Animal Intelligence

My wife talks to our dog.  I realize there's nothing unusual in that. Many people talk to their dogs. But I have heard my wife talking to our children, from infancy to adulthood, and she talks to the dog exactly the same way. When he was a puppy she started with single words, progressing to simple sentences as he grew and now that he's in middle age, age 6, she speaks to him in complex constructions, paragraphs. 

"You know," I remind her, "He is never going to reply."
She is not discouraged; she continues to talk to him, asks his opinions about contestants on "The Voice" or "Dancing with the Stars." He maintains a studied neutrality and has never endorsed anyone, which she takes as a great sign of his intelligence and discretion. He does watch the screen with an avidly which almost matches her own.

He is, in fact, quite reticent, even for a dog. He hardly ever barks. For years we thought he was mute, which concerned us because we thought he might be deaf mute, which could be a problem. But no, he barks on rare occasion, when some dog provokes him. Usually it's a dog, and often a fairly inoffensive dog, he simply takes a disliking to, for reasons he keeps to himself. Then he growls and barks and strains at the leash. But we can count on both hands the number of times that has happened. He's a pretty silent dog.

But this is not about our dog. It's about the two books reviewed in last week's New York Times Book Review about animal intelligence. 

Frans de Waal recounts a story about apes who were set up with a table and tea set at the London zoo and they "quickly mastered the teacups and teapot too. They sat there civilly, having tea."   I'm not sure I can believe this, but if they did, it is astonishing.    He claims this tableau of apes sitting around drinking teas like human beings so disturbed the human beings, they taught the apes to smash things up, the "reckless collision of beasts and high culture."  The apes had to be taught to be stupid, so as not to disturb human visitors to the zoo.

DeWaal compares primate intelligence to our own with a story about a psychologist who remarked, "It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together."  But then he relates a story about 25 apes who worked together to prop up a tree trunk against the wall of their enclosure at a Dutch zoo and raided the restaurant next door.

Intelligence, of course, has less to do with being like human beings and more to do with how an animal can understand and exploit its environment. So a squirrel is not stupid because it does not count or multiply or do calculus. The squirrel's life is about remembering where it stored its nuts and apparently squirrels can do this better than most human beings, who cannot remember where they left their keys.

Human beings have been remarkably stupid when trying to assess animal intelligence: Researchers noted that apes seem to have poor memory for faces, but they were testing apes with human faces.  When they finally thought to test apes with ape faces, the apes did quite well. Human investigators evaluated  elephants for their ability to recognize themselves in a mirror but they gave the elephants human, not elephant sized mirrors, and the elephants  "failed" to recognized themselves.

The other book, by Jennifer Ackerman, "The Genius of Birds" relates a story about birds on an island without predators. Freed from the fear of cats or other birds of prey, they had time to experiment and master the use of a wide variety of tools.  She notes how birds  can fly in a flock of 400, changing direction without saying a word, "almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird."  How often have I seen this and never thought about the intelligence involved in all that?  Fish do it, too. You just see it and smile, but someone wonders: "How do they know?" Not to mention birds' capacity to navigate, and to find their way across a continent when I find it difficult, sometimes, finding Massachusetts.

Some great souls seem to appreciate all this in a way which eludes me:  Up the street a pair of birds built a nest in the Spring wreath on my neighbor's door. She promptly went on the internet and identified the birds as wrens or finches or whatever and discovered the parents are likely to abandon the nest if threatened, so she has not used her door and postponed the spring power washing of her home.  Of course, the wrens or whatever they are would never go on the internet to identify the owner of this house, but they had to good sense to choose the one woman in Hampton who would nurture them and take steps to keep them from harm.

 This is the same wonderful woman who hears local coyotes howling at night and promptly grabs a flash light and goes out for a walk, in hopes of seeing them, over the objections of her husband and children.  She attends coyote lectures whenever they are given locally (more and more lately since coyotes have moved in.)  She does not yet have chickens, or goats, but when the topic comes up at the local Democrats society meetings, she grows suspiciously quiet and follows every word of the discussion. It can't be long now.

So there are human beings out there, who appreciate animals, on some level.

In college, I had a summer job at the National Institutes of Health, which was supposed to look good on my application for medical school.  I spent the summer assisting at surgeries on rats, placing catheters in their livers to study the biochemistry of liver glucose production; we also implanted electrical monitoring devices into the brains of possums and toads to study sleep in "lower" species. I was not convinced then and am not now convinced that any of those animals gave their lives for a worthy cause. The dogs who gave their lives so Banting and Best could discover insulin died so others might live, much as soldiers landing on the beaches at Normandy, but most of the casualties I saw in the NIH labs were simply cruel and wasteful. The human beings studying those animals had designed experiments, which on their best days could not have been worth the sacrifice.  Those animals died so careers could advance, not so that science could advance.

I held a fish I caught in my hand once, and after agonizing, smashed it on the head with a rock and felt it die.  I was fishing on a Vanderbilt estate, of all places, invited by a member of that family who was married to a dean of my medical school.  We were fishing for dinner and the Vanderbilt gutted and prepared the fish. Of course, she had a lodge where the walls were lined with animal heads shot by her forebears, so gutting the fish did not bother her, and it was, or should have been delicious. I ate it but did not enjoy it. That fish had wriggled and struggled to be free and wanted to live and I killed it.  I still eat fish other people catch.  Salmon, mostly. Salmon are suicidal fish. They swim upstream, mate, turn belly up. Or maybe a bear gets them as they flop around in shallow water. I have no qualms about salmon.

But once, a huge, beautiful tuna washed up on Plaice Cove beach.  My dog saw it from the entrance near the parking lot and dragged me all the way to the far end of the beach, near the flag pole, which marks the border with the North Hampton part of the beach and he sniffed the tuna curiously. The dog had never met a tuna before and the beach walking regulars, some of whom have walked that beach for decades,  averred they have seen seals and all sorts of sea life wash up, but never an eight hundred pound tuna.  

I don't eat tuna any more. They are too magnificent.