Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child

by Susan McCarthy

  In horizontal learning, animals learn from their own generation. If you follow your sister or your friend to forage in the new Dumpster the humans set up by the construction site, or if your classmates take you to a great concert, that’s horizontal learning. It is “rapid and ephemeral; hence most appropriate for the transmission of information pertaining to rapidly changing aspects of the environment,” write Hilary Box and Kathleen Gibson.

  In oblique learning, animals learn from unrelated individuals of another generation. If you follow an aged baboon to a hidden water hole (and he’s not your father or grandfather), or you actually learn something a teacher tells you, that’s oblique. Baby elephants reach into the mouths of other elephants to find out what they’re eating, and this is not a liberty they only take with their mothers.

  Social facilitation

  Social facilitation is when the sight of someone else doing something which you already know how to do inspires you to do it. Everybody’s dancing, and you feel like dancing too. You’re not copying them, because you already know all the dances. Those kids have ice-cream cones, and suddenly you feel like having one. Or everyone else is throwing rocks and before you know it, you’re throwing rocks too.

  Claire Kipps raised Clarence, an abandoned house sparrow nestling, in her London home. Because one wing was slightly crippled, he could not be released. After Clarence had grown, neighbors brought her several sparrow fledglings they had wrested from cats. The sparrows feared her almost as much as they now feared cats, but Clarence gave them confidence. They followed him slavishly. If he chirped, they chirped. If he preened, they preened. If Clarence drank from a teaspoon held by Kipps, they hopped over and drank from the teaspoon. They already knew how to chirp and preen, and the sound and sight of Clarence chirping and preening was social facilitation to do likewise. As for drinking from a spoon, they already knew how to drink. But going to the spoon to drink is probably better categorized as stimulus enhancement.

  Stimulus enhancement, local enhancement

  Stimulus enhancement is a very common form of observational learning. An animal’s attention is attracted to a place or an object by the actions of another animal. The observer doesn’t copy what the first animal did, but the heightened interest created in the place or thing may eventually cause the observer to perform the same action.

  Suppose I have somehow never run across a vending machine before. I notice that you go to the machine and come back with brightly colored snack crackers, and I suddenly crave such crackers. Stimulus enhancement has kicked in. I go over to the machine—local enhancement—and look at it, notice the coin slot, maybe even read the directions, and eventually buy myself some crackers of unnatural appearance. This is not imitation. I didn’t watch, understand, and copy what you did. My interest in the machine was enhanced by noticing your interaction with it, but I had to learn how to get crackers out of it by myself.

  Similarly, juvenile sea bass were much more likely to figure out how to push a lever to get fish pellets if they’d seen other sea bass in an adjacent aquarium push a lever to get fish pellets. (They knew the other fish were getting pellets because pellets went into both tanks when the lever was pushed.).

  In a large South African garden a bantam hen was persuaded to sit on five eggs abandoned by an Egyptian goose. She hatched them successfully and led them around the garden, scratching up bugs and seeds for them and looking on as they ate grass instead. When they were two weeks old she took her children to forage by the fishpond, and the goslings instantly realized that water was where they were meant to be. To the bantam’s astonishment, they jumped in and swam gaily, uttering joyful minihonks. They ignored their mother’s frantic calls to get out of the water. She flew back and forth, begging them to escape while they could. They dove and splashed. The rooster came to see what the fuss was about. “He couldn’t believe his eyes either and stood gaping at the scene, shocked speechless,” writes Kobie Krüger in The Wilderness Family.

  The goslings insisted on going to the pool every day, and one day another bantam arrived with her chicks. She blinked in surprise. Meanwhile one of her chicks, duped by local enhancement, decided that the pond looked like fun, marched up to the brim, ready to step in, leaned over—and lost his nerve.

  There is a well-known story of how tits in Britain learned to peck open milk-bottle tops and drink the cream at the top, and how this habit spread like wildfire across Britain as the birds copied each other.* This was once thought to be a case of imitation, but is now considered one of local and stimulus enhancement. A tit sees another on a milk bottle and thinks that milk bottles must be a good place to perch. A tit that sees another tit, even one that is just standing around, is also more apt to look for food, which involves pecking at things. A tit that finds a pecked-open milk bottle will learn to inspect milk bottles, and does not have to wonder what the best way to open milk bottles might be, since pecking is always a good bet. In the laboratory, chickadees* presented with a model of a milk bottle, and with no one to copy, came up with the idea of pecking through the foil to get the cream about a quarter of the time. So it is likely that tits in various parts of Britain came up with the idea independently, making the progress of the custom seem even faster than it was. Other birds, particularly house sparrows, also took it up.

  Imitation

  Debunking the milk-bottle imitation story produced its own wave of imitation, this time of scientists imitating other scientists by trying to prove that various cases—maybe all cases—of imitation by animals were no such thing.

  Imitation used to be scorned. It was considered “a cheap trick that animals often use, which produces a spurious mimicry of real intelligence,” writes Richard Byrne. “From this lowly status, imitation has recently been promoted to a sign of remarkable intellectual ability, one which involves a symbolic process—except when it is vocal imitation by birds, perhaps an anti-bird bias. Researchers studying human babies have called imitation ‘an innate mechanism for learning from adults, a culture instinct.’ And ironically it is now suggested that imitation can only be done by humans.”

  Frans de Waal writes that “increasingly the term ‘imitation’ is being reserved for cases in which a solution to a problem is copied with an understanding of both the problem and the model’s intentions. This usage has turned ‘imitation’ into a small, cream-of-the-crop subset of social learning, one that may not apply to rats and cats, perhaps not even to monkeys and apes.”

  Just as being said to ape someone is not a compliment, being said to parrot someone is a criticism. If the anti-bird bias suggested by Richard Byrne means that vocal imitation by birds doesn’t count, consider the case of Okíchoro. This African grey parrot was raised by psychologist Bruce Moore and imitated both words and gestures. Okíchoro learned to say “Ciao!” and wave one foot or wing. He’d say, “Look at my tongue,” open his beak, and show his tongue. He’d say, “Turn” and turn on his perch. He had motions or gestures to accompany “Get back, you,” “Back in your tree,” “ready,” “shake,” “microphone,” “heads up,” and “jump.” Okíchoro also imitated the sounds of Moore’s footsteps while walking or marching in place. He imitated the sound of knocking on a door while making knocking movements in the air with his beak or foot.

  Copycatting

  Psychologist Edward Thorndike, a student of William James, rejected the notion that cats can imitate. Around 1900, Thorndike constructed a series of puzzle boxes, from which cats could escape by manipulating levers, treadles, latches, or strings. Cats who saw how other cats escaped did not escape any quicker. Cats got out by trial and error, and they showed no insight into the workings of the levers, treadles, latches, or strings. Many cats tried the mewing-to-be-let-out technique. This was ineffective with Thorndike, but it’s an excellent strategy, which often works.

  Thorndike was touchy about amazing animal stories. He complained that they focused on animal intelligence, not stupidity. “Thousands of cats on thousands of occasions sit helplessly yowlin
g, and no one takes thought of it or writes to his friend, the professor; but let one cat claw at the knob of a door supposedly as a signal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes the representative of the cat-mind in all the books.”

  Thorndike’s low opinion of cats prevailed in scientific circles for some time, but he may have picked the wrong tests to get cats to imitate. In the 1960s, brain researchers doing electrophysiological studies became impatient with the lengthy process of conditioning cats and decided to see if cats could learn tasks (either jumping over a hurdle to avoid having their feet shocked or pushing a lever to get food) by imitation. They could, and they learned faster than cats conditioned by standard techniques.

  Karen Pryor writes that cats are quite good at imitating. When a dog does what another dog does, it’s usually because it’s responding to the same thing as the first dog, she says. But if she teaches a trick to one cat in a household, the other cats will do it without being taught.

  Pryor describes an incident in which her daughter spent an hour teaching her small poodle to jump into a child’s rocking chair and then make it rock. She rewarded its efforts with bits of chopped ham. At the end of the lesson the poodle jumped down and a cat who had been watching jumped into the chair unbidden, set it rocking, and looked up for her ham.

  Pryor doesn’t take the view that the cat capacity for mimicking the actions of another animal shows that cats are smarter than dogs, only that they’re better imitators.

  Beak and claw

  In recent years, some researchers have produced fairly clear-cut demonstrations of imitation by giving animals simple tasks that can be accomplished in more than one way. Only if they copy the precise way the task was done, as well as the end result, is it considered imitation.

  If parakeets, also called budgies, saw a demonstrator budgie push a piece of cardboard off a cup of birdseed with its bill, they would push the cardboard off a cup of seed with their own bill. But if they saw a budgie remove the cardboard by gripping it in its bill and lifting, they too would grip and lift. And if they saw a budgie kick it off with its foot, why, then, they would boot it off too.

  Challenging the view that apes can imitate but monkeys cannot, Bernhard Voelkl and Ludwig Huber worked with marmosets, small South American monkeys. They showed that if a marmoset sees another marmoset pry the lid off a film canister with its teeth and eat the scrumptious mealworm within, it will then pry the lids off film canisters with its teeth to retrieve mealworms. But if the marmoset sees another marmoset pry the lid off a film canister with its hands to win the mealworm, it will use its hands too.

  Swim this way

  Dolphins undeniably imitate. More than once an untrained dolphin in an aquarium who has witnessed another dolphin go through its act has turned out to be able to do the act perfectly without training. They don’t limit themselves to imitating each other. Haig, a captive Indian Ocean bottlenose dolphin who appears to have been bored out of her mind, took to imitating Tommy, a fur seal in the same tank. She lay on the surface, keeping her tail still and rowing with her flippers as Tommy did. Unlike a dolphin, but just like Tommy, Haig rubbed herself with her flippers. She copied Tommy’s habit of rising above the surface with open mouth. She even attempted Tommy’s sleeping position, lying on her side with a flipper protruding stiffly. As Tommy did, she lay belly-up on the surface of the water with her flippers pressed against her body. This put her blowhole underwater, so from time to time she had to turn over to breathe. “The dolphin maintained the postures only with great difficulty and clumsiness.” When she was not doing Tommy impressions, Haig was seen swimming behind a skate and pushing herself off the wall with her flipper as the skate did with its wing. When a loggerhead turtle slept on the bottom of the tank, Haig lay flat on the bottom beside it, and when it rose up to breathe, she rose up with it. After a while the stir-crazy Haig began to push the turtle down just before it took a breath. She and the other female dolphin in the tank, Lady Dimple, thought this was so funny that they drowned several turtles in the process.

  A dolphin in the same aquarium, Daan, watched a diver whose job was to clean algae off the inside of a glass viewing port. Daan took to scrubbing the window with a seagull’s feather, at the same time making a noise like the diver’s air-demand valve and emitting a stream of bubbles like the exhaust air from the diver’s equipment. When he couldn’t get a feather, he would scrub the window with a rock, a piece of paper, a dead fish, or an unfortunate sea slug. He monopolized the job, threatening and shoving divers who tried to come near.* He got the window pretty clean.

  Lady Dimple had a calf, Dolly, who copied her mother’s show-time act. Dolly also performed one of the most famous examples of imitation in the short annals of accepted incidents. Dolly was interested in visitors and often brought feathers, seaweed, or fish skins to the viewing port to show them. If people didn’t pay attention, she’d go get another object, such as her favorite rock. One day a visitor who was smoking blew a large cloud of smoke against the viewing port to which Dolly had her face pressed. Dolly immediately swam to her mother, nursed for a second, swam back to the port, and blew out a mouthful of milk in front of her side of the window, producing a cloud around her head just like the cloud of cigarette smoke. Having noticed the astonishment this created, Dolly made it a regular part of her routine.

  Dolphins in captivity and in the wild love to synchronize their movements. Captive killer whales Orky and Corky worked up what Alexandra Morton calls an Esther Williams routine, in the early morning when no trainers were present. It took a while until they could back into the tank wall simultaneously, push off with their tails at the same moment, and glide in unison. A number in which they lay side by side with their tail flukes on the training platform and their right pectoral fins raised took months to perfect.

  One sunset, watching wild killer whales in Discovery Passage, Canada, Morton saw two males lying on their sides in the water, head to tail. “Slowly they raised their right pectoral fins together and froze. They held their salute for fifteen seconds, then rolled to dive in perfect synchrony.”

  What do you have to do to get an apple around here?

  The zoo in Knoxville, Tennessee, has had outstanding success in breeding red pandas. The keepers wanted to be able to perform regular vaginal swabs on the female pandas, so they could tell when the pandas were ready to mate. They didn’t want this procedure to be stressful for the red pandas, so they decided to train them to accept it as routine. Over several sessions they were able to accustom the pandas to the proceedings, which involved providing them with a big bowl of apples while a keeper did a quick swab. There! All done! Have some more apples! The red pandas were very fond of apples, and this struck them as a good deal. Their cubs were on hand during the procedure, since separating mothers from cubs would be stressful. When the female cubs were mature, the keepers planned to train them to accept the vaginal swabbing procedure as the mothers had been trained, but it turned out to be unnecessary. The cubs knew all about it and cheerfully bellied up to the bowl of apples, ready for their swabs. (Whether males are bitter because they never get big bowls of apples is unknown.)

  Mixed learning

  A lot of things animals do are learned by a mixture of methods—a little bit of stimulus enhancement, a little bit of trial and error, maybe some imitation.*

  Two groups of young red squirrels, born in a laboratory, were given hickory nuts for the first time. One group could also see a grown squirrel, a wild-born expert, eating hickory nuts. The squirrel children attacked the nuts with enthusiasm and learned how to gnaw them open. At first they gnawed randomly all over the nut, but gradually they became more purposeful and skilled. The expert squirrel had a distinctive method, beginning at a certain point on the stem end of the nut, and gnawing along the main axis until he could get at the seed on each side of the internal septum. It took this expert about 23 minutes per nut. After the first group had been allowed to observe the expert for six weeks, he was moved so the second gro
up could watch.

  Squirrels who saw the expert in the first six weeks were apt to open their hickory nuts the way he did. Squirrels who saw the expert in the second six weeks mostly did not. The expert’s method was very efficient, and the young squirrels in the first group approached his 23-minute speed. The others took more than twice as long to open a nut, although they improved after six more weeks.

  Thus any red squirrel who wants to eat a hickory nut seems to be able to figure out a method by trial and error. And practice helps. But being able to watch a professional is a real shortcut.

  Ape this

  Surely marmosets aren’t the only primates who imitate. Surely apes can ape. There have been quite a few experiments in which what appeared to be imitation by primates turned out to be more like clueless stimulus enhancement. Thus chimpanzees who saw a trained animal use a T-shaped rake to pull distant food items in through the bars of their cage got the general idea of using the rake to get the food, but failed to notice the techniques that actually worked.

  But there are also examples from captive-reared apes of the most blatant aping imaginable. To say that apes do not ape is impossible when you watch Chantek put on lipstick, or see Lucy sipping a gin and tonic while leafing through a magazine, or notice that Viki has stolen your key and started the car.

  When Nina, a zoo gorilla, was feeling poorly, she took one of the empty burlap bags in which treats were brought to the gorilla enclosure, tore it open along the seams, and used it as a shawl. One day she brushed the leaves off a spot in the grass, laid the burlap down, smoothed out the wrinkles, straightened a dog-eared corner, and sat down on it. Then she noticed that every primate in sight, human or gorilla, was staring, and she became self-conscious. The next day her five-year-old daughter Alafia took an empty box of shredded-wheat biscuits, removed the paper sleeve the biscuits came in, tore it open along the seams, smoothed it out, and sat on it.