The Bond

by Wayne Pacelle

  The scientists’ belief in evolution did not solve this faulty perception. They had little difficulty adapting evolutionary theory to fit their worldview, placing animals in some sort of behaviorist straitjacket. In their view, natural selection programmed animals to gather food, reproduce, promote the survival of their offspring, and, in the end, to pass on their genes. Animals were locked in an unyielding and competitive struggle for survival. All of their energy was devoted to achieving reproductive success, and all of their behavior could be understood according to this single, blind, all-explaining force.

  In this view, animals in the wild, or in your own house, never play just for the fun of it; if play occurs, it’s always about honing predatory skills or other training for survival. Animals never feel concern or alarm for us or for another creature; any act of assistance to humans or to other animals must have had a survival benefit for the social group or the herd. And reproduction is, well, about reproduction only; whether the animals exhibit monogamy, polygamy, or polygyny, it is, in a word, workmanlike—mechanical copulation to make sure the genes were passed on to succeeding generations.

  Descartes viewed animals as machines, and though behaviorists rejected his formulations, they held the view that animals were machines of a different sort—biological machines, shaped by natural selection, and operating through instinct alone.

  We know as human beings that there is more to life than reproduction. That instinct to reproduce is certainly a strong biological impulse. But not all of our behavior is a run-up to sexual reproduction or the raising of offspring. We like to do all kinds of things that have no particular reproductive purpose or advantage, like playing, laughing, or just lying around. There may be some evolutionary explanation for such behaviors, or maybe it’s just that we like to do these things. They’re enjoyable, and no grand scientific theories are needed to explain why.

  And that’s one of the flaws in the reductionist thinking of the behaviorists, whether it’s applied to human action or to all the things that animals do. Animals also like to have fun and enjoy life. When a dog sticks his head out of the car window, he’s having a great time. When cats are swatting at each other, they are playful. And as baby calves scamper and chase each other, it is part of the fun in their lives. Animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe, who has challenged the views of his more conventional peers, says that too many scientists treat nature like a “constant, joyless struggle,” bereft of happiness, or even an idle moment.

  There are theories and even entire books that try to explain all of canine behavior as an elaborate evolutionary strategy to get food and shelter from us, as if dogs were just clever parasites on the earth’s dominant species. What we see as love and loyalty in dogs, the behaviorists insist is all just an evolutionary game playing out in our homes—and boy, have they put one over on us.

  Darwin’s observations about animal emotions and thought got the science of animal behavior off to a great start. But because many of the same animal scientists who accepted his doctrine of evolution also ignored his views on animal minds, it would fall to later researchers to reawaken the field of study. In the 1950s, the famed zoologist Konrad Lorenz provided a counterweight to the dominant school of behaviorism, arguing that animals were conscious and emotional. But it took the growth of the new field of cognitive ethology in the 1970s to begin to dismantle in a more comprehensive way the falsehoods left by Skinner and others.

  In 1976, Harvard zoologist Donald Griffin provided a jolt to the discipline with The Question of Animal Awareness, in which he argued that animals had conscious minds much like humans. Griffin was an innovative scientist; as an undergraduate in the 1930s, he had strung guitar strings across his dorm room and noticed that bats still navigated effortlessly through them in the dark—a finding that led to the discovery of echolocation.

  For most of his career Griffin had belonged to the orthodox behaviorist school, and he rightly earned the respect of his peers as a rigorous scientist. But starting in the 1970s, he pioneered new techniques to study animals in their natural habitats, demonstrating that animals do not operate merely by instinct. “Nature,” Griffin wrote, “might find it more efficient to endow life-forms with a bit of awareness rather than attempting to hardwire every animal for every conceivable eventuality.” Griffin argued that intelligence itself began as an adaptive characteristic. Animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff told me that when Griffin first began discussing animal intelligence at conferences, the idea was so rattling that people thought he had lost his mind.

  Thanks in large part to Griffin, the discipline has seen great change for the better in the last three decades. Gone are the days when talking about the emotional lives of animals will get you laughed out of an academic conference. Cognitive ethology is now a reputable and growing field, and every year more studies are published on animal intelligence and emotions. Marc Bekoff notes that in 2000, when he sought essays from respected scientists on animal emotions, more than fifty signed up. The resulting book was called The Smile of a Dolphin, with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, and it signaled a long-awaited shift away from the mechanistic and miserly views of the behaviorists.

  Signs of Change

  ON THE NIGHT OF September 6, 2007, Alex, a thirty-one-year-old African grey parrot, wished his trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, good-night as usual.

  “You be good, I love you,” said Alex.

  “I love you too,” Dr. Pepperberg replied.

  “You’ll be in tomorrow?”

  “Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Dr. Pepperberg arrived to find Alex dead. In the ensuing weeks, Alex would receive more public attention than perhaps any bird in history. Television shows from Good Morning America to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno ran segments on his death, while the New York Times published three articles on his life and feats of intelligence. Thousands of people from around the world wrote heartfelt letters to tell Dr. Pepperberg how Alex had opened their eyes to the incredible minds of animals. The Economist, which usually devotes its weekly obituary to statesmen and celebrities, devoted it instead to Alex, noting, “by the end, Alex had the intelligence of a five-year-old child and had not reached his full potential.”

  When Dr. Pepperberg bought Alex at random at a pet store in 1977, there was nothing to suggest he would bring about immense change in animal science. To no avail, researchers had been trying to teach chimpanzees to talk, and few thought that parrots, with their walnut-sized brains, would do any better. (It was only later that researchers turned to teaching chimps sign language, with far more success.)

  But evolutionary explanations for behavior were taking a new turn. British scientist Nicholas Humphrey, for example, argued that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one. According to Humphrey, the reason chimps are so smart is that they live in complex societies, in which they must consistently reason, learn, and negotiate to survive. That got Dr. Pepperberg thinking. Since parrots also live in complex societies in the wild (and, like chimps, have long enough life spans to make investing time in learning worthwhile), perhaps they had also evolved advanced intelligence. And as parrots have vocal cords more suited to talking than chimps do, perhaps Alex really could be taught human language.

  Alex’s education began slowly. Dr. Pepperberg and her colleagues at the University of Arizona (and later Harvard, MIT, and Brandeis) would hold objects in front of Alex and discuss them in detail. Conventional wisdom held that parrots could simply repeat words—“parroting”—but Alex soon began to express thoughts that seemed awfully similar to human ones. He’d ask to be taken to his play area, and then complain when he was taken to the wrong place. He understood and could discuss concepts like “bigger,” “smaller,” “same,” and “different.” By the end of this life, he knew fifty objects by name, and he could describe the colors and shapes of objects he’d never seen before. He even knew when and how to apologize when he antagonized Dr. Pepperberg. Before he died, Alex ha
d been learning about optical illusions—which he perceived with an incredible likeness to the way humans see them.

  As Dr. Pepperberg would later write, “Scientifically speaking, the 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 possible.”

  Nor are parrots the only birds to show such amazing abilities. In 2003, Cambridge University researchers camped out for months in the jungles of New Caledonia to study crows. By attaching miniature video cameras to the crows’ wings (the cameras fall off when the birds molt, leaving them unharmed), they observed the birds making advanced use of tools. Some used sticks to burrow into rotten trees for larvae, while others adapted dry grass to fish for ants. One intrepid crow even hauled a large stick hundreds of yards because it made such a useful tool. Researchers have since found that even crows raised by people, without the benefit of learning by experience, are capable of working out how to make and adapt tools.

  More recently, scrub jays have gone even further toward upending our assumptions about avian intelligence. Scrub jays not only have episodic memories of the past that mimic our own, but also plan for the future—a trait that even infant humans lack. The researchers tested the jays’ memories by having them hide perishable wax worms and nonperishable peanuts. If they could access their cache after just a couple of days, they chose the wax worms, but if they knew they wouldn’t get back to the cache for weeks, they’d go for the peanuts—knowing the wax worms would have decayed in the interval.

  To test their “future-planning” capacity, the researchers rotated the birds between different locations and gave them the opportunity to hide food in each one. They found that the birds not only stored food in locations where they anticipated they would be hungry the next morning, but also stored preferred foods where they anticipated only nonpreferred foods would be available. In other words, the birds were stocking up on their favorite breakfast foods, much as we might fill up the fridge before a busy weekend.

  Although the countless mental feats of dogs are still routinely dismissed by behaviorists as mere “anecdotal” evidence, they, too, have often surprised researchers in formal tests. Just how smart are dogs? Rico, a border collie, astounded scientists in 2004 by demonstrating the ability not only to recognize the meaning of more than two hundred words, but also to infer the names of items she hadn’t seen previously. In a test described in Science, researchers placed objects in another room and then had Rico retrieve them by name. When asked to retrieve an object with a foreign name, Rico used what the researchers called “simple logic” to infer it must be the one object whose name she didn’t know, and she retrieved that one.

  Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, doesn’t think these results are exceptional. He administers language and cognition tests devised for human infants to dogs and says that the most intelligent breeds square up well. Poodles, retrievers, Labradors, and shepherds can learn around 250 words, signs, and signals, according to Coren, and some even “get the idea of being a dog”—they are able to differentiate photos with dogs in them from photos without dogs.

  As for the great apes, recent studies have turned up evidence of mental acuity that would impress even Jane Goodall. At Kyoto University, Ayuma, a five-year-old chimp, gave humans a humbling lesson in memory recall. He was placed in front of a computer screen and a sequence of numbers from one to nine flashed in front of him for a second before being replaced by white squares. He was able to remember the sequence almost perfectly, while humans could barely remember four or five numbers.

  They even put Ayuma up against British memory champion Ben Pridmore—who can remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards in thirty seconds—and the chimp performed three times better. As Jonathan Balcombe relates, “When the numbers flashed for just a fifth of a second, Ayuma correctly recalled all nine digits 90 percent of the time, compared to 33 percent for Pridmore.” Balcombe concludes that chimps probably have a “botanist’s memory” for up to two hundred plant species, and that may have aided in their development of this amazingly rapid recall. In a head-to-head matchup on memory recall, the chimp won.

  With language experiments, of course, great apes and parrots are no match for us. But what they can do is pretty impressive. The lowland gorilla Koko (whose niece, Binti Jua, was the one who rescued the fallen three-year-old boy at the zoo) has famously mastered more than a thousand signs in American Sign Language. Here we have a case of a gorilla learning human language—so how good are we at learning gorilla language? We probably wouldn’t do all that well. Balcombe frames the matter another way:

  But how would a lowland gorilla do if she were tested on things that are important to her, such as the ability to recognize native plants and to distinguish edible from inedible ones? Or to predict weather changes in the lush African jungles where lowland gorillas live? Or to gauge the moods of other gorillas based on facial expressions, body postures, or their scent? By such measures, she would be a genius among humans. Gorillas’ evolutionary history and survival depend on these mental skills. Gorillas are intelligent at being gorillas. Similarly, a rat is probably no less intelligent than a rhino, but more to the point, a rat is intelligent at being a rat, as is a rhino at being a rhino.

  One animal commonly praised for its intelligence is the dolphin, but even dolphins keep surprising us with all that they can do. They have brains remarkably similar to the basic architecture of our own, with folds in the neocortex that are thought to enable many of our most impressive mental feats. Dolphins off Western Australia, confronted with jagged coral reefs and spiny fish, have learned to hold sponges over their mouths as they trawl the ocean floor. And in one test, a captive dolphin named Akeakamai was able to grasp and act upon commands given in a form of sign language. To do so required not just receiving elementary commands like “fetch,” but to understand a series of thoughts that she was able to interpret and act upon. In a separate study some years ago, dolphins’ keepers asked them, by hand signals, to devise a trick of their own. Beneath the water, they communicated among themselves and then performed a synchronized trick—having never done it together before.

  The tricks of trained dolphins have even found their way into the wild. In captivity, bottlenose dolphins will bide their time by creating underwater rings and helices of air to swim through, and then teach the trick to other dolphins. In the wild, they will surf in waves and play fight with other dolphins. In 2009, Australian wildlife rehabilitators taught a rescued dolphin to tail walk during a three-week recovery period, and then released the animal to the wild. Weeks later, they were astounded to see other dolphins performing the trick. The rescued dolphin had passed along the lesson, and before you knew it a new craze had swept the entire pod.

  Lifesaving Dolphins and Dogs, Altruistic Elephants, and Other Remarkable Animals

  IF ANYTHING HUMBLES US in what we learn about dolphins and other creatures, it’s not just their intelligence but how they’ve been known to use it. Stories abound of dolphins rescuing sailors and swimmers, even to the point of risking their own safety, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any adaptive advantage in that behavior. In 2004, for instance, four lifeguards in New Zealand found themselves suddenly encircled by a pod of dolphins, which seemed at first to spell big trouble. As it turned out, the real lifeguards that day had fins and could swim at thirty knots:

  Lifeguard Rob Howes said he and three female lifeguards were on a training swim about 100 metres off Ocean Beach near Whangarei on the North Island.

  About halfway through the swim, a pod of dolphins “came steaming at us” and started circling, startling the swimmers, he said.

  Howes said he was unnerved by the speed of the approach, thinking perhaps it was a group of aggressive males or dolphins protecting their baby.

  The dolphins bunched the four swimmers together by circling about
4–8 centimetres from them, and slapping the water with their tails for about 40 minutes.

  Howes said he drifted away from the main group when an opening occurred. One large dolphin became agitated and submerged toward Howes, who turned to see where it would surface.

  That, he says, is when he saw a great white shark about two metres away in the beach’s crystal clear waters.

  “The form came and travelled in an arc around me. I knew instinctively what it was,” he said.

  When the shark started moving toward the women, including his 15-year-old daughter, the dolphins “went into hyperdrive,” said Howes.

  “I would suggest they were creating a confusion screen around the girls. It was just a mass of fins, backs and…human heads.”

  The shark left as a rescue boat neared, but the dolphins remained close by as the group swam back to shore. At no point did the shark break the surface of the water, remaining near the bottom, he said.

  Humans have been hearing stories like this since the days of the ancient mariners, and with the frequency of these rescues in our own day we know it’s not just lore. Off the coast of California in 2007, it was a surfer in trouble, a man named Todd Endris, and the great white had already gotten a piece of him: “The shark—a monster great white that came out of nowhere—had hit him three times, peeling the skin off his back and mauling his right leg to the bone. That’s when a pod of bottlenose dolphins intervened, forming a protective ring around Endris, allowing him to get to shore, where quick first aid provided by a friend saved his life.”