Killer whales also catch elephant seals by the beaching technique in Argentina, on the coast of Patagonia. Diana and Juan Carlos Lopez saw an adult male stranding side by side with a juvenile. The adult would grab a seal and fling it over to the juvenile.
Ornithologists watching royal terns in a wintering area in coastal Peru were surprised to see adults calling to young birds, leading them away from the flock and giving them fish. Sometimes the adult would, in an instructive manner, drop a fish for the young bird to catch or at least pick up off the water. The young terns sometimes follow their parents, uttering “the squeaky begging call.” These are not tiny fuzzy chicks. By the time they get to Peru at seven months old, they have migrated 3,000 miles from their breeding grounds. They can still use a little help.
In 1954, in the ornithological journal The Ibis, Col. Richard Meinertzhagen gave an account along similar lines, but with more detail, of osprey school. Osprey are handsome fish-eating raptors, and in the family Meinertzhagen observed, the parents were ready to stop bringing fish to their no longer helpless chicks. The two babies were ready to fledge, and the adults brought fish and perched nearby, while the kids screamed that they were starving. The adults repeatedly flew off with a fish in their talons, as if hoping the frantic children would follow. At first the fledglings stayed in the nest, but the next day they ventured to a nearby rock in the lake, and the parents fed them there. After another day or two, the parents were able to lead the young birds flying over the lake. A parent caught a fish, flew toward a fledgling with it, and then dropped it in midair. Each time the parent swooped down and snagged the fish before it hit the water. They did this many times, until one of the fledglings grabbed a dropped fish in the air and took it to the rock to eat. The other fledglings came over and they quarreled until “an infuriated parent” came over and shoved one of the kids off the rock. (We are told that the one who got to keep the fish was the one who caught it. I hope so, because otherwise it wouldn’t be fair.) The parents went back to dropping and catching fish until the second fledgling got one.
The next day the parents dropped fish into the water and retrieved them, over and over, until the hungry young birds started grabbing the floating fish. By the next day, they were diving for living fish.*
Classroom time
In a more scholastic setting, a bird was noted modifying his behavior in an instructive way. When teaching young gray parrots using the model-rival method, one of the participants was the older and more skilled parrot Alex. Psychologist Irene Pepperberg noticed that during such sessions, Alex spoke with unusual clarity and would say the word being taught repeatedly, with admirable diction, which was not, apparently, his usual habit. “The intentionality of the behavior, however, cannot be proved,” cautions Pepperberg, and she is right, for although it seems probable to me that Alex was speaking slowly and clearly to help the younger birds understand, it might also be that he was doing it to drive Pepperberg crazy.
Training
People have used the learning abilities of animals to teach them or train them to do all sorts of things. As many early attempts to teach animals elements of language showed, we don’t always go about it in the best way. Drilling and artificial reward structures often don’t work. Animal students hate rote teaching just as human students do, and if Koko, the famous signing gorilla, is made to practice a sign after she has lost interest, “she becomes restless, moody, and intransigent. Often she’ll walk away.” She also gives deliberately silly replies. When Koko was joined by the gorilla Michael, she tried to teach him signs by molding his hands into the proper shapes, as hers had been molded, but Michael wouldn’t allow it.
Dogs
Dogs are taught to do all kinds of things. They are trained to sniff things out, including drugs, termites, people who are lost or hiding, snakes, bodies, explosives, missing pets, truffles, land mines, and contraband shellfish. One dog was inadvertently trained to sniff out plastic bags like the ones the police department stored drug samples in. Dogs are trained to herd sheep, cattle, and geese.* In one fish hatchery, they are trained to jump in the water and herd trout into a net. They menace malefactors, rescue drowning people, and pull sleds. As service dogs they guide blind people, alert deaf people to sounds such as telephones and smoke alarms, and let epileptic people know when a seizure is coming, as well as fetching things, hitting switches, and carrying things. All these training regimens involve refining and channeling natural dog behavior patterns so that their innate tendencies are modified by learning.
Learn to herd
Dog that herd animals are using instincts that were originally selected for because they’re useful in hunting. This is why sheep often get the horrors when they’re herded: the behavior of the sheepdogs makes them think a murderer is stalking them. But instead of cutting off the path of a fleeing animal and ripping its throat out, the herding dog cuts off the path of the fleeing animal and sends it racing back to the herd.
I once watched a pet border collie, who had never seen a sheep, taken to a sheepdog training arena. The dog, whom I’ll call Fido, glanced into the corral and saw some sheep. Then she looked at her owner and wagged her tail. The sheep shifted nervously and Fido licked her owner’s hand. She picked up a stick and brought it to her owner. “Look at the sheep, Fido!” said her owner, and Fido gazed fondly at her owner’s face. She lay down and chewed on something dubious.
The trainer went into the pen and the sheep fled. Fido showed no interest. The trainer gave her own highly trained collie a few commands, and the dog sent the sheep hurtling around the pen, selected one, and penned it in a corner. Fido was electrified. She stared. She shook with excitement. She suddenly knew what she was born to do.
After a while they took Fido into the pen. All she knew was that she wanted to chase sheep, but it was clear that she had the instincts to perform more sophisticated maneuvers. She knew, for example, how to give the sheep the eye, a dreadful where-shall-I-bite-them-first stare that chills sheep to the marrow. Her owner had merely been idly curious about whether her border collie had the right stuff. Now she had a prodigy on her hands.
Heard what? Heard whom?
Under the auspices, in part, of the Office of Naval Research, researchers trained a bottlenose dolphin to attack and herd sharks on command. (You can see what they were thinking: “Sharks! Flipper, help me!”) First the dolphin was trained to head-butt small dead sharks around the gills. Then big dead sharks. Then they opened a flume between the dolphin tank and a shark tank and let in a small live sandbar shark. The dolphin hesitated but then, on command, butted the shark, chased the shark, and herded the shark back into the flume.
Good! Then they let a small bull shark into the tank and the dolphin got upset and started barking and chirping and echolocating like a fiend and refusing to respond to commands. Bull sharks have been known to eat dolphins. They had to take the shark out and go back to training with dead sharks and then a living sandbar shark before they had the dolphin responding properly again. Then they let in another bull shark, and the dolphin got worked up again, following the shark, carrying on like crazy, but refusing to attack.
They tried the dolphin with nurse sharks and lemon sharks. In each case the dolphin pursued the shark and made “soft contact” with it. This sounds rather like a dolphin that has learned that if you agree to attack a little dead shark, they will ask you to attack a big dead shark. And if you agree to attack dead sharks, they will ask you to attack living sharks. And if you agree to attack timid living sharks, they will ask you to attack scary living sharks. You have to draw the line somewhere or you’ll find yourself wrestling gators on a daily basis.
You’ll thank me one day. No, I wasn’t talking to you, Mickey
Of orphaned owls raised by wildlife rehabilitators, Kay McKeever writes, “The gravest consequence of separation from natural parents is the loss of the whole period of gradually acquired experience in what to look for, where to look for it, and how to catch it and kill it.” The job of t
he parents is to keep the young owl fed while it is learning, “usually pretty clumsily,” to do these things. McKeever, having raised young owls on a diet of dead white mice, begins by putting the mice in different parts of the flight cage so the owl has to search for them. Then she gives the owls live white mice. “Astonishment, instinctive excitement, and fear will probably be the reactions from the owls.” The mice, who don’t know about owls, scamper freely, and it can take so long for an owl to make its first attempt on a mouse that McKeever says rehabilitators may need to put out food and water—for the mice. But as soon as the owl makes its first lunge, the mice, quick learners, go to cover. As the owls get hungrier, and think about how delicious mice are, and glimpse mice dashing for shelter, they listen to the mice rustling in the leaves on the bottom of the cage, and begin to associate the sound with the visual images they already have of mice, McKeever writes.
“Once the full implication is familiar—usually pretty fast—the owl does not wait for sight of prey but begins plunging into the leaf litter at every slightest sound.” Now that the owls are learning to listen as well as look for mice, the rehabilitator can switch from white to dark mice and put them in the cage at night. The sign of success is “the appearance of decapitated dark mice stored in nooks and crevices around the cage,” McKeever says, and getting to this point can take four weeks. Exactly how well this procedure prepares owls for hunting in the wild isn’t known, but bands have been recovered years later from owls who were rehabbed this way.
Training as communication
For bioacoustical research, Diana Reiss was training a dolphin called Circe, using conditioning techniques. Circe was rewarded with bits of fish, which Reiss made by cutting fish into three sections, a head, a middle, and a tail. Circe kept spitting out the tail sections, but Reiss noticed that if she cut the fins off the tail section, Circe ate them.
The negative reinforcement, or punishment, was a time-out. Since Circe liked training sessions and interacting with people, any time the dolphin misbehaved, Reiss would step back from the pool and wait for a minute, just looking at Circe. This was very effective.
One day Reiss tossed Circe a piece of fish. It was a tail, and Reiss had forgotten to cut the fins off. Circe spat it out, swam to the other end of the pool, and looked at Reiss. “After a few seconds, I got the strong feeling that she was giving me a time-out.” Several days later, Reiss experimentally slipped another untrimmed tail section into the routine, and Circe promptly gave her a time-out. Not only had Circe learned the tasks Reiss was training her to do, and the signals that Reiss used, she had made one of the signals her own. The next step really ought to have been to rig up a device with which Circe could reward Reiss with chocolate or grapes so that we could find out what Circe would have trained Reiss to do. Surely with the right behavioral tools, Circe could have trained her tasks beyond “Cut the fins off, dummy.”
Not that old trick again!
Clarence, a house sparrow hand-reared by Clare Kipps, had a repertoire of tricks he did on request. During the London blitz, when he was young, Clarence was in demand as a performer at children’s wards, rest centers, posts, and private homes “where there were nervous people.” With Kipps as his foil, he played tug-of-war, selected cards from a deck, and twirled a card in his beak.* As his smash finale, Kipps cupped her hands, and when she called “Siren’s gone!”—the signal to take refuge in a bomb shelter—he hid in her hands. After a moment he peeked out, “as if enquiring if the All-Clear had yet sounded,” which always brought down the house. When the war ended, Clarence gave up show business. Years later, when Clarence reached the venerable age of 12, he had a stroke, which Kipps nursed him through. Realizing that she had no record of his stage career, she arranged for two photographers to document his act. Although he had not practiced his routine in six years, he remembered it perfectly.
Trained mothers
As in the case of Dolly, great apes raised by humans may not show mothering skills. In 1991 at the National Zoo, the first infant gorilla in many years was born to Mandara. Zoo staff were worried about how Mandara, who was only seven, would react to the baby, but she handled him perfectly. Almost a year later Holoko had a baby, her fourth. At the zoo where she had lived before, she had had a stillbirth and two other babies, which she ignored and which were raised by humans. Staffers hoped she would do better this time. But the first time they saw Holoko’s baby, it was in Mandara’s arms along with 11-month-old Kejana. Holoko was not interested.
Mandara cared for both infants perfectly, but after a few weeks she started weaning Kejana. Kejana perhaps did not agree that he was getting the care he was entitled to. After a few months he decided that Holoko should fill the gap and pursued her relentlessly until she began acting as his mother. Unlike a newborn, he could follow Holoko and climb into her arms, and she must have seen that it was useless to resist.
Parenting classes
Zookeepers at Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, were concerned when one of their young gorillas, Mouila, became pregnant. (As a birth control measure, they had separated the females from the dominant male, Balu, but apparently the younger male, Bongo, was more capable than they realized.) “As we considered that Mouila had come into captivity too young to have learnt the techniques of infant care…we felt some teaching was necessary.” They scheduled viewings of humans cuddling a young black spider monkey. Every few days, Mouila spent 20 minutes with a zookeeper and the baby monkey. She was allowed to touch and sniff the baby. At the first session Mouila looked interested but stayed several meters away. At the next session she drew quite close until the baby “gave a little scream,” and she hurried away. In subsequent sessions, she showed more interest, touching the baby gently. She no longer rushed off if the baby made noise. By the tenth session, she was hinting that she wanted to hold the baby, but that wasn’t allowed, in case she refused to give it back. The zookeepers felt that Mouila was becoming “familiar with a living small creature, a ‘sound-producing, moving, brittle thing.’”
Concerned that Mouila might not know how to nurse her infant, the zoo enlisted two nursing mothers to demonstrate (on the other side of a fence). The mothers made sure Mouila saw the sequence of a baby crying and then being soothed by nursing. “Mouila showed satisfying interest.” When Mouila’s baby was born, she handled it with affection and confidence and suckled it competently, moving the little gorilla into the right position.
I call her Aunt Gigi, but she’s not really my aunt
Extreme ignorance resulting in terrible maternal technique is often seen in captive animals of species that do a lot of learning, but is unexpected in the wild. Jane Goodall was surprised to witness the dreadful mothering of Patti, an ape in the Kasekala troop. Patti had transferred into the group, and her own childhood’s story isn’t known. “We know from studies of wild Japanese monkeys that females who lost their mothers during infancy, but survived, have turned out to be abusive mothers. Their own first-born infants have a much higher percentage of deaths than do infants born to females who did not lose their mothers while they were young. I suspect Patti may have been an orphan,” Goodall wrote.
Patti was so slapdash and unfeeling that her first baby was dead within a week. She ignored him when he cried and carried him by one leg so that his head bumped the ground. Tapit was her second, and she did not carry him by one leg, although she often carried him back-to-front. If he was climbing near her and she wanted to move on, instead of gently drawing him toward her like the other mothers, she’d grab an arm or leg and jerk, causing Tapit to clutch the tree and scream. She’d jerk him loose, slap him on her abdomen, in all likelihood backward, and trundle off with Tapit screaming his head off. If he got lost and started to weep and then shriek, Patti would sit and watch, making no move to get him or let him know where she was. Once she left him alone and screaming in the forest. Goodall was following the chimpanzee Melissa and her daughter Gremlin when they heard the screams. Gremlin carried Tapit until they found Patti.
&nb
sp; Luckily for Tapit, a childless female, Gigi, took a loving interest in him. She went everywhere with Patti and Tapit until he was four, and he spent half his time, or more, with Gigi. She was also there when Patti had her third child. But by this time Patti knew her stuff and she was a fond, skillful, attentive mother.
Animal children learn about life, and if they survive, they may become animal parents. Aided by instinctive hints, they learn to be better parents. They may even learn to help their children learn.
TEN
What Learning Tells Us About Intelligence
The crows of New Caledonia are inveterate tool users who make hooks and rakes to extract uncooperative insect larvae from cracks and dead wood. Two New Caledonian crows in an Oxford laboratory, Abel and Betty, were being tested to see if they could pick the right tool for the job. The task was to get a little bucket with meat in it out of a tall upright pipe that was fixed in place. The pipe was so tall and the bucket so small that the crows couldn’t reach it with their beaks. They were offered two pieces of wire, one straight and one with a hook, to see if they had the sense to use the one with the hook.
Both Abel and Betty apparently understood that the hooked wire was better for the purpose. In fact, the fifth time around, when Betty selected the hooked wire, Abel stole it from her for his own use. Undaunted, Betty took the straight wire and bent a hook in it.
The impressed researchers changed the experiment in response to this unexpected result. They gave the crows only straight wire. Betty tried to get the food with the straight wire and, when that didn’t work, she bent it into a more useful shape. She did this either by wedging one end of the wire in the tape the experimenters used to fasten various things in place or, if there was no tape, by holding one end down with her feet, and then bending it with her beak. Then she fished the bucket of meat out of the pipe with the bent wire, and Abel promptly stole meat from her. (Why didn’t they test Abel and Betty separately? They don’t like to be apart and are “less motivated to participate in experiments” when separated. Oh, Betty.)
Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Page 37