Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

Consider the related question as to whether animals say goodbye as well as hello.

It remains a mystery why these efforts were temporarily suspended, and why we voluntarily hung a millstone around the neck of biology—which is how the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals

Can we understand the tick’s Umwelt? It seems incredibly impoverished compared to ours, but Uexküll saw its simplicity as a strength: her goal is well defined, and she encounters few distractions.

processing? Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. While the term cognition refers to the process of doing this, intelligence refers more to the ability to do it successfully.

With our stereoscopic vision, grasping hands, ability to climb and jump, and emotional communication via facial muscles, we inhabit the same Umwelt as other primates. Our

We had better use the plural to refer to their capacities, therefore, and speak of intelligences and cognitions. This will help us avoid comparing cognition on a single scale modeled after Aristotle’s scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. Comparisons

That we can’t compete with squirrels and nutcrackers on this task—I even forget where I parked my car—is irrelevant, since our species does not need this kind of memory for survival the way forest animals braving a freezing winter do. We don’t need echolocation to orient ourselves in the dark; nor do we need to correct for the refraction of light between air and water as archerfish do while shooting droplets at insects above the surface. There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

Mark Twain’s “Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.”

but we need to remember that, as Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg,

The challenge is to find tests that fit an animal’s temperament, interests, anatomy, and sensory capacities.

No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind. When I asked one of the pioneers in this field why the methodology had never moved beyond the human face, he answered that since humans differ so strikingly from one another, a primate that fails to tell members of our species apart will surely also fail at its own kind.

when a zookeeper familiar with chimpanzees once naïvely accepted a bonobo kiss, not knowing this species, he was taken aback by the amount of tongue that went into it!

Griffin’s proposal to take animal cognition seriously led to a new label for this field: cognitive ethology. It is a great label, but then I am an ethologist and know exactly what he meant. Unfortunately, the term ethology has not universally

Lorenz once joked that there was nothing comparative about comparative psychology. He knew what he was talking about, having just published

behavior.” Think for a second about this terminology, which remains so entrenched in psychology that no one takes notice anymore. Its first implication, of course, is that the only reason to study animals is to learn about ourselves. Second, it ignores that every species is uniquely adapted to its own ecology, because otherwise how could one serve as a model for another? Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something.

I’d rather avoid its leaden baggage and propose to call the new field evolutionary cognition, which is the study of all cognition (human and animal) from an evolutionary standpoint.

Now, compare this behavior with that of your pet rabbit. It doesn’t matter how many balls you throw at him, none of the same learning will take place. Absent a hunting instinct, what is there to acquire? Even if you were to offer your rabbit a juicy carrot for every retrieved ball, you’d be in for a long, tedious training program that would never generate the excitement for small moving objects known of cats and dogs. Behaviorists

Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet the Morris Water Maze is a standard memory test used every day in hundreds of laboratories that make rats frantically swim in a water tank with high walls until they come upon a submerged platform that saves them. In subsequent trials, the rats need to remember the platform’s location.

“misbehavior.” Raccoons, for example, are almost impossible to train to drop coins into a box, because they prefer to hold on to them and frantically rub them together—a perfectly normal foraging behavior for this species.9 Skinner had no eye for such natural proclivities, however, and preferred a language of control and domination. He

The great novelty of ethology was to bring the perspective of morphology and anatomy to bear on behavior.