Alex & Me - How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process

by Irene Pepperberg

  In the interim, another e-mail had arrived. In the subject line was a single word: “Sadness.” My blood turned to ice as I read the message. “I’m saddened to report that one of the parrots was found dead in the bottom of his cage this morning when Jose went to clean the room…not sure which?…in the back left corner of the room.” It was from K.C. Hayes, the chief veterinarian in the animal care facility at Brandeis.

  I was in raw panic. No…no…no! Back left corner of the room. That’s Alex’s cage! I was gasping for breath, trying to stave off rising terror. Maybe he’s mixing up his right and his left. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe it’s not Alex. It can’t be Alex! Even though I clung to that feeble hope as I snatched at the phone, I knew K.C. had not made a mistake. I knew Alex was dead. Even before I could dial, a second e-mail from K.C. chimed onto the screen. The message was simple. “I’m afraid it is Alex.”

  I reached K.C., barely able to speak through my tears and pain. He told me he had wrapped Alex in a piece of cloth and put him in the walk-in cooler, down the hall from the lab. I threw on jeans and a shirt and jumped in my car. I’ll never know how I managed to drive, given my state. I called Arlene, because I didn’t want her to walk into the lab unprepared. She was just driving into the parking lot down the hill from the lab when I reached her. “Alex is dead, Alex is dead,” I wailed. “But maybe, maybe they made a mistake. Maybe it isn’t Alex. Please go find out, Arlene.” What was I saying? I knew K.C. hadn’t made a mistake. I knew Alex was dead. But I said those words anyway, as if they might make untrue what I knew to be true.

  Poor Arlene. She was crying hysterically now, too. Eventually she said she’d go to the lab and find out what had happened. She ran up the slope and in through the side door to the facility. She got to the lab just moments after our friend and lab volunteer Betsy Lindsay had arrived. Betsy hadn’t even noticed anything amiss. Arlene saw immediately what she, too, had hoped against all reason she would not see: Griffin and Wart were in their cages, doors closed. The door to Alex’s cage was open slightly. The cage was empty.

  When I arrived in the lab almost an hour later, Arlene and I held each other and sobbed for quite some time. Wave after wave of pain and despair washed over us, a torrent of shared disbelief. “Alex can’t be dead,” Arlene whispered through her tears. “He was larger than life.”

  We knew that we had to take Alex to the vet for an autopsy, but neither of us could bring ourselves to go fetch him from the cooler. Betsy did that for us and put him in a small carrying case. We decided that Arlene was the more capable of the two of us to make the forty-minute drive. She had done it many times, when Alex or one of the other birds needed treatment or a checkup. This time would be different. This time we wouldn’t be bringing Alex back with us.

  Karen Holmes, one of the veterinarians at the practice, greeted us with hugs of sympathy. She led us to the mourning room, where we placed Alex, still wrapped, still in his carrier, next to us on the sofa. Arlene and I sat holding hands, crying, not saying much. Karen asked if I wanted to see Alex one last time, but I didn’t. Years ago I had seen my father-in-law in his casket. For a very long time I couldn’t dispel the image of him lying there, drained of life. I determined then never to look at death again, and I stuck to that determination, even when my mother died.

  I wanted to remember the Alex I’d put in the cage the previous night. Alex, full of life and mischief. Alex, who had been my friend and colleague for so many years. Alex, who had amazed the world of science, doing so many things he was not supposed to be able to do. Now he had died when he was not supposed to, two decades before the end of his expected life span. Damn you, Alex.

  I wanted to remember the Alex whose last words to me were, “You be good. I love you.”

  I stood, put my hand on the door, and whispered, “Goodbye, little friend.” I turned and walked out of the clinic.

  Chapter 9

  What Alex Taught Me

  Alex left us as a magician might exit the stage: a blinding flash, a cloud of smoke, and the weaver of wizardry is gone, leaving us awestruck at what we’d seen, and wondering what other secrets remained hidden. Alex’s sudden, unexpected departure left me in awe at his achievements and wondering what else he would have done had he stayed. He left at the height of his powers. To some what he did seemed magical, or at least otherworldly. Indeed, he had given us a glimpse of another world, one that had always existed but remained beyond our view: the world of animal minds. I barely had a voice when I was a child. Yet this powerful little feathered presence gave voice to a hidden world of nature. He was a great teacher to me and to us all.

  The greatest single practical lesson Alex taught me was patience. Ever since childhood I have been a determined kind of person. Whatever I wanted to do, I would pursue doggedly and see through to the finish. I embarked on The Alex Project in the early seventies with the same grit and idealism I always have, or rather had. I wonder if I might have had second thoughts about the venture had I known the multitude of practical obstacles and the anti-bird-brain prejudices I would face over the years. But I didn’t know, of course, and in any case I doubt that anything would have been capable of deflecting me, so convinced was I of an amazing world of animal cognition to be explored. But oh, what patience it took to get us to where we were when he died.

  Scientifically speaking, the single greatest lesson Alex taught me, taught all of us, is that animal minds are a great deal more like human minds than the vast majority of behavioral scientists believed—or, more importantly, were even prepared to concede might be remotely possible. Now, I am not saying that animals are miniature humans with somewhat lower-octane mental powers, although when Alex strutted around the lab and gave orders to all and sundry, he gave the appearance of being a feathery Napoleon. Yet animals are far more than the mindless automatons that mainstream science held them to be for so long. Alex taught us how little we know about animal minds and how much more there is to discover. This insight has profound implications, philosophically, sociologically, and practically. It affects our view of the species Homo sapiens and its place in nature.

  Exactly how scientists came to espouse ideas about animal minds that were so at odds with what nonscientists would call common sense is fascinating and instructive. It bears exploring, because it tells us a lot about ourselves as a species. Humans have always tried to make sense of their world and their place in it. Foraging people, living in close harmony with nature and her rhythms, see themselves as closely connected to other living things in their worlds. They see themselves as an integral part of the whole of nature. We see this expressed in the mythologies and folk tales of Australian Aborigines and Native Americans, for instance. The same would have been true for all populations of Homo sapiens through the six thousand generations after which our species arose, and until relatively recently in human history. When Western civilization began to take root with the Greeks, a very different way of thinking began to emerge.

  Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C.E., constructed a view of the natural world that is, in its essence, still with us. He ordered all living and nonliving things on a ladder of perceived importance based on mind. Humans were at the top, below the gods, a place earned by our great intellect. On lower and lower rungs were the lesser creatures, and finally the plants; lowest of all was the mineral world. The Judeo-Christian tradition enthusiastically adopted Aristotle’s blueprint, in which humans were given dominion over all living things and the earth. This description of nature came to be known as the Great Chain of Being. Humans were not only different from all other of God’s creatures, but also distinctly superior.

  Little changed when Darwin argued that we are the product of evolution rather than of God’s creation. The Great Chain of Being, a static ordering of life, merely morphed into a dynamic process of progressive evolution. Simple forms yielded more complex forms over evolutionary time, ultimately giving rise to humans as the pinnacle and goal. (Darwin did not put it this way, but anthropocentric others had
no trouble interpreting his theory in this fashion.) All other living things were for our exploitation. We still were different from and superior to the rest of nature, despite our connection to nature through our evolutionary heritage. Or so most scientists believed until not so very long ago. Vanity, thy name is Homo sapiens.

  Recognizing that Homo sapiens is connected to the rest of nature through evolution had hurt the human psyche. The belief that our intellect, and particularly spoken language, was unique in nature was a life vest for our damaged pride. It kept us afloat above lower creatures. As Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s champion, wrote in his 1872 book, Man’s Place in Nature: “No one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between…man and the brutes, for he alone possesses the marvelous endowment of intelligible and rational speech [and]…stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows.”

  This lofty sentiment changed little with the passage of a century. Norman Malcolm’s 1973 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association said essentially the same thing: “The relationship between language and thought must be…so close that it is really senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also really senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts.” Malcolm said this just a year before I decided to embark upon what would become The Alex Project—and after the Gardners had published their first paper on Washoe. But the equation was simple and, for many, conclusive: language is necessary for thought; animals don’t have language; therefore, animals don’t think. This also was the behaviorists’ gospel, a movement that began in the 1920s and was still dominant when I started working with Alex. Animals are automatons, responding mindlessly to stimuli, the behaviorists’ contended, exactly the same position posited by René Descartes three and a half centuries earlier.

  Little wonder, then, that passions ran so high at the Clever Hans conference I discussed earlier: people working with apes and dolphins were challenging cherished notions about supposed human uniqueness. Genuine methodological issues needed to be aired about the ape-language work. But the underlying drive of the conference had been a desire to protect the assumption of human primacy. That assumption had never really been tested.

  Nevertheless, the fortress of human uniqueness came under attack in the 1980s and began to crumble. We once thought only humans used tools; not so, as Jane Goodall discovered her chimps using sticks and leaves as tools. OK, only humans make tools; again not so, as Goodall and later others discovered. Only humans had language; yes, but elements of language had been discovered in nonhuman mammals. Each time nonhuman animals were found doing what was the supposed province of humans, defenders of the “humans are unique” doctrine moved the goalposts.

  Eventually, these defenders conceded that evolutionary roots of certain cherished human cognitive abilities could indeed be found in nonhuman animals, but only in large-brained mammals, particularly in apes. By doing the things he did, Alex taught us that this, too, was untrue. A nonprimate, nonmammal creature with a walnut-sized brain could learn elements of communication at least as well as chimps. This new channel of communication opened a window onto Alex’s mind, revealing to me and to all of us the sophisticated information processing—thinking—I described in earlier chapters.

  By implication, a vast world of animal cognition exists out there, not just in African Grey parrots but in other creatures, too. It is a world largely untapped by science. Clearly, animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know. That, essentially, was what Alex (and a growing number of research projects) taught us. He taught us that our vanity had blinded us to the true nature of minds, animal and human; that so much more is to be learned about animal minds than received doctrine allowed. No wonder Alex and I faced so much flak!

  We faced a flurry of goalpost moving, too. Birds can’t learn to label objects, they said. Alex did. OK, birds can’t learn to generalize. Alex did. All right, but they can’t learn concepts. Alex did. Well, they certainly can’t understand “same” versus “different.” Alex did. And on and on. Alex was teaching these skeptics about the extent of animal minds, but they were slow, reluctant learners.

  Science has to be rigorous in its methodology. I understand that. It’s why I worked so painstakingly over the years. It’s why I insisted that we test Alex through so many repetitive trials before we could say with statistical confidence that he did indeed have this or that cognitive ability. Poor bird. No wonder he’d sometimes get bored and refuse to cooperate, or play creative tricks on me. No wonder from time to time Alex pushed me to go beyond the task at hand. When he “spelled” “Nnn…uh…tuh” in exasperation that I had not given him a nut, he went beyond anything I had asked. When he got me to ask a question so he could answer “none,” he was applying that concept to a novel context.

  What did these and other things that Alex had done teach me? To believe that Alex had a degree of consciousness that even less radical behaviorists would flatly deny. Can I prove it, the way I proved Alex could label objects and learn concepts? No, I can’t. Although language is no longer widely held to be a prerequisite for thinking—I often think visually, for instance, as many people do, and nonhuman animals might do this, too—language is necessary to prove another individual is conscious. Language allows us to explore the workings of another individual’s mind as nothing else can. If I could have asked Alex, “Why did you chew up that grant application back at Purdue?” or “What were you thinking when you chewed up the slides in my desk at Northwestern?” and had him reply, “Oh, I was just having fun,” or “I knew it would get your goat,” then I’d have glimpsed his consciousness. But Alex didn’t have the use of language the way you and I do. So I can’t prove he had a degree of consciousness. But the way he behaved surely was suggestive.

  Alex taught me to believe that his little bird brain was conscious in some manner, that is, capable of intention. By extrapolation, Alex taught me that we live in a world populated by thinking, conscious creatures. Not human thinking. Not human consciousness. But not mindless automatons sleepwalking through their lives, either.

  Some people take this new understanding of animal minds as an argument for treating animals as if they had the same rights we give to ourselves. That is as wrong as the behaviorists’ restrictive gospel. Parrots and other pets are not little humans. They are their own beings. Do they deserve to be treated with care and kindness? Of course. As an intelligent flock animal, Greys need a lot of companionship, and it would be cruel to adopt one as a pet only to leave it alone all day. But that doesn’t mean Greys or other animals have wide-ranging political rights.

  The most profound lesson that Alex taught us concerns the place of Homo sapiens in nature. The revolution in animal cognition of which Alex was an important part teaches us that humans are not unique, as we long believed. We are not superior to all other beings in nature. The idea of humans’ separateness from the rest of nature is no longer tenable. Alex taught us that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature. The “separateness” notion was a dangerous illusion that gave us permission to exploit every aspect of the natural world—animal, plant, mineral—without consequences. We are now facing those consequences: poverty, starvation, and climate change, for example.

  My ecologist friends are more aware than most scientists of the interconnectedness of living things in the world, and their dependence on the nonliving realm. But even this awareness is relatively new in appreciating the complexity of animal and plant communities, locally, regionally, and globally. For much of the twentieth century, all sciences, including biology, were obsessed with reductionism: viewing the world at all levels, from the smallest to the largest, as merely a machine made of parts. Take the machine apart, examine the individual pieces, and we would understand how the world works.

  Reductionism has had many triumphs in understanding the nature of the parts and how some parts fit together. It enabled us to build computers and devise powerful medic
ines, for example. But some scientists admit that reductionism falls short of its ultimate goal: understanding how the world works. It falls short because it fails to recognize the connectedness, the unity, that is the deep essence of nature in all realms. Not in the sense of physicists seeking the ultimate fundamental particle or the theory of everything. There is a oneness in nature in the sense of interdependence.

  My scientifically literate, nonscientist friends get this idea instantly and intuitively. It “feels right,” if you will. Deb Rivel, a friend and The Alex Foundation board member, put it this way: “Alex taught me the meaning of oneness. What I learned from him also supported what I always have known to be true: that there is just one Creation, one Nature, one good, full, complete Idea, made up of individuals of all shapes and designs, all expressing their oneness with one God. We are not different because we look different, but we all reflect the eternal beauty and intelligence of one Creation in our own peculiar way. It’s what makes up the whole—this textured fabric of thought and existence—and knowing Alex has underscored to me how much the same we really are.”

  Deb expresses beautifully what people who believe in a God say they learned from Alex. I personally am not much interested in organized religion. But I strongly believe in the oneness and beauty of the world that Alex taught Deb and taught me. My philosophy of life is based in an appreciation of the holistic nature of the world, seeds of which were planted in my childhood, put there by No-Name and the love of nature to which that bird led me. My “religion” is therefore much more akin to the Native American lore of being and belonging, of equality with and responsibility for nature. Who knows what other amazing things we might have seen through our window onto Alex’s mind had he stayed? In any case, he did leave me this great gift of what was once known and embraced but was lost: the oneness of nature and our part in it.