Countless stories I heard growing up, involved animals as the main characters. In Indian mythology such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, animals played a key role, be it as the trustworthy and loyal Hanuman, the brave Jatayu who dies trying to protect Sita from Ravana or Garuda, the ride of gods. They were even the god themselves, as in Ganesha, the god with an elephant’s head. And who can forget the stories from the Jataka tales, Hitopadesha and Panchatantra with their wondrous, imaginative and moral stories in many of which animals were the only characters. When my eyes turned to the west, I ran into the cute, cuddly Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, the ever grumpy Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd and the dumb, but with a heart of gold, Goofy.
The animals led lives not unlike humans in many of these tales, possessed of speech, likes and dislikes and full of intelligence and spirit. Monkeys played pranks, laughed heartily, shed tears of remorse, mice fell in love, snakes conspired and birds sang and gossiped. I knew fairly early that dogs can’t talk no matter how much Goofy does and when I saw the monkeys, realized that their lives were different from humans.
Though revered and a part of the child’s landscape across cultures, just about every culture considered them to be less than humans. In Hinduism, if you commit enough grave sins, you are reborn as an animal such as a dog or a pig. If you do good as a dog, such as give your life for your masters, you can be reborn as a human. In the west, where Christianty played (and continues to play) the central role in attitudes to animals, man ruled over the world and animals, considering it fit to use the animals as he saw fit, making it perfectly acceptable to treat them as badly as one wanted to, either by killing cats in the hundreds of thousands or rendering hundreds of thousands of animal species extinct in our path to modernity.
And animals could never be intelligent, for any definition of intelligence you could conjuncture. And could not love or mourn. If they shed tears, they were only the fake tears of a crocodile. As time elapsed and people began to study the animal life more closely, the broad generalizations of their inferiority began to fall apart. So, we constructed narrower and narrower definitions of intelligence, love and mourning to keep our superiority intact. And we showed our contempt for their minds with terms such as birdbrain. Three pieces of recent research call into question whether that is even derogatory.
Using Tools
Tools, making them and using them, were long considered the dominion of humans alone. Then people like Jane Goodall brought us observations of chimps using long leaves to tease out ants through the tiny openings in ant hills. So we grudgingly allowed some tool making capabilities to the greater apes, the primates, the ones closest to us. And though we remembered the stories of crows using stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher to a reachable level, we didn’t think they were true.
A story I came across on Yahoo news yesterday concerned new research that showed rooks, a cousin of crows, that used stones to raise the water level in a narrow pitcher to reach a worm floating in the water. The study states that the rooks seemed to understand instinctly that dropping stones would rise the level of water. Further, they also seemed to know how many to drop and learnt quickly that the bigger stones got the worm early. When presented with a bowl containing sawdust instead of water, the rooks learned that using the stones didn’t help.
The accompanying commentary to the article professes some skepticism that the rooks really understood the properties of water or that they were dropping stones instinctly rather than as a behavior learned during another experiment. I found the skepticism rather strange in trying to equate crow cognition with human cognition. I think this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of cognition and evolution. We, just like other animals, evolved in ways that were adaptive and advantageous to the environments we lived in. In other words, our intelligence is defined and limited by our bodies (mind is embodied) and the ecology in which we evolved. Birds such as crows occupy different ecological niches compared to us and so have evolved different strategies than us. Its as if the crows conducted experiments on humans ability to fly and decided that we couldn’t do it as instinctively or as well or in a similar manner as they.
The Yahoo article also posts a link to a Youtube video showing the rooks using stones to reach the worm.
This is not the only experiment that shows birds can use tools. Many other tests done in the recent past show that birds, especially of the crow family, are quite adept at using tools to get what they want.
Recognizing Faces
I came across this article last year and noted it, but failed to blog it earlier. The article speaks of research conducted in the urban landscape of Seattle. The researcher, John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, used two face masks. His team of researchers always captured a bird and banded it using one of the guises before releasing them. In the months that followed, the researchers walked the neighborhood, sometimes wearing the mask in which they captured the birds and sometimes using one that was not used in capturing the birds. They found that the birds constantly harangued and scolded them when they wore the masks that was used to capture them. And more significantly, this information seemed to have been communicated to other crows in the neighborhood because they were scolded by 47 of the 53 crows in the neighborhood, far more than the number they trapped.
Dr. Marzluff extended his study now to many parts of Seattle, used a half-dozen new more realistic masks made by a professional mask maker and added volunteers who didn’t know the history of the masks. Wearing some of the “dangerous” masks, Dr. Marzluff and his research team trapped and banded several crows in and around Seattle. Then, they asked volunteers to walk around the neighborhoods where the crows had been trapped. Unaware of the history behind the mask, some volunteers wore the “dangerous” mask and others wore a mask that had not been used to trap crows. As one of the volunteers reported:
The reaction to one of the dangerous masks was “quite spectacular,” said one volunteer, Bill Pochmerski, a retired telephone company manager who lives near Snohomish, Wash. “The birds were really raucous, screaming persistently,” he said, “and it was clear they weren’t upset about something in general. They were upset with me.”
The crows deliberately targeted only the volunteers wearing the dangerous mask even in the presence of other volunteers wearing the neutral masks. According to Dr. Bernd Heinrich, a well recognized authority in the study of ravens, this ability to recognize faces is an offshoot of the ability of crows to recognize each other even after several months of separation.
Why the mask, the more perceptive reader may ask. The researchers say they used the mask to test the recognition of faces specifically as compared to the clothing, the gait and other human traits.
Self Recognition
One of the last holdouts of our superiority over animals is self-recognition. When we look in the mirror, we know we’re looking at a reflection of ourselves. We can use this information to indulge in all sorts of narcissitic things such as grooming ourselves. Even human babies are considered to not pass muster until they’re at least a year or so old. We then grudgingly admitted that four primates, the elephant and the bottlenosed dolphin had the ability to self-recognize themselves in the mirror. But a bird, a non-mammalian life, one that doesn’t even possess the same brain machinery as the mammals, machinery such as the neocortex, thought to be the seat of self-recognition ? Not a chance.
Last year, a study found that Magpies, another cousin of the crows, can recognize themselves in the mirror. The researchers in Frankfurt, West Germany, placed a red, yellow or black mark on a group of five magpies. The black mark couldn’t be differentiated from the bird’s own black feathers. The mark was only visible in a mirror. When presented with a mirror, the birds looked at themselves and the ones with a red or yellow mark, attempted to peck themselves in the spot where the mark was.
Says lead researcher Helmut Prior: “It shows that the line leading to humans is not as special as many thought…. After finding this kind of intelligence in apes, many people thought it had developed once in one evolutionary line with humans at the end. The bird studies show it has developed at least twice”[Reuters].
The popular science magazine, Discover, listed the discovery as one of the top 100 discoveries in science for the year 2008.
It was through Kitty that I grew closer to feeling a kinship with other animals. Life with him was a continuous process of growing closer. When he first came to be with us, he wouldn’t let us touch his belly. As time passed, he allowed us to touch his belly, his front paws and finally, he sat on our laps and kneaded our chest with his paws, the ultimate act of being allowed into the feline world. The ways in which he acted with me, I wondered if he loved me. I remembered a line from Ayn Rand: “Love is making exceptions”. In that sense, I can say Kitty loved me. He made exceptions with me.
One day, we might find that it is we who’re being studied by the animals all this time, as Douglas Adams wrote tongue-in-cheek in the hilarious “trilogy in four parts”, “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”. The dolphins eventually leave Earth, having concluded their experiment on humans and in parting they say “So long, and thanks for all the fish”.
