The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist

by Franz De Waal

  Is it even desirable to suppress thoughts that come naturally to us? Why is it that we, in Kennedy's own words, "do not wish to" abandon anthropomorphism? Isn't it partly because, even though anthropomorphism carries the risk that we overestimate animal mental complexity, we are not entirely comfortable with the opposite either, which is to deliberately create a gap between ourselves and other animals? Since we feel a clear connection, we cannot in good conscience sweep the similarities under the rug. In other words, if anthropomorphism carries a risk, its opposite carries a risk, too. To give it a name, I propose anthropodenial for the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals when in fact they may exist.

  Those who are in anthropodenial try to build a brick wall between themselves and other animals. They carry on the tradition of French philosopher Rene Descartes, who declared that while humans possessed souls, animals were mere nmachines. Inspired by the pervasive human-animal dualism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this view has no parallel in other religions or cultures. It also raises the question why, if we descended from automatons, we aren't automatons ourselves. How did we get to be different? Each time we must ask such a question, another brick is pulled out of the dividing wall. To rue, this wall is beginning to look like a slice of Swiss cheese. I work on a daily basis with animals from which it is about as hard to distance oneself as from Lucy, the Australopithecus fossil. All indications are that the main difference between Lucy and modern apes resided in her hips rather than her cranium. Surely we all owe Lucy the respect due an ancestorand if so, does not this force a different look at the apes?

  If Georgia the chimpanzee acts in a way that in any human would be considered deliberately deceitful, we need compelling evidence to the contrary before we say that, in fact, she was guided by different intentions, or worse, that apes have no intentions, and that Georgia was a mere water-spitting robot. Such a judgment would be possible only if behavior that in its finest details reminds us of our own-and that, moreover, is shown by an organism extremely close to us in anatomy and brain organization-somehow fundamentally differs from ours. It would mean that in the short evolutionary time that separates humans from chimpanzees, different motives and cognition have come to underlie similar behavior. What an awkward assumption, and how unparsimonious!

  Isn't it far more economical to assume that if two closely related species act in a similar way, the underlying mental processes are similar, too? If wolves and coyotes have behavior patterns in common, the logical assumption is that these patterns mean the same thing, inasmuch as they derive from the common ancestor of both species. Applied to humans and their closest relatives, this rationale makes cognitive similarity the default position. In other words, given that the split between the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees is assumed to have occurred a mere five to six million years ago, anthropomorphism should be less of an issue than anthropodenial.17

  This radical-sounding position-according to which, in the case of monkeys and apes, the burden of proof should be shifted from those who recognize similarity to those who deny it-is not exactly new. One of the strongest advocates of a unitary explanation was the philosopher David Hume. More than a century before both Lloyd Morgan and Darwin, Hume formulated the following touchstone in A Treatise of Human Nature:

  'Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both."

  Bambification

  As soon as we admit that animals are not machines, that they are more like us than like automations, then anthropodenial becomes impossible and anthropomorphism inevitable. Nor is anthropomorphism necessarily unscientific, unless it takes one of the unscientific forms that popular culture bombards us with. I was once struck by an advertisement for clean fuel in which a grizzly bear had his arm around his mate's shoulders while both enjoyed a beautiful landscape. Since bears are nearsighted and do not form pair-bonds, the image was nothing but our own behavior projected onto these animals.

  Walt Disney made us forget that Mickey is a mouse and Donald a duck. Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, Barney: television is populated with talking and singing animal representations with little relation to their actual counterparts. Popular depictions are often pedomorphic, that is, they follow ethology's Kindchenschema (baby-appeal) by endowing ani mals with enlarged eyes and rounded infantile features designed to evoke endearment and protectiveness.

  I've had firsthand experience with another form that I refer to as satirical anthropomorphism, which exploits the reputation of certain animals as stupid, stubborn, or funny in order to mock people. When my book Chimpanzee Politics came out in France in 1987, the publisher decided, unbeknownst to me, to put Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac on the cover with a grinning chimpanzee between them. I can only assume that he wanted to imply that these politicians acted like "mere" apes. Yet by doing so he went completely against the whole point of my book, which was not to ridicule people but to show that chimpanzees live in complex societies full of alliances and jockeying for power, societies that in some ways mirror our own.

  You can hear similar attempts at anthropomorphic humor at the monkey rock of most zoos. Isn't it interesting that antelopes, lions, and giraffes rarely elicit hilarity, but that people who watch primates often end up hooting and yelling, scratching themselves in an exaggerated manner, and pointing at the animals while shouting things like "I had to look twice, Larry, I thought it was you"? In my mind, the laughter reflects anthropodenial: it is a nervous reaction caused by an uncomfortable resemblance.

  The most common anthropomorphism, however, is the naive kind that attributes human feelings and thoughts to animals based on insufficient information or wishful thinking. I recall an interview with a woman in Wisconsin who claimed that the squirrels in her backyard loved her to an extraordinary degree. The rodents visited her every day, came indoors, and accepted food directly from her hand. She spent over a thousand dollars per year on nuts. When the interviewer discreetly suggested that perhaps the abundant goodies explained the animals' fondness of her, the woman denied any connection.

  Naive anthropomorphism makes us exclaim "He must be the daddy!" when an adult male animal gently plays with a youngster. We are the only animals, however, with the concept of paternity as a basis of fatherhood. Other animals can be fathers-and fathers may treat juveniles differently than non-fathers-but this is never based on an explicit understanding of the link between sex and reproduction. Similarly, when Elizabeth Marshall Thomas tells us in The Hidden Life of Dogs that virgin bitches "save" themselves for future "husbands," she assumes Victorian values in an animal not particularly known for its sexual fidelity.

  All such instances of anthropomorphism are profoundly anthropocentric. The talking animals on television, the satirical depiction of public figures, and the naive attribution of human qualities to animals have little to do with what we know about the animals themselves. In a tradition going back to the folktales, Aesop, and La Fontaine, this kind of anthropomorphism serves human purposes: to mock, educate, moralize, and entertain. Most of it further satisfies the picture, cherished by many, of the animal kingdom as a peaceable and cozy paradise. The fact that, in reality, animals kill and devour each other, die of starvation and disease, or are indifferent to each other, does not fit the idealized image. The entertainment industry's massive attempt to strip animals of their nasty side has been aptly labeled their "Bambification."39

  The general public is less and less aware of the discrepancy with the real world as fewer people grow up on farms or otherwise close to nature. Even though having a pet provides a reality check (dogs are generally nice,
but neither to their prey nor to invaders of their territory), the full picture of nature in all its glory and horror escapes the modern city dweller.

  What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

  The goal of the student of animal behavior is rarely a mere projection of human experiences onto the animal. Instead, the goal is to interpret behavior within the wider context of a species' habits and natural history.

  Without experience with primates, one might think that a grinning rhesus monkey must be delighted, or that a chimpanzee running toward another with loud grunts must be in an aggressive mood. But primatologists know from hours of watching that rhesus bare their teeth when intimidated and that chimpanzees often grunt when they meet and embrace. In other words, a grinning rhesus monkey signals submission, and grunting by a chimpanzee serves as a greeting. In this way the careful observer arrives at an informed anthropomorphism that is often at odds with extrapolations from human behavior.

  When Sofie, a six-month-old kitten, bounces toward me sideways, with wide eyes, arched back, and fluffy tail, I recognize this as playful bluff. This judgment is not based on knowing any people who act this way. I just know how Sofie's behavior fits with all the other things cats do. By the same token, when an animal keeper says "Yummy!" while feeding mealworms to a squirrel monkey, she is speaking for the animal, not for herself.

  Or take an example that reached the best-sellers list. In The Man Who Listens to Horses, animal trainer Monty Roberts freely employs what appears to be hopelessly anthropomorphic language to describe his animals' reactions. When the horses make licking and chewing movements, for example, they are said to be negotiating with their trainer: "I am a herbivore; I ain a grazer, and I'm making this eating action with my mouth now because I'm considering whether or not to trust you. Help me out with that decision, can you, please?"40

  Rather than attributing human tendencies to his animals, however, Roberts's interpretations are from the animal's perspective. His extraordinary success as a trainer rests on the fact that he treats the horse as a flight animal in need of trusting relations. A horse has a fear-based psychology totally different from that of a predator.

  While the goal of understanding animals from the inside out may be considered naive, it certainly is not anthropocentric. Ideally, we understand animals based on what we know about their Umwelt-a German term introduced in 1909 by Jacob von Uexkull for the environment as perceived by the an imal. In the same way that parents learn to see through their children's eyes, the empathic observer learns what is important to his or her animals, what frightens them, under which circumstances they feel at ease, and so on.

  Is it really anthropomorphic to look at the world from the animal's viewpoint, taking its Umwelt, intelligence, and natural tendencies into account? If anthropomorphism is defined as the attribution of human mental experiences to animals, then, strictly speaking, Roberts is not anthropomorphizing; he explicitly postulates major differences in the psychological makeup of horses and people. Although he does put human words in the horse's mouth, this seems done for the sake of reaching an audience, not because of any confusion between the species.

  The animalcentric approach is not easy to apply to every animal: some are more like us than others. The problem of sharing the experiences of organisms that rely on different senses was expressed most famously by the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he asked, "What is it like to be a bat?"41 A bat perceives its world in pulses of reflected sound, something that we creatures of vision have a hard time imagining. Still, Nagel's answer to his own question-that we will never know-may have been overly pessimistic. Some blind persons manage to avoid collisions with objects by means of a crude form of echolocation.42

  Perhaps even more alien would be the experience of an animal such as the star-nosed mole. With its twenty-two pink, writhing tentacles around its nostrils, it is able to feel microscopic textures on small objects in the mud with the keenest sense of touch of any animal on earth. Humans can barely imagine this creature's Umwelt. Ohviously, the closer a species is to us, the easier it is to do so. This is why anthropomorphism is not only tempting in the case of apes, but also hard to reject on the grounds that we cannot know how they perceive the world. Their sensory systems are essentially the same as ours.

  Aninialcentric anthropomorphism must be sharply distinguished from anthropocentric anthropomorphism (see diagram). The first takes the animal's perspective, the second takes ours. It is a bit like people we all know, who buy us presents that they think we like versus people who buy us presents that they like. The latter have not yet reached a mature form of empathy, and perhaps never will."

  Anthropomorphism comes in many shapes and forms. The type to be treated with caution is the naive, humanizing (anthropocentric) type. Most students of animal behavior, however, try to understand animals on their own terms. Animalcentric anthropomorphism is a common heuristic tool: it generates testable ideas. The opposite of anthropomorphism is anthropodenial, which is based on the assumption that it is safer to err on the side of difference than continuity.

  To make proper use of anthropomorphism we must view it as a means rather than an end. It should not be our goal to find some quality in an animal that is precisely equivalent to some aspect of our own inner lives. Rather, we should use the fact that we are animals to develop ideas we can put to a test. This heuristic use of anthropomorphism is very similar to the role of intuition in all of science. It inspires us to ►nake predictions, and to ask ourselves how they can be tested, how we can demonstrate what we think is going on. In this way, a speculation is turned into a challenge.44

  Gorilla Saves Boy

  On August 16, 1996, an ape saved a three-year-old boy. The child, who had fallen six meters into the primate exhibit at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, was scooped up and carried to safety by Binti Jua, an eight-year-old western lowland gorilla. The gorilla sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a gentle back-pat before continuing on her way. Her act of sympathy touched many hearts, making Binti a celebrity overnight. It must have been the first time in U.S. history that a gorilla figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as an example of much-needed compassion. Time elected her one of the "best people" of 1996.

  Some scientists were not as lyrical. They cautioned that Binti's motives might have been less noble than they seemed, pointing out that she had been raised by people, and had been taught parental skills with a stuffed animal. The whole affair, they suggested, might be explained by a confused maternal instinct. Other speculations included that Binti might have acted the same way with a sack of flour, or that she presented the child to the keepers with the same "pride" with which a house cat presents a dead mouse to her owner.

  The intriguing thing about this flurry of creative explanations was that nobody thinks of raising similar doubts when a person saves a dog hit by a car. The rescuer might have grown up around a kennel, have been praised for being kind to animals, and have a nurturing personality, yet we would still see his behavior as an act of caring. Why, then, was Binti's background held against her?45

  I am not saying that I can look into Binti's heart, but I do know that no one had prepared her for this specific, unique emergency, and that it is highly unlikely that she, with her own seventeen-month-old infant riding on her back, was "maternally confused." How in the world could such a highly intelligent animal mistake a blond boy in sneakers and a red Tshirt for a juvenile of her species? Actually, the biggest surprise was how surprised most people were. Students of ape behavior did not feel that Binti had done anything unusual. Jtirg Hess, a Swiss gorilla expert, put it most bluntly in an interview in Stem: "The incident can be sensational only for people who don't know a thing about gorillas."

  What Hess meant-and I fully agree-is that Binti's action made a deep impression only because it benefited a member of our own species. To take care of a hurt juvenile is perfectly normal behavior for an ape, but of course it typically is di rected at the ape's own kind. Inst
ances of such caretaking behavior never reach the media, but they are well known and in line with Binti's assistance to the unfortunate boy. The idea that apes have a capacity for empathy is further supported by how they embrace and caress recent victims of aggression, a reaction thus far not observed in other primates.46

  Binti's 1996 rescue of a boy who had fallen into her enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo, in Chicago, occurred when the United States was gearing up for national elections with Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot as presidential candidates. (Cartoon by Bruce Plante for the Chattanooga Times, with the artist's permission).

  The incident at the Brookfield Zoo illustrates how hard it is to avoid both anthropodenial and anthropomorphism at the same time: in shying away from anthropomorphism one runs straight into the problem that Binti's actions hardly make any sense if one refuses to assume intentions and emotions. All one can come up with then is a confused instinct.

  The larger question behind all of this is what kind of risk we are willing to take: the risk of underestimating animal mental life or the risk of overestimating it? There is no simple answer, but from an evolutionary perspective, Binti's kindness, like Georgia's mischievousness, is most parsimoniously explained in the same way that we explain our own behavior.

  Darwistotle

  The debate about anthropomorphism exposes old fault lines in Occidental thought, going back to the united view of Aristotle and the dualistic position of the Christian religion. Aristotle saw human social and political life as flowing from natural impulses, such as the reliance on cooperation and need for parental care that we share with many other animals. These views agree so well with current evolutionary biology that in the writings of at least one American political scientist, Larry Arnhart, Darwin and Aristotle have begun to blend into a single person, perhaps to be called Darwistotle.47