Later on I saw a photo of dancing bears in Afghanistan, and every one of those bears had a white fur patch on its chest. I’ve even started to see this pattern in wildlife photography. Derek Grzelewski, who took a series of photos of otters, mentions that some otters are more “inquisitive” and less “wary” than others.30 If you look at his pictures of his two inquisitive otters, both of them have white fur at their throats, and one is looking straight at the camera. Those are the only close-ups in the whole batch of photographs, possibly because the solid-colored otters kept their distance.
I don’t know whether that tells us anything about what kind of dog a black puppy with a little spot of white on his chest will grow up to be. But I’d be surprised if he was as nutty as some of the Dalmatians out there.
6. How Animals Think
Those pigeons that poop on the cars at the Denver airport can tell the difference between Monet and Picasso. At night they roost in a man-made concrete rookery located over the most expensive parking spots at the airport. When wealthy travelers get back from their trips they find their Land Rovers and Lexuses dribbled over with pigeon poop. For travelers, those birds are a major nuisance, like rats with feathers.
They are also potential art connoisseurs. George Page, in his book Inside the Animal Mind, describes a famous experiment in which pigeons were taught to distinguish between paintings by Picasso and paintings by Monet.1 The birds learned the difference easily. A pigeon can quickly learn to peck at a painting by Picasso, instead of a painting by Monet, and vice versa. Not only that, but when the experimenters showed the birds a painting by Manet (not Monet), whose style is similar to early Picasso’s, the pigeons pecked the Manet, too. The birds make the same mistake entry-level art students do.2
Another experiment showed that pigeons who had never seen a tree in their lives, because they’d been born and raised in a lab, could easily learn to peck at a picture that contained a tree. That might not seem so amazing, except for the fact that they could also peck a picture that contained just one tiny part of a tree. They understood that a part of a tree was still a tree, even though technically a solitary leaf doesn’t look anything like a whole tree.3
Pigeons are a lot smarter than people think.
Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. But it’s still a battle. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don’t have a lot of feelings or aren’t very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there’s a lot more going on inside an animal’s head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it’s always the animal “debunkers” who are on the attack. At least, I don’t remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can’t do something isn’t considered blasphemous.
Fortunately, it’s gotten a lot more respectable to argue that animals are smarter than we realize. One of the main research teams we can thank for that is Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her twenty-five-year-old African gray parrot, Alex. Alex has now reached the cognitive level of a normal four-to-six-year-old child.4
His achievements are nothing short of revolutionary, because up until Alex came along no one had ever been able to teach birds much of anything at all. It wasn’t because they hadn’t tried, either. Bird researchers had spent hours and hours trying to teach birds concepts like color, and no bird had even come close to figuring it out. Birds couldn’t even learn labels for familiar objects, something everyone agreed apes could do. Even though experts were extremely skeptical of the language abilities of apes like Kanzi, who was said to have receptive language equivalent to that of a two-and-a-half-year-old child, it was obvious that you could teach an ape a huge amount. But birds seemed like real birdbrains. (Receptive language means the language you can understand, as opposed to expressive language, which is the language you can use to speak or write.)5
So it was a huge shock when Dr. Pepperberg succeeded where every single person before her had failed. Not only could Alex learn categories like color and shape, which no bird had ever done before, he learned them easily. Also, once he’d learned the categories, he could spontaneously answer questions like “What color?” and “What shape?” about brand-new objects he’d never seen before.
This means Alex was learning abstract categories like color and shape, not just concrete categories like “cat” and “dog.” Dr. Pepperberg says the difference between concrete categories and abstract categories is the difference between classification and reclassification. We use simple classification, like sorting out dogs and cats, to form basic, concrete categories. Concrete categories are permanent and stable. A dog is never going to be a cat, and a cat is never going to be a dog.
But when you’re using abstract categories to classify things, objects can jump categories. A blue triangle can be grouped with blue squares or with red triangles, depending on which abstract category, color or shape, you’re using to make the classification.
A lot of researchers have shown that animals form concrete categories. It would be extremely surprising if they didn’t, since an animal has to be able to distinguish between basic categories like food/not food and shelter/not shelter in order to survive.
But the research on whether or not animals can handle the most abstract categories still hasn’t produced a firm answer. We know that abstract categories like color are hard for young children to learn. At first, a child will learn that grass and broccoli are green, and apples and roses are red, without figuring out that there’s such a thing as greenness or redness as a separate category unto itself. Greenness and redness are just part of the apple. Animal behaviorists always assumed that if forming abstract categories is hard for children, it was probably impossible for animals. But now, thanks to Dr. Pepperberg and Alex, we know it’s not.
Alex can reclassify objects on demand. If Dr. Pepperberg shows him a square piece of blue wood and asks him, “What color?” he’ll say, “Blue.” Then if she asks him, “What shape?” he says, “Four-corner.” For Alex color and shape are abstract categories that can apply to any object, not just to the objects he’s been taught.
DO ANIMALS HAVE TRUE COGNITION?
I like the way Marion Stamp Dawkins, a researcher at Oxford who studies animal behavior and thinking, defines thinking in animals. She starts by saying what true cognition is not. True cognition is not hardwired instinctual behavior, and it is not learning a simple rule of thumb.6
True cognition, Dr. Dawkins say, happens when an animal solves a problem under novel conditions.
By that definition, birds are star performers. One of my favorite bird experiments is the one with about the thieving blue jays. Blue jays are famous food thieves who, in nature, know enough to hide their food so other jays won’t get it.
The researchers set up a situation where a jay would have to hide some food in the presence of other jays who were watching him. They gave the first set of blue jays some mealworms and a refrigerator ice tray filled with sand. The jays all hid their worms in the trays, while the other jays watched.
Then the experimenters took the watcher jays away—and the blue jays immediately dug up their mealworms and re-hid them in other parts of the tray. They obviously knew the watcher jays would try to steal their food, and they also knew the other jays knew where they’d hidden the food. So they hid the food again.
That is true cognition. The blue jays were in a novel situation, and they figured out a solution.
Mark saw two magpies using a similar strategy on Red Dog. Red Dog was eating a marrow bone that the magpies wanted for themselves. So the birds teamed up to get Red Dog away from the bone. One bird would lure Red Dog into chasing him, and the other would fly down to the marrow bone and start eating it. Then when Red Dog came back to the bone and chased that bird away, the first
bird would get its turn to eat some of the marrow. The birds were double-teaming Red Dog.
There’s been one formal experiment on ravens tricking each other to get food. The researchers studied two ravens, a dominant male and a subordinate male. At the beginning of the experiment the subordinate male found most of the food the experimenters had hidden, and the dominant raven chased him away and took the food for himself. So the subordinate male started tricking the dominant male by heading off to boxes he already knew didn’t have food. Then when the dominant male followed him and chased him off, the subordinate male had a head start to the boxes that did have food. That worked for a while until the dominant male stopped following him and looked for food on his own.7
Crows are really smart birds, too. The Betty and Abel study shocked the world when it appeared in Science.8 In the study the researchers were testing two crows, Betty and Abel, to see whether they would choose a hooked wire or a straight wire to use for getting some food out of a tube. During one session Abel snatched the hooked wire away from Betty, leaving Betty with only the straight wire to use. When she realized the straight wire wouldn’t work, she bent it into a hook. She did this nine different times, using different techniques. She also made improvements to her hook after using it, changing the angle to make it just right.
No one had ever seen any animal do anything like this, ever. It wasn’t that long ago researchers believed man was the only animal to use tools at all. Then, when people finally discovered chimpanzees using tools in the 1960s and 1970s, no one ever saw them actually manufacture a tool. The chimpanzees would just pick up an object in the environment, like a twig or a leaf, and stick it down a termite mound to fish out some termites to eat. Betty’s tool creation is even more amazing when you consider the fact that Betty didn’t know anything about wire or its properties and didn’t have any reason to know anything about wire and its properties. In nature nothing bends and holds its shape the way wire does.
I heard another amazing crow story from a man I know. He’s fed up with a crow who is damaging his house. I can really relate to that. There’s a crow in my neighborhood who has spent the last five years of his life dismantling and pulling out the rubber weather stripping in my bathroom skylight. It’s taken him five years to pull out a six-inch strip, and he just keeps at it. He’s so dedicated to his project his behavior seems instinct-driven and almost obsessive-compulsive.
I can’t get him to stop. I throw hats at the skylight from inside the bathroom to scare him off, but he always comes back. If he keeps doing it the skylight is going to leak, but what I really worry about is that if he finally gets all the weather stripping out he’s going to eat it and get sick or die. This is where blind instinct overrides cognition: a bird that’s so smart some of the time can be so stupid other times.
The man I know apparently has a similar situation with a crow at his house, only he’s opted to use a weapon more dangerous than a soft hat. But he’s never been able to shoot his invader, because the crow always knows when he’s thinking about getting his gun. The bird will be there in the man’s yard attacking the house while the man does his yard work, but the minute the man goes inside the house to get his gun the bird is gone. This has happened over and over again. The homeowner is completely mystified. When he goes inside his house without any intention of getting his gun, the crow stays in the yard. When he goes inside his house with the intention of getting his gun, the crow takes off.
How does the bird know it’s time to get out of there? Probably the crow has picked up on differences in the man’s behavior. I’m guessing that when the man gets irritated enough to go get his gun, first he does a lot of angry staring at the bird. The crow knows that’s dangerous and takes off.
No one has ever seen a dog make a tool, but dogs can problem-solve in novel situations. Guide dogs for blind people have to be able to respond appropriately in new situations. Some service dogs are better problem-solvers than others, of course. In one city, highway engineers wanted to save money on curb cuts for wheelchairs at intersections. Normally a street corner will have eight curb cuts, one on each side of the four corners. To economize, the engineers reduced the number to four, putting each curb cut at the point of each corner, facing diagonally across the intersection.
That was a problem for the service dogs, who had all been trained on eight-cut corners. Some dogs got confused by the new design and took their owners clear across the intersection on a diagonal. But the really smart dogs led their owners down the diagonal curb cut and then back around to where the curb cuts would have been located in the normal crosswalk design. Then they crossed the street. That’s problem solving in a novel situation.
The wild dogs in Mexico City go our service dogs one better. They cross the street in packs, with the light, in the intersection. They probably learned how to do this by watching how people cross the street.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who wrote The Hidden Life of Dogs, discovered that her dogs had figured out on their own that intersections are dangerous.9 To avoid getting hit by turning cars, her free-roaming dogs learned to cross the street in the middle of a block instead of at the intersection. That way they could see all the cars that were coming toward them from a distance, and not be surprised by a car making a sudden right or left turn into their path.
In farming and ranching you see lots of situations where animals will learn something useful by accident, such as how to break through a fence or open a gate. This is probably not true cognition, but some of these animals are pretty clever, and in the field it’s hard to say what’s true cognition and what’s not. Most cattle and horses will never touch gate latches to try to open them, even though they’ve seen people open the latch a thousand times. However, if an animal accidentally learns to open the gate he’ll never stop. He won’t unlearn it, and he generally can’t be trained out of it. My aunt had a horse that learned to put his head through a gate and lift it off the hinges. The only way we could get him to stop was to install a bracket at the top of the fence. Once one animal figures out how to open a gate, the other animals can learn how to open the gate by observation. Then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
The big problem is fence busting. Every year I get about twenty calls from lawyers about cattle getting loose on the highway and getting hit by a car. The drivers always want to sue the ranchers for inadequate fencing. I have to explain to the lawyers that there is no pasture fence on the market that can keep cattle inside a pasture once the cattle have learned how to get through it. Only a steel stockyard fence is strong enough to hold cattle in physically, and steel fences are too expensive to put up around grazing lands. The fences ranchers use keep cattle in only because the cattle don’t realize that they have the power to break through them.
Is fence busting true cognition? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Usually cattle discover how to break through a fence by accident. Cattle will push on a fence to reach greener grass on the other side, and keep pushing until one day the fence falls over. Then they draw the appropriate conclusion: if I push on the fence, I can get out and go eat where I want. Animals also figure out, probably by accident, that if they run through an electric fence it’s going to hurt for only a few seconds. We know this because pigs who have learned to go through electric fences often squeal before they hit the wire. They know what’s coming.
Some cattle have learned to break through a fence through simple trial and error, but others have started to build on what they learned by accident. There was one bull from the Arizona high country who was the champion fence buster. Bulls are the worst fence busters, and once a bull has learned to break through a fence it’s difficult to keep him in. This particular bull was the champion; he took out fences faster than the U.S. Forest Service could build them. He knew how to knock over a high-quality four-strand barbed wire fence built to government standards. In one afternoon he walked through four brand-new fences. I saw him after he had been locked in a stall corral that was too strong for h
im to break out of.
All of us were amazed that the bull could tear out so many barbed wire fences without getting cut. His tan-and-white hide did not have a single scratch. This is where cognition is at work. He had figured out how to knock over a barbed wire fence without getting cut. Nobody ever saw him do it but he must have figured out that if he pushed over the posts with his head first, and then walked through, he would not get cut. He was careful.
Holstein steers are another story. With all the licking and tongue manipulating they do, Holsteins end up opening gate latches beef cattle never even try to open. I don’t think they’re really solving a problem, though; it’s more like a happy accident. What starts out as a pure desire to lick and tongue things turns into the discovery that they can open gates. Still, once they figure it out they’re experts. They can open just about anything, including every sliding bolt gate latch on the market. The only kind of latch that can keep a Holstein cow inside a pen is a chain hooked together with a dog leash snap. They love to get out, too. At one feedlot a group of Holsteins escaped their pen and walked up to the office to lick the windows and remove the paint from the manager’s pickup.
ARE ANIMALS AS SMART AS PEOPLE?
I can’t answer that question, and neither can anyone else. Researchers who believe we know for a fact that man is the crown of creation when it comes to IQ are off base. That’s what researchers think, not what they know. I’ve come to the conclusion that although in many ways other mammals are similar to us, in other ways they may be totally alien. A lot of our tests and experiments with animals probably aren’t telling us what we think they’re telling us.
Dr. Pepperberg’s breakthrough with Alex ought to make researchers think twice. It’s not just that what we know keeps changing, but that the way we go about finding out how animals think sometimes changes, too. That’s the moral of Dr. Pepperberg’s story. The reason she finally succeeded where everyone else had failed was that she was the first person to consider that maybe it was the researchers’ fault birds weren’t learning anything, not the birds’.
Animals in Translation Page 29