It’s bad enough that practically every time you say, “This is something that only the great apes can do,” you are forced to add, “And Alex, the grey parrot. And dolphins.” To have to add, “And certain species of octopus,” “Also, hyenas,” “Bats, too,” “Plus, the cleaner wrasse” really detracts from the effect.
But if you believe the people who know them best, almost every animal is smarter than we knew. You learn something every day.
The relation between learning and intelligence is intimate. Both modular and generalized intelligence make it easier for animals to learn things, and make animals more likely to show insight. Yet learning is so vital to survival that even the dullest creatures learn a little. Every baby animal, from insect to ape, gathers information, perfects its skills, and goes forth into the world.
Conclusion:
Secrets of a Tiger’s Success
BABY ANIMALS HAVE A LOT TO LEARN in order to survive and flourish. Even animals of comparatively feeble intellect, who rely most heavily on a suite of instincts, usually must learn the details of where they live and who their family is and whether there’s anything left worth eating around here.
That tigers have serious learning to do is suggested by the fact that cubs stay with their mothers for more than two years. To begin with, the cub learns who its mother is, who its siblings are, and, when it is older, which other tigers its mother is friendly or unfriendly with. It learns to walk and climb trees. Playing with other cubs and with its mother, the young tiger practices the innate behavior patterns of stalking and pouncing, which give it joy, and learns how far it can jump, what are the most gratifying places to grab an opponent, and how hard it can bite before it makes another tiger angry. The cub also learns how tough it is and how big in comparison to the other cubs in the litter. In the time spent with its family, the tiger cub learns that it is a tiger, information that will be relevant when it wants to mate. The tiger Victoria, raised as the only child of the dog Rosemary, apparently missed this lesson when she was young enough to learn it.
In the world the cub encounters situations where it learns by conditioning and association, although if it is lucky it won’t have the learning situation of being hit by a car, like the cattle-killing tiger of Trengganu. Like other cats, it will probably learn some actions by imitating its mother. Although tigers don’t need to learn what to say, they probably learn the alarm calls of other species (who are mostly alarmed because there’s a tiger in the neighborhood).
For a long time, the tiger cub works very hard at learning to catch prey. Even a zoo tiger learns that turkeys will fly over the fence, whereas ducklings won’t. Some wild tigers learn about prey specialties such as horses, bears, or dogs. They learn that they don’t really want to eat a civet cat or a crocodile. Like Tara, they may learn that otters are little, but they’ll gang up on you.
Most tigers associate humans with danger. The tigers of Ranthambhore apparently learned too well that humans in jeeps are harmless types who just gape and take pictures, leaving them vulnerable to poachers. And some of the tigers of the Sundarbans have learned that humans are edible.
Predation is the area where tigers are at their best intellectually. Here is where we should look for tiger insight, forethought, and innovation. Clever tigers are not interested in the principle of the lever, they are interested (like Genghis, the tiger who hunted in water) in ingenious new ways to separate a deer from the herd. How to get close to a blesbok without being spotted and how to prevent a warthog from taking refuge in its burrow are the issues that preoccupy the tiger students Ron and Julie.
If you created an intelligence test for a tiger, it would be only fair to include sections devoted to stalking, pouncing, and killing, where the tiger would shine. It would probably not do as well on sections devoted to dragging prey. The tigers described by Locke, who kept trying to pull their prey in one direction without heeding the fact that its horns might be caught on a tree, were trying to solve the difficulty with brute force—pulling harder. But the solution to pigs taking refuge in a burrow is not to run faster, but to cut off the pigs’ retreat. The second problem brings out more learning ability than the first.
We really don’t know to what extent there may be a tiger culture, a social environment for learning. Although tigers are not profoundly social, mothers and cubs stay together for years, and after that may meet from time to time. Wild tigers spend more time associating with each other at kills than had been previously understood, which requires a certain amount of diplomacy. That male tigers, not famed for chivalry, shared kills with the hand-raised Tara, even when she was not in heat, was somewhat unexpected. Whether tigers learn from unrelated tigers, except in the important area of romance, is unknown. Tiger mating is a touchy situation for two touchy individuals, but they usually figure it out.
What I learned about learning
All animals, including us, evolve in response to change. But evolution is slow, takes place over generations, and is a response of the species. Learning is fast, and is the response of individuals. Culture, which creates an environment for learning, speeds it up.
We have evolved to learn from the world. Learning from the lecture, the blackboard, or the study materials is harder for us, and it’s harder for other animals too. Animals do teach, but active teaching (as distinct from opportunity teaching, coaching, and apprenticeship) is rare because that’s not the way most learning happens.
Looking at the stories of animals learning—and not learning, which can be even more illuminating—I was struck by the way learning interlocks with animal feelings and personalities. Rivalry, shyness, impatience, the desire for freedom and control can be as influential in the learning process as simple brainpower.
Examples include the observations that birds learn song better if they get to push the buttons. Parrots learn better if they can watch the competition, and apes learn more from watching someone else being taught than they do from being taught themselves. Animals prefer to try hard new things when no one is watching, whispering and mumbling the language skills they are mastering. You should learn language as young as possible; it may be more important to learn to interpret the communications of others (such as alarm calls) than to learn to make communications yourself; and most animals aren’t nearly as interested in communicating with us as they are with each other. When they do want to communicate, it’s usually not about the curriculum we had in mind.
A shocking revelation: being tested is boring, and boring things are harder to learn. (Is it true that the smartest kids get bored the quickest?)
Animals are more apt to imitate a creature they perceive as being like themselves than some stranger. Whether you are a cowbird or a chimpanzee, it messes you up to be raised in isolation. And raising kids is hard, but you get better at it.
Some skills or intelligences are only good for one thing and some carry over to many things. Learning to do something may or may not mean understanding what you’re doing, as witness the prelearning dip seen in, for example, chickens, bees, and dogs. You can learn about how learning works and get better at it. As Christophe Boesch has pointed out, the richer the environment you give a captive animal, the smarter it turns out to be.
Learning comes with costs. There’s the cost of running the brain, and there’s also the cost of making mistakes. It’s an adaptation of incredible power. Our extreme ability to learn has made us ridiculously successful as a species, and we share learning with other animals.
To learn is to change. Learning allows an animal child to finish the long, slow process of evolution by changing in its own lifetime. Tiger cubs, eaglets, or babies, nature brings us all into existence with the ability to learn, and the rest is up to us.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE: HOW TO DO OR KNOW SOMETHING NEW
birds are alike. Morton 2002.
open programs. Mayr 1974.
of birdsong. Nicolai 1986.
in the genome. Immelmann 1975.
or another drum.�
�� Kummer cited in de Waal 2001.
different habits. Dilger 1962.
correlation-learning device. Cited in Byrne 1995.
in the tank. von Frisch 1938.
isoamyl acetate. Dukas 1998.
problem tigers. Locke 1954.
Sonja Yoerg Yoerg is an admirably clear writer who gets off some very funny lines in her book Clever as a Fox, which compels me to forgive her silliness in refuting what she says my erstwhile coauthor and I “would inevitably suggest” had we discussed her research.
Skinner boxes. Yoerg 2001.
were universal.” Pepperberg 1999.
performing animals. Breland & Breland 1961.
to do tricks. Pryor 1975.
people do this. Keith-Lucas & Guttman 1975.
latent learning. Walker 1987; Gould & Gould 1999.
suddenly understood. Pryor 1999; the hula-ing chicken is in Pryor 1975.
in honeybees. James L. Gould, “Can Honey Bees Create Cognitive Maps?” pp. 41–45 in Bekoff et al. 2002.
good at it. Beck 1980.
mussels on sand. Burger 2001.
trial and error.” de Waal 2001.
looks like playing. Ashmole & Tovar S. 1968.
peck at it. Hess 1956.
chicken droppings. Burton 1956.
Kathleen Gibson. Hilary O. Box & Kathleen R. Gibson, “New Perspectives in Studies of Social Learning: Editors’ Comments,” pp. 1–5 in Box & Gibson 1999.
with their mothers. Phyllis C. Lee & Cynthia J. Moss, “The Social Context for Learning and Behavioural Development among Wild African Elephants,” pp. 102–125 in Box & Gibson 1999.
her London home. Kipps 1953.
lever was pushed.) Anthouard 1987.
an Egyptian goose. Krüger 2001.
stimulus enhancement. Sherry & Galef 1984, 1990.
also took it up. Summers-Smith 1963.
writes Richard Byrne. Byrne 1995.
a culture instinct.’ Gopnik et al. 1999.
monkeys and apes.” de Waal 2001.
case of Okíchoro. Bruce R Moore, “The Evolution of Imitative Learning,” pp. 245–265 in Heyes & Galef 1996.
in all the books. Quoted in Zuk 2002.
food) by observation. John et al. 1968.
good at imitating. Pryor 1999.
their own bill. Dawson & Foss 1965.
South American monkeys. Voelkl & Huber 2000.
in the same tank. Tayler & Saayman 1973.
trainers were present. Morton 2002.
breeding red pandas. Greta McMillan, personal communication.
for the first time. Weigl & Hanson 1980.
that actually worked. Michael Tomasello, “Cultural Transmission in the Tool Use and Communicatory Signaling of Chimpanzees?” pp. 274–311 in Parker & Gibson 1990.
started the car. H. Lyn White Miles, “ME CHANTEK: The Development of Self-Awareness in a Signing Orangutan,” pp. 254–272 in Parker et al. 1994; Temerlin 1975; Hayes 1951.
as a shawl. Prince-Hughes 2001; Dawn Prince-Hughes, personal communication.
Camp Leakey. Russon 2000.
rod on the box. Cited in Robert W. Shumaker and Karyl B. Swartz, “When Traditional Methodologies Fail: Cognitive Studies of Great Apes,” pp. 335–343 in Bekoff et al. 2002.
at the National Zoo. Ibid.
puppies were bred. Slabbert & Rasa 1997.
28 of them did. Hosey et al. 1997.
learned to do it. Elisabetta Visalberghi and Dorothy Munkenbeck Fragaszy, “Do Monkeys Ape?,” pp. 247–283 in Parker & Gibson 1990; Kummer 1995.
to get it.” Pongrácz et al. 2001.
a fascinating box. Huber et al. 2001.
many entertaining things. Pryor et al. 1969; Pryor 1975.
deal of English. Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1998.
CHAPTER TWO: LEARNING THE BASICS
chaparral below. Snyder & Snyder 2000.
coordinated fashion. Wilson & Kleiman 1974.
is coming from. Knudsen & Knudsen 1985.
water looks like. Paul Rozin, “The Selection of Foods by Rats, Humans, and Other Animals,” pp. 21–76 in Rosenblatt et al. 1976.
her first snow. Wayre 1976.
learn about ice. Henry 1986.
a baby orangutan. Laidler 1980.
hand coordination. Francesco Antinucci, “The Comparative Study of Cognitive Ontogeny in Four Primate Species,” pp. 157–171 in Parker & Gibson 1990.
shortly after birth. Sarah McCarthy, personal communication.
walk at the same age. Gould & Gould 1999.
they move off. Rijt-Plooij & Plooij 1987.
short distance away. Maestripieri 1995.
look for her. Rijt-Plooij & Plooij 1987.
about eight months old.” Temerlin 1975.
he was eight months old. Laidler 1980.
told what to do. Grunwald 1995.
trees at 13 weeks. Kilham & Gray 2002.
ears, and eyes. Baldwin & Baldwin 1978.
assigning themselves “projects.” Fagen 1981.
in a mimosa tree. Temerlin 1975.
a poor showing. Carter 1981; Linden 1986.
next tree over. Galdikas cited in Fagen 1981.
stepping off neatly.” Russon 2000.
different distances. Kim A. Bard, “‘Social Tool Use’ by Free-Ranging Orangutan: A Piagetian and Developmental Perspective on the Manipulation of an Animate Object,” pp. 356–378 in Parker & Gibson 1990.
requires self-conception. Povinelli & Cant 1995.
climb down again. Pryor 1999.
attempt to fly. Corbo & Barras 1983.
broke its neck. Lorenz 1978.
on the ground. Miller 1894.
his first flight. Pittman 2003.
plummy English accent. Hancock 1977.
Becoming a Tiger: The Education of an Animal Child Page 42