As always, learning can produce error. One day a baby vervet saw some stampeding elephants and gave a leopard alarm call. It so happened that at almost that very moment, an adult male in the troop, looking in the opposite direction, saw a leopard and gave the leopard alarm call too. For months thereafter, that little monkey gave leopard alarm calls for elephants.
In active teaching, one animal wants another to learn something and changes its own behavior according to how the pupil is doing. Some take the view that animals, or certainly most animals, cannot really teach, because they do not have a theory of mind. That is, they cannot put themselves in the mental place of another animal and perceive what it knows and what it does not know. If the adult animal doesn’t know that the baby doesn’t know, how can it teach? Others argue that this knowledge may be necessary for some forms of teaching, but not for all.*
Walk this way
The more you read about learning, the more elusive teaching becomes. We don’t teach babies to talk or walk. It is impossible to keep them from walking and talking. We may be able to coach them to walk and talk sooner. Possibly this is a delusion, but just as it is impossible to stop babies from striving to walk and talk, it is impossible to stop parents from urging them on.
When a mother or father primate encourages a baby to crawl or walk, Dario Maestripieri argues, this doesn’t mean that the parents are aware of the infant’s mental state. They may not have an idea about what goes on in the infant’s head; they may just want to see the child walk, and have learned that infants walk sooner if gently encouraged.
We are not the only primates who teach, or coach, infants to crawl and walk. Some captive pigtailed macaque mothers set their infants down, back a few steps away, look at the infant and pucker their lips and raise their eyebrows, enticing the baby to come. If it can’t support itself on all fours, she may support it with a hand. A wild Barbary macaque in Gibraltar placed a week-old infant (probably his child) on the ground, backed about two feet away, and leaned in to look at and chatter to the baby. The baby chattered back and crawled ineptly toward the male. When it got six inches away, the father backed up a little more and chattered to the baby again.
Researchers studying captive rhesus found that some mothers encouraged early independence by breaking contact with their infants in the first weeks of life, while others did not break contact and in some cases restrained their infants when they eventually tried to move away. The mothers who broke contact accompanied this with encouragement for the infants to follow, by walking backward, looking at their infants, and smacking their lips. Their children became independent slightly earlier, breaking away from and returning to their mothers at a slightly younger age than the infants of the clingy mothers.
Spider monkey mothers encourage their older children to lead the way along foraging routes, and put a lot of time into it. The mother will start out along the route and then sit down on the branch. Eventually the little monkey gets tired of the inactivity and walks a little way along the route through the tree, and the mother at once falls in behind, thus encouraging her child to lead and learn to travel independently, not simply follow.
Bat rehabilitator Patricia Winters received 15 orphaned pallid bats one year. Their Latin name is Myotis yumanensis, and bat enthusiasts call them yummies. When Winters had gotten them through infancy she put them in a flight cage with two adult male California bats. She hoped the sight of the flying adults would encourage the yummies to try flying. Winters was a little worried because yummies are twice the size of California bats. When she heard a racket from the cage, she feared the yummies were beating up the adults, “because they can be very rowdy.” She peeked in and beheld “flight school.” The males would land a short distance away from the yummies, turn to face them, and call to them. The apprehensive yummies “acted like they were going to get crushed to death on the rocks below,” but finally they flew the tiny distance to the males. The males repeated this at greater and greater distances. “Within two nights the babies were flying like champs.”
On the prowl
If the only role of parents were to keep the young alive while they mature, there would be no reason for predators to take their cubs along on hunts. Cubs and pups are clumsy and noisy and scare the prey, but they’ve got to learn sometime. When they are a little more skilled, mother and children may actually increase each other’s success.
Mother grizzly bears who swim out to islands off the Alaskan coast to pillage seabird colonies, digging up nest burrows and eating eggs, chicks, and all, are followed by their cubs. The cubs learn where the islands are (some are as much as 10 miles offshore) and that delicious food can be found there, but no teaching is necessary. The cubs can see and taste for themselves.
Kids want limits, don’t you, honey?
If you’re going to take the kids with you, they’re going to have to learn to behave themselves, and animal parents and elders do not always take the view that children who misbehave can be sweetly reasoned with. Zoologist Maurice Burton describes what he takes to be maternal discipline in the dusky wood rat. A mother wood rat struck her son, knocking him off a log. The observers concluded that she didn’t recognize her child, but Burton argues that she was disciplining him for not following behind her in single file as young wood rats usually do. He immediately got in line. She may also have been in a terrible mood because they had only recently been released from a wood rat trap set by those same observers.
Burton describes a mother water vole swimming peacefully, followed by her child. When the young vole veered off obliquely, she turned and “there was a flurry of water and every sign of chastisement after which the two swam on, the young one following directly behind the mother.”
If a river otter cub races ahead of its mother, she may nip it on the nose. Chastised, the cub falls flat on the ground. If the mother is very angry, the cub may lie there “until the mother returns to it and caresses it as if telling the cub that everything is all right, but just to behave.”
Dolphin mothers usually feel that their calves should stick close. In one oceanarium the calves Delphi and Pan saw no reason for this caution. If a calf was persistently disobedient, his mother would push him to the bottom of the pool and hold him there for a few seconds. Then she’d let him go and he’d behave. For a while. When the calf got bigger, the mother had a harder time holding him down. Instead she’d swim below the calf and lift him out of the water.
Teenaged chimpanzees who accompany adults on boundary patrols get hints on how to behave during this dangerous activity. If they utter a sound, they get shushed by older chimpanzees who touch them or make threatening faces at them.
Greylag goslings follow their parents wherever they go. When goslings are raised by humans, who walk faster and cheat by wearing shoes, it is easy to tire the goslings out. The goslings keep following through the scary woods and over the hard roads because they don’t want to be left behind. But they learn that their parents are unreasonable taskmasters, and refuse to go on subsequent expeditions.
Apprenticeship
Humans do teach actively but not nearly as much as we think. (This fact may be partly obscured by the fact that most of the people studying this subject support themselves as teachers.) Most tool use is not actively taught. Beginners learn through apprenticeship, which involves observational learning, trial and error, opportunity, and occasional coaching. Anthropologists who have studied the human acquisition of complex skills have found very little direct instruction. Thus a novice on a commercial fishing trawler learning the process of purse seining “does not learn by simply internalizing a body of knowledge presented to him by others. He is, in fact, given little or no information at all.” He is not taught the names of parts and he is not told why he is supposed to do tasks he is assigned. He learns one thing at a time, in no particular order, and gradually assembles them into sequences of actions. Traditional Navajo silversmiths and weavers don’t tell their apprentices what to do, but simply let them watch and try
. Papuan craftsmen who make flaked stone tools don’t teach explicitly, but by demonstration.
Okay, that counts
The canonical examples of active teaching by animal parents come from chimpanzee nut cracking. Even those who define teaching narrowly accept these, although they say how rare it is.
Wild chimpanzees of the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast crack nuts on stones that serve as anvils, striking them with stones or branches that act as hammers. This skill takes years to master, and chimpanzee mothers encourage the development of the skill in several ways. Christophe Boesch divides the behavior of these chimpanzee mothers into stimulation, facilitation, and active teaching.
They stimulate nut cracking by leaving nuts or hammers near anvils, something they do often when their babies start to show an interest in cracking nuts, at around three years of age. On several occasions mother chimpanzees placed a nut in perfect position on the anvil, placed the hammer next to it, and then left it there, making things as easy as possible for the inexperienced young chimps. Males and females without offspring don’t leave their stuff lying around. Someone might take it.
Mothers also help out by supplying nuts or better hammers to their infants. Typically this involves letting the kid snatch the hammer. A chimpanzee named Ella let her five-year-old son Gérald take four hammers from her in a row. Using hijacked hammers, Gérald was able to crack open 36 nuts during a 40-minute period in which Ella cracked only 8 because she was kept so busy searching for new hammers.
On several occasions researcher Christophe Boesch also saw chimpanzees actively teach a child how to crack nuts more effectively. Watched by her six-year-old, Sartre, the chimpanzee mother Salomé was cracking panda nuts, which have particularly hard shells and which require careful positioning to extract the three separate kernels. She cracked 18 nuts and Sartre ate 17 of them. Then she watched as he took up her hammer and tried to crack nuts. He succeeded in getting the first kernel out of a nut, and then replaced it “haphazardly” on the anvil. Salomé took the nut off the anvil, cleaned off the anvil, and carefully repositioned the nut. She watched as Sartre successfully cracked the nut further and got the second kernel.
Nina, a five-year-old, was trying to crack nuts with an irregularly shaped hammer. It wasn’t working, so she kept changing her position, her grip, and the position of the nut—still no success. After nearly 10 minutes, her mother, Ricci, got up from where she had been resting and came over. Nina gave her mother the hammer, and watched as Ricci very very slowly rotated the hammer into an effective position. She did this so deliberately that it took her a full minute, Boesch reports. As Nina watched, Ricci cracked 10 nuts. She gave Nina 6, and bits of the other 4. Then she left the hammer and anvil to Nina, who cracked 4 nuts in the next quarter of an hour, all the while holding the hammer exactly as her mother had, even when she changed positions. Ricci and Salomé are generally conceded to have been teaching their children, even in the strictest sense of the word.
Creating learning situations
The safety provided by an animal parent keeps children alive and also gives them time and confidence to learn. Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka write, “The presence of their parents allows young animals to explore their environment much more readily, since, by providing a protective and comforting atmosphere, the parents act as stress minimisers…. There is an obvious, and usually adaptive, association between emotions and learning in both animals and man.”
That young ravens learn what is safe by exploring the world in the presence of their parents became clear to Bernd Heinrich when he raised a family of four young ravens in the Maine woods. He took them on walks through the woods and made a point of touching many things. They touched and examined everything he touched, but they also investigated almost everything else they saw. By the time they were four months old, however, they were showing signs of neophobia—fear of the new. If they had seen an object, say a film canister, in the first four months of their lives, it didn’t worry them. But if it was a novelty, it was scary.
The sequence of the indulgent parent making the young work a little harder is common. In an Israeli olive orchard, great tits raised a family of chicks. When the chicks were newly hatched, the parents brought insects and put them in the babies’ mouths. When they were two weeks old, almost fully feathered, the parents would perch in the nest entrance and the babies would have to leap to get the insect. Soon the parents would perch in the entrance for a second, displaying the tantalizing food, and then fly away, encouraging the young birds to fly after them.
In the Kalahari, after bat-eared fox cubs have been weaned, their mother goes out hunting at night while their father stays with them. When they are a little older, he takes them out foraging. If the father catches a sunspider, a terrible-looking creature that bat-eared foxes consider edible, he gives a low whistle to call the cubs to his side. Then he releases the sunspider and the cubs try to catch it. If they bungle the task, he catches it again and lets it go again.
Modeling behavior
For some British red foxes, earthworms are a big food item. One evening David Macdonald witnessed the old vixen Toothypeg foraging with her son. Toothypeg walked silently back and forth, inspecting the damp grass with watchful eyes and cocked ears. When she detected a worm she’d stab her nose into the grass and grab it. Meanwhile her cub was dancing around in the grass, performing the classic “mouse leap,” in which a canid leaps high in the air and comes down with both forepaws on some savory rodent sneaking through the stems. This didn’t work. Worms slithered away between his toes, leaving him biting at the dirt.
The cub turned to see what his mother was doing. She had caught a worm that had its tail anchored in a burrow. Toothypeg was expert at pulling such worms loose, but this time she stretched the worm out and held it in place. She waited, and the cub took hold of it. He pulled too hard, and the worm broke in two, so he only got half. Toothypeg caught and held another, and let the cub take it. Again he snapped it. By this time the cub was deeply interested. Toothypeg caught a third worm, this one with most of its body anchored in its burrow. She stretched it, and tapped its taut body with a forepaw, gently teasing it out, and the cub—and Macdonald—watched in fascination. A worm-catching artist was at work. Slowly she eased the worm out of the soil, and let the cub have it. He began trying to catch worms using her quiet careful examination of the turf instead of his previous pouncing folly.
Two days later Macdonald saw them catching worms again. Toothypeg was catching four times as many worms as her son—but he was catching them. A month later he was as quick as his mother. (Which makes it all the luckier that Macdonald caught the brief, minutes-long tutorial performed by Toothypeg.)
Teaching beaching
Killer whales in the southern Indian Ocean, observed by researchers stationed on Possession Island in the Crozet Archipelago, taught their calves a diabolical, dangerous way of catching elephant seal pups. Elephant seals would be basking on the beach in apparent safety when a killer whale would come shooting out of the water, strand herself on the beach, grab a young seal, and let the next wave carry her back into the water.*
Christophe Guinet and Jérome Bouvier were watching a group of killer whales: A1, an adult male; A2, A3, and A6, adult females; and A4 and A5, female calves. A4 was A2’s child, and A5 was A3’s child, but the female A6 was also involved in the care of the calves. The calves A4 and A5 frequently beached themselves when no elephant seals were present. Occasionally they beached together. In 1988 young A4 beached herself and couldn’t get back into the water—observers returned the calf to the water (after taking advantage of the opportunity to measure her). Without their help, she would probably have died. Yet in ensuing weeks she continued to practice beaching. A4 mostly practiced stranding with female A6, not with her mother. Between the 1989 and 1990 field seasons A6 vanished, and in 1990 observers did not see A4 beaching herself at all. In 1991 A4 resumed her beaching practice, mostly with A3 rather than with her mother. That year A4 almost got
stuck on the beach again. She couldn’t seem to get back to the water. As she was struggling there, her mother, A2, swam away from the beach about 50 meters, then turned and accelerated toward the beach. When she was 5 meters away she wheeled suddenly, creating a large wave that lifted A4. Buoyed by the wave, A4 was able to turn around and swim back to deep water.
Meanwhile A5, a slightly younger calf, was accompanying her mother on attempts to actually get a seal while beaching. In 1991 she was videotaped in the act. A5 was swimming along the shore with her mother, A3, when they spotted an elephant seal pup on the beach near the water’s edge. They lined up side by side and shot onto the beach, where A5 snatched at the seal. Her mother, right behind her, gave her a push toward the seal, and A5 grabbed it by the side. The mother then used her head and the front end of her body to push A5 and the seal back into the ocean.
Between 1963 and 1995 observers on Possession Island found six hopelessly stranded killer whales, five juveniles and one adult. (I’m tempted to guess that the reason A4 did all her practicing with adults other than her mother was that her mother didn’t want to encourage A4 to do anything so dangerous, but I have no evidence.)
Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Page 36