much more I could write, but space prevents. There are touching tales of animals cooperating with humans. Like the killer whale that did something he was never trained to do to help his trainers who were trying to help his sick baby. That was in captivity. In the wild, there's an even more fascinating account of a voluntary joint fishing effort between dolphins and humans in Brazil. The dolphins actually herd fish to humans waiting with nets, to their mutual benefit. And this has been passed down from generation to generation on both sides for over a century! I haven't even touched on elephants and the remarkable things they do. Schmid had more comments. She and Linden think alike, especially on the environment. Considering what humans are doing to the earth, they wonder how truly smart WE are and question our long-term survivability, compared to species that have toughed it out a lot longer than us. In his conclusion, Linden wonders what animals think of us. That could keep you going awhile. So, where have we arrived? I report, you decide. I think there are different kinds of intelligence. When I told a friend about the feature subject, she said, "Animals are as smart as they need to be." Okay. Is there something going on in those heads? Yes. Do I need to save for Buford's college education? No. I don't envisage landing on a Planet Of The Apes. I am human. I am the dominant...excuse me, I hear Buford knocking, and he gets so impatient Back to Features |
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