Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures

There is one more point to be made about animal minds and evolution. Evolution is not a progressive force. Although it was once thought that there was a scale of nature or a Great Chain of Being, with all the fond of life ascending in some orderly, preordained fashion - from jellyfish to fish to birds to dogs and cats to us - this is not the case. We are not the culmination of all these "lesser" beings; they are not lesser and we are not the pinnacle of evolution. [...] Evolution is not linear. It is divergent - which means that we all sit on the limbs of a bushy tree, each species as evolved as the next, the anatomical differences largely a result of ecology and behavior. (p23)

I've also heard it argued that animal emotions are likely very simple and/or vastly different, even "alien," from those of humans (as if species other than us came from another planet). There is simply no evidence to back up such statements. Because evolution is conservative (for instance, human brains and those of all vertebrates, including fish and amphibians, use the same set of chemicals to transit signals), it's more likely that many of our emotions are similar to those of other animals, as de Waal notes. Why, after all, reinvent sensations, such as fear, pain, or love, and the internal states or mental representations that accompany these? (p21)

Goodall nodded. "Yes, it doesn't make much sense to say they aren't thinking or don't have emotions," she said. "Most of us studying animals in the wild see things like this [Dilly's deception] all the time. But we've learned to be careful. We *can* say, 'If Dilly were a human, we would say she was acting deceitfully.'" To say that Dilly - or any animal - had what we would call subjective or personal experiences would be considered unscientific. Although some animals might have an inner, mental life, we had no way of asking them about it and so could not study it.

I asked Goodall how scientists could possibly get around this dilemma. The rules of the game seemed stacked in such a way as to forever preclude knowing what was in the mind of another creature. Goodall agreed but added that because so many researchers were witnessing similar behaviors (and in a variety of species, not just chimpanzees), she thought the science - the study of animal cognition and emotions - would change. "It has to," she said. "It's just a matter of time." (p8)

"The ants provide a cautionary note to us" about our own thought processes, Franks continued. "Could it be that, like the ants, all we have are algorithms in our heads, and we just put a gloss of reasoning on these? That all we're doing is saying to ourselves, 'I think I thought it through?'"

It was a humbling thought. Are our brains really working at a higher cognitive level, or do we just think so because we have a bigger store of instincts, experiences, and memories and have a constant mental monologue, reviewing and revising what we just did? (p47)

- "People don't expect much from fish, but that's where they're wrong," [researcher Stefan Schuster] says. "Fish are capable of much more than people think." (p50)

- Although scientists don't understand fully the relationship between cognition and sentience, they know that the two are intertwined - that one ability informs the other. For instance, human athletes sometimes compete even when in great pain; they are aware of the pain, but they choose to ignore it to achieve another goal. Rats also can elect to ignore a painful heat sensor attached to their tails if they smell a cat - it's better for the rat to remain in a frozen position on the hot plate, as it were, than move and expose itself to a predator. Can fish do something like this? And if they are able to experience the sensation of pain, are they mentally conscious of suffering? (p65)

- Pain has been missed in fish, [fish biologist Victoria] Braithwaite thinks, because we humans really do not understand them. Their faces are immobile and don't convey the type of emotional signals we're used to reading. We also have trouble understanding and appreciating what life is like in their aquatic world. (p67)

The sounds of each reef are apparently so unique that the young of some fish can identify where they were hatched and use these noises to find their way home again, although ocean currents carried the fish miles away when they were larvae. (p67)

Several weeks before my visit, Braithwaite had spoken to a group of human psychologists who wondered if she would next be asking if insects suffer emotionally.

"My response was: Well, shouldn't we have a look? Wouldn't it be interesting to know if insects have some kind of mental representation of pain? And if they don't, why not? It seems very unlikely that insects would have feelings, yet these kinds of emotions have clearly shaped us and other vertebrates. They help us learn to protect ourselves - to say, 'Oh, that really hurts; I really don't want to face that again.' What's wrong with exploring this question in other animals?"

Darwin would have said, "Nothing." He would expect to find some degree of our own senses of pain and suffering in other animals, from primates to insects. For him, all creatures were capable of intense emotions. Even insects could express "anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulations [the sounds crickets, for instance, make by rubbing their back legs together]," he wrote, and made other, grating noises "from distress or fear." He wrote descriptively of the pain animals felt, and their suffering; and he noted that if they suffered unduly they became dispirited, depressed, and lethargic - just like Braithwaite's venom-injected fish. (p72)

As amazing as her report was, it also seemed to make sense: chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor that used tools. But our last common ancestor with birds was a reptile that lived about three hundred million years ago. How can we explain the discovery of these ingenious behaviors in creatures so far removed from our evolutionary lineage?

"This is not a trivial matter," [behavioral ecologist Alex] Kacelnik said. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once - that it is not something reserved only for primates or mammals." In other words, creativity and inventiveness, like other forms of intelligence, are not limited to the human line. (p87)

No longer hampered by Edinger's bias, scientists in recent years have discovered a remarkable variety of cognitive talents in birds: Clark's nutcrackers have tremendous memories; they can hide up to thirty thousand seeds and find them six months later. Rooks, close relatives of crows, are highly inventive, making and using tools in captivity, even though they don't do this in the wild. Magpies and parrots have a sophisticated understanding of the physical world. At a very young age, they realize that when an object disappears behind a curtain it has not vanished - an ability that children also develop as toddlers. Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror as well, an ability that suggests they are self-aware. Crows and pigeons can recognize and discriminate among human faces; pigeons can also distinguish between cubist and impressionistic styles of painting. One group of birds - bowerbirds, which live in Australia and on the island of New Guinea - even have an artistic sensibility, the only animal in which this has ever been discovered. Greater bowerbirds, for instance, use the illusion of perspective (the method an artist uses to make objects in a painting look far away) when arranging piles of progressively smaller bits of glass and stone in front of their bowers, structures they build of twigs and decorate to attract females for mating. And Kacelnik and others studying the New Caledonian crows have now shown that these crows are able to use various tools in the correct sequence and in the wild may have tool technology cultures that are distinct from one region on the island to another.

Some birds are also psychologically savvy. Western scrub jays understand that sometimes other jays are likely up to no good. The jays stash numerous nuts and seeds for the winter, just as nutcrackers do. If they can, jays will steal each other's caches, too. So a smart scrub-jay that sees another jay watching him hide his nut will return later, alone, and hide the nut elsewhere. (p88)

A room full of laughing rats! Their joyful chirps were ricocheting all around us, but we couldn't hear a bit of it. If there was a moment that encapsulated all that we don't know or miss about animals, for me, this surely was it. It was like being in a foreign country when all the locals break into big guffaws at someone's joke or quip, and you-not speaking the language-can only look on, a passive spectator. (p121)

Most mammals are born with brains that don't expand much beyond birth; their brains are about 90 percent of their adult weight. Human infants, in contrast, are only about 23 percent of their final capacity — a difference that neuroanatomists explain by our need to learn. Baby elephants, too, have much to learn, and their brain size at birth is around 35 percent of what it will be at maturity. When poachers target the matriarchs or older females — as they often do, because older elephants usually have larger tusks — they also destroy that lifetime of learning and knowledge. For an elephant family, the death of a matriarch must feel like losing an encyclopedia, or an entire library — and for us, the loss makes stopping the poaching even more urgent, if only to protect the experienced matriarchs, who keep their families out of harm's way. (p145)

And, too, there was another experiment McComb staged, using the call of a fifteen-year-old female elephant who had died. She played the deceased elephant's call to her family twice, once three months after her death and again twenty-three months later. They rumbled back to her in greeting, and walked directly to the loudspeaker. "They hadn't forgotten her," McComb said, "but I was uneasy doing that test." It may have left the elephants confused or raised some feelings in them akin to sorrow. (p148)

"There are so many factors that affect their success at these tasks " added [primatologist Elizabeth] Lonsdorf, who had joined us. Her dark hair spiraled in curls to her shoulders, and she had the kind of direct gaze and patient manner of an ethologist who spends months in the field, focused on her study animals. "Kwan takes longer than the chimpanzees because he has to keep an eye on his females and make sure that Amare's behaving," Lonsdorf continued. "But you can't have Kwan down here alone without his family; silverbacks have to keep an eye on all their members -- that's their job. If you didn't know this, or take it into account, you could conclude that gorillas aren't as good as chimpanzees at this test." (p218)

"Old-school skeptics and naysayers ("killjoys," as one prominent philosopher calls them) may dismiss the latest findings on animal intelligence as so much sentimental, romantic anthropomorphizing. But why is it romantic to acknowledge that animals are thinking and feeling beings? Considering the weight of recent scientific evidence, I would argue that it's actually realistic to do so. By embracing this larger understanding of our fellow creatures, we may yet succeed in overcoming the great tragedy of the Sixth Extinction." (p267)