Those pigeons that poop on the cars at the Denver airport can tell the difference between Monet and Picasso. At night they roost in a man-made concrete rookery located over the most expensive parking spots at the airport. When wealthy travelers get back from their trips they find their Land Rovers and Lexuses dribbled over with pigeon poop. For travelers, those birds are a major nuisance, like rats with feathers.
They are also potential art connoisseurs. George Page, in his book Inside the Animal Mind, describes a famous experiment in which pigeons were taught to distinguish between paintings by Picasso and paintings by Monet.1 The birds learned the difference easily. A pigeon can quickly learn to peck at a painting by Picasso, instead of a painting by Monet, and vice versa. Not only that, but when the experimenters showed the birds a painting by Manet (not Monet), whose style is similar to early Picasso’s, the pigeons pecked the Manet, too. The birds make the same mistake entry-level art students do.2
Another experiment showed that pigeons who had never seen a tree in their lives, because they’d been born and raised in a lab, could easily learn to peck at a picture that contained a tree. That might not seem so amazing, except for the fact that they could also peck a picture that contained just one tiny part of a tree. They understood that a part of a tree was still a tree, even though technically a solitary leaf doesn’t look anything like a whole tree.3
Pigeons are a lot smarter than people think.
Animal researchers are finally beginning to catch up to the little old ladies in tennis shoes who say Fifi the poodle can think. But it’s still a battle. The fights are always between a big group of experts who think animals don’t have a lot of feelings or aren’t very smart, and a much smaller group of researchers who think there’s a lot more going on inside an animal’s head than we know. The really nasty fights always seem to go one way: it’s always the animal “debunkers” who are on the attack. At least, I don’t remember a single big academic fight where someone got fired or lost their funding for doing a study where the animal turned out to be dumber than people thought, and lots of studies like that have been done. Claiming that an animal can’t do something isn’t considered blasphemous.
Fortunately, it’s gotten a lot more respectable to argue that animals are smarter than we realize. One of the main research teams we can thank for that is Dr. Irene Pepperberg and her twenty-five-year-old African gray parrot, Alex. Alex has now reached the cognitive level of a normal four-to-six-year-old child.4
His achievements are nothing short of revolutionary, because up until Alex came along no one had ever been able to teach birds much of anything at all. It wasn’t because they hadn’t tried, either. Bird researchers had spent hours and hours trying to teach birds concepts like color, and no bird had even come close to figuring it out. Birds couldn’t even learn labels for familiar objects, something everyone agreed apes could do. Even though experts were extremely skeptical of the language abilities of apes like Kanzi, who was said to have receptive language equivalent to that of a two-and-a-half-year-old child, it was obvious that you could teach an ape a huge amount. But birds seemed like real birdbrains. (Receptive language means the language you can understand, as opposed to expressive language, which is the language you can use to speak or write.)5
So it was a huge shock when Dr. Pepperberg succeeded where every single person before her had failed. Not only could Alex learn categories like color and shape, which no bird had ever done before, he learned them easily. Also, once he’d learned the categories, he could spontaneously answer questions like “What color?” and “What shape?” about brand-new objects he’d never seen before.
This means Alex was learning abstract categories like color and shape, not just concrete categories like “cat” and “dog.” Dr. Pepperberg says the difference between concrete categories and abstract categories is the difference between classification and reclassification. We use simple classification, like sorting out dogs and cats, to form basic, concrete categories. Concrete categories are permanent and stable. A dog is never going to be a cat, and a cat is never going to be a dog.
But when you’re using abstract categories to classify things, objects can jump categories. A blue triangle can be grouped with blue squares or with red triangles, depending on which abstract category, color or shape, you’re using to make the classification.
A lot of researchers have shown that animals form concrete categories. It would be extremely surprising if they didn’t, since an animal has to be able to distinguish between basic categories like food/not food and shelter/not shelter in order to survive.
But the research on whether or not animals can handle the most abstract categories still hasn’t produced a firm answer. We know that abstract categories like color are hard for young children to learn. At first, a child will learn that grass and broccoli are green, and apples and roses are red, without figuring out that there’s such a thing as greenness or redness as a separate category unto itself. Greenness and redness are just part of the apple. Animal behaviorists always assumed that if forming abstract categories is hard for children, it was probably impossible for animals. But now, thanks to Dr. Pepperberg and Alex, we know it’s not.
Alex can reclassify objects on demand. If Dr. Pepperberg shows him a square piece of blue wood and asks him, “What color?” he’ll say, “Blue.” Then if she asks him, “What shape?” he says, “Four-corner.” For Alex color and shape are abstract categories that can apply to any object, not just to the objects he’s been taught.
DO ANIMALS HAVE TRUE COGNITION?
I like the way Marion Stamp Dawkins, a researcher at Oxford who studies animal behavior and thinking, defines thinking in animals. She starts by saying what true cognition is not. True cognition is not hardwired instinctual behavior, and it is not learning a simple rule of thumb.6
True cognition, Dr. Dawkins say, happens when an animal solves a problem under novel conditions.
By that definition, birds are star performers. One of my favorite bird experiments is the one with about the thieving blue jays. Blue jays are famous food thieves who, in nature, know enough to hide their food so other jays won’t get it.
The researchers set up a situation where a jay would have to hide some food in the presence of other jays who were watching him. They gave the first set of blue jays some mealworms and a refrigerator ice tray filled with sand. The jays all hid their worms in the trays, while the other jays watched.
Then the experimenters took the watcher jays away—and the blue jays immediately dug up their mealworms and re-hid them in other parts of the tray. They obviously knew the watcher jays would try to steal their food, and they also knew the other jays knew where they’d hidden the food. So they hid the food again.
That is true cognition. The blue jays were in a novel situation, and they figured out a solution.
Mark saw two magpies using a similar strategy on Red Dog. Red Dog was eating a marrow bone that the magpies wanted for themselves. So the birds teamed up to get Red Dog away from the bone. One bird would lure Red Dog into chasing him, and the other would fly down to the marrow bone and start eating it. Then when Red Dog came back to the bone and chased that bird away, the first bird would get its turn to eat some of the marrow. The birds were double-teaming Red Dog.
There’s been one formal experiment on ravens tricking each other to get food. The researchers studied two ravens, a dominant male and a subordinate male. At the beginning of the experiment the subordinate male found most of the food the experimenters had hidden, and the dominant raven chased him away and took the food for himself. So the subordinate male started tricking the dominant male by heading off to boxes he already knew didn’t have food. Then when the dominant male followed him and chased him off, the subordinate male had a head start to the boxes that did have food. That worked for a while until the dominant male stopped following him and looked for food on his own.7
Crows are really smart birds, too. The Betty and Abel study shocked the world when it appeared in Science.8 In the study the researchers were testing two crows, Betty and Abel, to see whether they would choose a hooked wire or a straight wire to use for getting some food out of a tube. During one session Abel snatched the hooked wire away from Betty, leaving Betty with only the straight wire to use. When she realized the straight wire wouldn’t work, she bent it into a hook. She did this nine different times, using different techniques. She also made improvements to her hook after using it, changing the angle to make it just right.
No one had ever seen any animal do anything like this, ever. It wasn’t that long ago researchers believed man was the only animal to use tools at all. Then, when people finally discovered chimpanzees using tools in the 1960s and 1970s, no one ever saw them actually manufacture a tool. The chimpanzees would just pick up an object in the environment, like a twig or a leaf, and stick it down a termite mound to fish out some termites to eat. Betty’s tool creation is even more amazing when you consider the fact that Betty didn’t know anything about wire or its properties and didn’t have any reason to know anything about wire and its properties. In nature nothing bends and holds its shape the way wire does.
I heard another amazing crow story from a man I know. He’s fed up with a crow who is damaging his house. I can really relate to that. There’s a crow in my neighborhood who has spent the last five years of his life dismantling and pulling out the rubber weather stripping in my bathroom skylight. It’s taken him five years to pull out a six-inch strip, and he just keeps at it. He’s so dedicated to his project his behavior seems instinct-driven and almost obsessive-compulsive.
I can’t get him to stop. I throw hats at the skylight from inside the bathroom to scare him off, but he always comes back. If he keeps doing it the skylight is going to leak, but what I really worry about is that if he finally gets all the weather stripping out he’s going to eat it and get sick or die. This is where blind instinct overrides cognition: a bird that’s so smart some of the time can be so stupid other times.
The man I know apparently has a similar situation with a crow at his house, only he’s opted to use a weapon more dangerous than a soft hat. But he’s never been able to shoot his invader, because the crow always knows when he’s thinking about getting his gun. The bird will be there in the man’s yard attacking the house while the man does his yard work, but the minute the man goes inside the house to get his gun the bird is gone. This has happened over and over again. The homeowner is completely mystified. When he goes inside his house without any intention of getting his gun, the crow stays in the yard. When he goes inside his house with the intention of getting his gun, the crow takes off.
How does the bird know it’s time to get out of there? Probably the crow has picked up on differences in the man’s behavior. I’m guessing that when the man gets irritated enough to go get his gun, first he does a lot of angry staring at the bird. The crow knows that’s dangerous and takes off.
No one has ever seen a dog make a tool, but dogs can problem-solve in novel situations. Guide dogs for blind people have to be able to respond appropriately in new situations. Some service dogs are better problem-solvers than others, of course. In one city, highway engineers wanted to save money on curb cuts for wheelchairs at intersections. Normally a street corner will have eight curb cuts, one on each side of the four corners. To economize, the engineers reduced the number to four, putting each curb cut at the point of each corner, facing diagonally across the intersection.
That was a problem for the service dogs, who had all been trained on eight-cut corners. Some dogs got confused by the new design and took their owners clear across the intersection on a diagonal. But the really smart dogs led their owners down the diagonal curb cut and then back around to where the curb cuts would have been located in the normal crosswalk design. Then they crossed the street. That’s problem solving in a novel situation.
The wild dogs in Mexico City go our service dogs one better. They cross the street in packs, with the light, in the intersection. They probably learned how to do this by watching how people cross the street.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who wrote The Hidden Life of Dogs, discovered that her dogs had figured out on their own that intersections are dangerous.9 To avoid getting hit by turning cars, her free-roaming dogs learned to cross the street in the middle of a block instead of at the intersection. That way they could see all the cars that were coming toward them from a distance, and not be surprised by a car making a sudden right or left turn into their path.
In farming and ranching you see lots of situations where animals will learn something useful by accident, such as how to break through a fence or open a gate. This is probably not true cognition, but some of these animals are pretty clever, and in the field it’s hard to say what’s true cognition and what’s not. Most cattle and horses will never touch gate latches to try to open them, even though they’ve seen people open the latch a thousand times. However, if an animal accidentally learns to open the gate he’ll never stop. He won’t unlearn it, and he generally can’t be trained out of it. My aunt had a horse that learned to put his head through a gate and lift it off the hinges. The only way we could get him to stop was to install a bracket at the top of the fence. Once one animal figures out how to open a gate, the other animals can learn how to open the gate by observation. Then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.
The big problem is fence busting. Every year I get about twenty calls from lawyers about cattle getting loose on the highway and getting hit by a car. The drivers always want to sue the ranchers for inadequate fencing. I have to explain to the lawyers that there is no pasture fence on the market that can keep cattle inside a pasture once the cattle have learned how to get through it. Only a steel stockyard fence is strong enough to hold cattle in physically, and steel fences are too expensive to put up around grazing lands. The fences ranchers use keep cattle in only because the cattle don’t realize that they have the power to break through them.
Is fence busting true cognition? Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. Usually cattle discover how to break through a fence by accident. Cattle will push on a fence to reach greener grass on the other side, and keep pushing until one day the fence falls over. Then they draw the appropriate conclusion: if I push on the fence, I can get out and go eat where I want. Animals also figure out, probably by accident, that if they run through an electric fence it’s going to hurt for only a few seconds. We know this because pigs who have learned to go through electric fences often squeal before they hit the wire. They know what’s coming.
Some cattle have learned to break through a fence through simple trial and error, but others have started to build on what they learned by accident. There was one bull from the Arizona high country who was the champion fence buster. Bulls are the worst fence busters, and once a bull has learned to break through a fence it’s difficult to keep him in. This particular bull was the champion; he took out fences faster than the U.S. Forest Service could build them. He knew how to knock over a high-quality four-strand barbed wire fence built to government standards. In one afternoon he walked through four brand-new fences. I saw him after he had been locked in a stall corral that was too strong for him to break out of.
All of us were amazed that the bull could tear out so many barbed wire fences without getting cut. His tan-and-white hide did not have a single scratch. This is where cognition is at work. He had figured out how to knock over a barbed wire fence without getting cut. Nobody ever saw him do it but he must have figured out that if he pushed over the posts with his head first, and then walked through, he would not get cut. He was careful.
Holstein steers are another story. With all the licking and tongue manipulating they do, Holsteins end up opening gate latches beef cattle never even try to open. I don’t think they’re really solving a problem, though; it’s more like a happy accident. What starts out as a pure desire to lick and tongue things turns into the discovery that they can open gates. Still, once they figure it out they’re experts. They can open just about anything, including every sliding bolt gate latch on the market. The only kind of latch that can keep a Holstein cow inside a pen is a chain hooked together with a dog leash snap. They love to get out, too. At one feedlot a group of Holsteins escaped their pen and walked up to the office to lick the windows and remove the paint from the manager’s pickup.
ARE ANIMALS AS SMART AS PEOPLE?
I can’t answer that question, and neither can anyone else. Researchers who believe we know for a fact that man is the crown of creation when it comes to IQ are off base. That’s what researchers think, not what they know. I’ve come to the conclusion that although in many ways other mammals are similar to us, in other ways they may be totally alien. A lot of our tests and experiments with animals probably aren’t telling us what we think they’re telling us.
Dr. Pepperberg’s breakthrough with Alex ought to make researchers think twice. It’s not just that what we know keeps changing, but that the way we go about finding out how animals think sometimes changes, too. That’s the moral of Dr. Pepperberg’s story. The reason she finally succeeded where everyone else had failed was that she was the first person to consider that maybe it was the researchers’ fault birds weren’t learning anything, not the birds’.
All of the parrot studies up to then had used a classical operant conditioning format. Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning or stimulus-response teaching, is when an animal learns to do something in order to get what he wants. A rat who’s learned to press a lever to get food pellets has had operant conditioning. Using operant conditioning the experimenter would show the bird a red triangle and a blue triangle and say “touch blue,” then reward him with a piece of food whenever he happened to peck at the blue triangle by chance. If he happened to peck the red one he didn’t get the food. After a while he was supposed to learn blue, because he had been rewarded for pecking the blue triangle every time he heard “touch blue.” That’s classic behaviorism.
The problem was, no bird ever learned blue. They didn’t learn red, either. They didn’t learn anything, really. Apes weren’t learning too much in those setups, either, but no one wanted to hear about it, because everyone thought it was much more scientific to do a stimulus-response experiment in the lab than to watch an animal learn things naturally in his normal habitat. When a few researchers began teaching apes in more naturalistic settings they were criticized for being unscientific and performing uncontrolled experiments. In science, there’s nothing worse than an experiment that’s uncontrolled.10
Dr. Pepperberg decided to give up on operant conditioning and try a different branch of behaviorism called social modeling theory. Albert Bandura developed social modeling theory at Stanford University in the 1970s, based on how he thought real people and real animals probably learned in the real world.11 For years behaviorists had assumed that animals and people learn everything they know through either operant or classical conditioning. (Classical conditioning works with innate, reflexive responses like eye blinks and salivation. Pavlov’s dog learning to salivate at the sound of a tone is classical conditioning.)
But Dr. Bandura pointed out that the stimulus-response learning animals did in labs was just learning by trial and error. The animal does more of whatever behaviors he gets rewarded for doing, and less of whatever behaviors he’s been punished or negatively reinforced for doing.
That sounds like a logical way to learn until you think what it would mean in the wild. In the real world, trial and error learning would get a lot of animals killed. If the only way a baby antelope could learn to run away from a lion was by finding out what happens if you don’t run away from a lion, there wouldn’t be any baby antelope left. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any lions left, either, since they wouldn’t have baby antelope to eat.
In Dr. Bandura’s view, animals and people had to do a huge amount of observational learning. He thought that a baby antelope would learn to run away from lions by watching other antelope run away from lions and doing the same thing. Today we know Dr. Bandura was right, partly thanks to Susan Mineka’s research on monkeys and snakes.
Dr. Bandura had obviously hit on something with social modeling theory, but it didn’t occur to anyone to try using it in their research on animal learning. That was Dr. Pepperberg’s innovation. She set up a social modeling situation for Alex. Instead of teaching Alex one-on-one she taught him two-on-one, two people to one bird. And instead of teaching Alex directly, she taught the other person, while Alex sat on his perch and watched. No one had ever done that before.
She also used items a parrot really, really wants, like a nice, crunchy piece of bark, for her learning materials. Animals and people both pay more attention to things that are important to them, like food, and you have to pay attention to learn. A parrot in the wild doesn’t care about blue triangles, so why should he care about blue triangles in the lab? He doesn’t.
So if Dr. Pepperberg wanted Alex to learn the color blue, she took a nice, crunchy piece of bark and painted it blue. Then she’d sit down with Alex and her research assistant and ask the assistant, “What color?”
If the assistant got the answer right, he got to play with the bark. If the assistant got the answer wrong, he didn’t get to play with the bark. All Alex got to do was watch. Dr. Pepperberg called her technique model/rival, because the assistant was a model for Alex to copy and also a rival for whatever item Dr. Pepperberg was using in her lesson. She set up a competition for scarce resources between Alex and the assistant.
Using modeling theory was the breakthrough. Alex learned so much that he started asking questions on his own! One day he looked at his reflection in the mirror and asked Dr. Pepperberg, “What color?”
After he’d asked about his own color six different times, and heard answers like “That’s gray; you’re a gray parrot” six different times, he knew gray as a category. From then on he could tell his trainer whether or not any object she showed him was gray.
This is nothing short of miraculous as far as I’m concerned. Alex was never taught to ask questions; he just did so on his own, spontaneously. That’s incredible, because question asking seems to be a separate skill from making statements, judging by the language of autistic children. Autistic children who can talk rarely ask questions; some of them never do. I know a mom whose sixteen-year-old has been talking since the age of two, and she says to this day she can count on one hand the number of questions he has asked.
Question asking is so important that Bob and Lynn Koegel, of the Autism Research and Training Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made major breakthroughs in their autism clinic when they started teaching autistic children to ask questions.12 I wonder whether we would have major breakthroughs in language comprehension with apes and dolphins if we taught them to ask questions, instead of just having them answer questions all the time.
LEARNING THAT’S EASY FOR PEOPLE, HARD FOR ANIMALS
Most birds and animals are almost certainly smarter than we know, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some limitations that humans don’t. (Humans have limitations animals don’t, too. I’ll get to that in the next chapter.)
I’ve said several times now that one of the major differences between people and our fellow mammals is that we have larger, better-developed frontal lobes. One of the benefits of having bigger frontal lobes is that we have more working memory. Since working memory is an important factor in general intelligence, if animals have less working memory overall, that’s going to make a difference in their general cognitive abilities.
The question is, what differences are you going to see in a person or animal with lots of working memory versus a person or animal with a lot less working memory? I think my own brain is a good place to start, since I have terrible working memory. If I were a computer I would have a huge hard drive memory and a very small microprocessor. As a result, I have a hard time doing things that involve multitasking, like trying to make change and talk at the same time. Another problem area for me: mental arithmetic. I can’t hold one number in memory while I manipulate another. For me to try to add up two two-digit numbers inside my head would be a stretch, and I couldn’t even begin to add two three-digit numbers together without writing them down where I can see them.
Since we never ask animals to multitask or add numbers in their heads, one of the main places you can see this difference is in situations that require an animal to be good at sequencing. (I’m talking about primates and domestic animals, not birds and sea mammals like dolphins. Birds and dolphins have different brain structures from ours, and I don’t know enough about their sequencing abilities to comment.) Animals are not good at sequencing. A good example is dogs getting tangled up in leashes or tie-outs. Owners are always amazed at how helpless a dog is once he’s gotten his tie-out wrapped around a tree.
A big part of the problem is that he can’t remember the sequence of events that got him to where he is, so he can’t retrace his steps. He has the same problem if he just tries to start fresh and figure it out. If one move doesn’t work he has to be able to hold that failure in mind while testing other moves. A dog probably doesn’t have enough working memory to do that. He’s like a person who gets mixed up driving unfamiliar streets after dark. A normal person with an excellent working memory can end up going around in circles in that situation, because he’s hit the limits of his working memory. He can’t hold all of the different routes he’s tried in working memory while he tries new ones, so he keeps going over the same route all over again without realizing it until he ends up back where he started.
Dogs can learn sequences, like the ones working dogs perform at show, with a lot of direct training. However, I think it’s probably as hard for a dog to learn show sequences as it was for me to learn the sequence of events that take place in a large meatpacking plant. When I first went into a big plant the place looked so complicated I was amazed the managers were able to keep track of all the complex procedures. I didn’t know how anyone could understand and remember anything so intricate.
In the early 1970s I visited a big meatpacking plant every Tuesday afternoon for three years. I used to stand for hours on a catwalk overlooking the floor where the carcasses were processed and dressed by about a hundred employees altogether. The place was a mass of visual details, and every Tuesday afternoon I downloaded more details into my brain.
At first I tuned in to all the really minute details that attracted my attention. Bob, the plant superintendent, was surprised that I kept asking him questions about small details such as how they attached a chain to the hide during hide removal. Apparently nonautistic people could get the gist of the place without having to know every little thing about it. But I couldn’t.
One disadvantage of my type of thinking that I probably share with animals is that it takes a long time to download enough details to learn a complex sequence. To do it, I have to create a computer video in my imagination. With the plant, all told, it took six months to download a complete videotape of the entire place into my head. Twenty-four Tuesday afternoons.
Then one day I was standing on the catwalk and suddenly it all seemed simple. I didn’t have to worry about remembering the sequence anymore, because I could walk through the whole plant in my mind. Every step in the sequence was connected to the next step, so I didn’t have to hold hundreds of different, separate details in my working memory at the same time. I just had to remember one step at a time, and that step brought up the next step.
For me, trying to learn a sequence or add numbers in my head is like having more than one window open on your desktop. If I’m trying to add 49 to 56, first I add 9 and 6 to get 15 and carry the 1. That’s in the first window.
But then it takes a really long time for me to close the 9 plus 6 window and open a new window to handle 4 plus 5. By the time the new window is open I no longer remember the 4 and the 5. Or, if I do manage to remember the 4 and the 5 (plus the 1 I have to carry), it takes so long to close the 4 and 5 window and reopen the 9 and 6 window that I’ve forgotten the original 15. I can work inside only one window at a time, and it takes me forever to switch to a different one. I wonder if animals are like that, too.
The breakthrough with the meat plant came when I could put the whole plant in one window and not have to switch back and forth. Then I could understand and remember it, and after that when I visited other meat plants I could easily pick out the familiar machines even though the floor layout was different. A dog probably has to get any sequence he’s learning into one window, too. I suspect that once that happens, the dog “gets it” the way a person “gets it.” He understands what he’s doing and can apply it to new situations. That’s my guess.
THE MAN WITHOUT WORDS
In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an essay called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” that researchers have been arguing about ever since.13 I think most researchers, thirty years later, would say it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat, although they disagree with each other about why.
To me, “What is it like to be a bat?” isn’t the right question. It’s too absolute. I’m never going to know what it’s like to be a bat, and a bat’s never going to know what it’s like to be me. Of course, Professor Nagel wasn’t just talking about empathy; he was talking about the scientific method and whether you could ever fully explain consciousness in terms of brain biology. But that doesn’t change my point. The fact that it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat doesn’t mean it’s impossible to know anything about being a bat.
Since almost all researchers believe that animals don’t have language, a good place to look for an answer is in the lives of people who have no language. We’ve already seen that autistic people have a lot in common with animals, but another source of clues comes from normal people with normal brains who don’t have language. How do language-less human beings think?
There are probably lots of language-less people in the world. Usually they are people who were born deaf into communities too small to have anyone who spoke sign language, and too poor to have schools for the deaf. But there are also some language-less people who were born into middle-class American homes but were never taught sign. Their brains are normal, and they had normal parents with normal incomes who loved them. They weren’t poor and they weren’t abused. The only reason they don’t have language is that they were never exposed to language. (Probably in many of these cases the parents believed that allowing their children to learn sign would prevent them from using whatever residual hearing they had.)
The strange thing is that practically no one has studied these people. When I did a Google search for the phrase “language-less people” only nine entries came up. It’s bizarre. It’s especially strange when you consider how much attention has been paid to feral children and to horribly abused children like Genie, the thirteen-year-old California girl who grew up without language because her father strapped her to a potty chair around the age of twenty months and didn’t allow her to have any human interaction. When Genie’s mother finally brought her to a welfare office, she had only two words, “stopit” and “nomore.”14 A case like Genie’s is extremely interesting, of course, but she was emotionally abused and nutritionally deprived. It’s hard to tell how much relevance her cognitive skills have to a normal language-less animal or autistic person’s cognitive skills.
Why aren’t normal language-less people on the agenda?
The best book on a normal language-less person is A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller. Susan Schaller has spent twenty years traveling and researching language-less people completely on her own. The experts she tried to get help from when she first started out were dismissive, uncooperative, or hostile. She even got yelled at by one researcher who shouted, “Who are you?” A graduate student told her, “Nobody’s interested in that subject anymore—that was popular last century.”15
Susan became interested in language-less people when she volunteered to teach Ildefonso, a deaf mute Mexican immigrant who was raised in a town that had no education for deaf children. A Man Without Words is the story of her work with him. Susan discovered that Ildefonso had no concept of language at all. Later she learned he had a deaf brother, and that the two of them had figured out some simple ways to communicate as children. But he had absolutely no idea that spoken or written language existed. He understood that the other children did something important with their schoolbooks, but he did not know what it was.
It took Ildefonso only six days with Susan to grasp the idea of language. In the book, he has a revelation that’s a lot like the water pump scene in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller suddenly understands what language is.
Although he got the idea of language quickly, it took much longer for him to be able to learn and use the language Susan was trying to teach him. One of the most powerful parts of the book, for me, is the day when Susan tries to teach him the words for color. Susan is teaching him the names for colors, like red, yellow, and green, but when they get to “green” suddenly he becomes highly agitated and mimes running and hiding while signing “Green!! Green!!”
Susan couldn’t understand why he was so frantic, until she learned that green was the most important concept in Ildefonso’s life. Ildefonso was an illegal immigrant who supported himself working harvesting crops and picking apples. All the good things in life and all the bad things in life were green. Green money and picking green crops let him feed his family in Mexico. Border Patrol agents wearing green uniforms and driving green trucks were the bad people who would grab him and take him back to Mexico, to the place where there was less work and food was scarce.
The most important thing in life was the Green Card that magically repelled the bad green men.
Susan writes that it was impossible for her to imagine Ildefonso’s world. I expect she knows a lot more about the world of language-less people now that she’s spent two decades searching them out, and I’m looking forward to her next book. She did perceive differences in Ildefonso that I think directly apply to animals, as well as to people with autism.
The main difference between Ildefonso and people who have language is that he was missing a layer of abstract thinking. For instance, he didn’t have the categories of real and fake. He just knew that some Green Cards worked to keep the green men from taking you back to Mexico, and some Green Cards didn’t. He didn’t know why.
He also didn’t have just and unjust as abstract categories. It’s not that he didn’t have morals or a conscience. Susan doesn’t say a lot about this, but she writes that Ildefonso became upset one day when she kept insisting on paying for his lunch after he had signed that he wanted to pay. Ildefonso got more and more angry until finally he signed, “God. Friend. Burrito buy I.”
“He connected God and friend and placed them above burrito buying,” Susan writes. “His anger was that of a religious instructor. I was properly rebuked for my concern for the material world. Who had more money was trivial.” Later on he asked her what “God” meant, but he had already figured it out on his own. Susan writes that he had guessed that the word “God” stood for “unseen greatness, apart from and more important than the tangible stuff in front of us.”
Although Ildefonso had the idea that there was something greater than the material world, he didn’t seem to have any concept of human justice. He had no idea whether it was just or unjust for the green men to catch him and take him back to Mexico; he just knew that’s what the green men did, so he needed to stay away from the green men. He was trying to understand the rules, without realizing there were principles behind the rules.
Ildefonso was an innocent. He didn’t see all the good and bad that people do, and he didn’t know there could be good and bad rules, either. After he learned language, he was sad to learn of the terrible things people do. Animals are innocents, too. Even when animals are treated badly by humans, or see other animals treated badly by humans, they don’t seem to develop the abstract categories of just and unjust. Like Ildefonso, animals try to learn the rules without seeming to realize there are principles behind the rules. Since they don’t know there are principles underlying the rules they don’t realize that the rule itself can be just or unjust, or that a person could be breaking abstract principles of justice. Animals live much closer to the plain facts of the situation.
But the important thing to realize is that Ildefonso’s innocence was not the same thing as being stupid, or unable to think. Ildefonso wasn’t stupid, and he functioned as a person of normal intelligence and reasoning ability or even above-average intelligence, given that he had been able to immigrate to a foreign country, find work, and manage his life while struggling with a huge disability.
This means that when it comes to animals, we should not equate innocence with lack of intelligence. The fact that a dog never rejects a nasty owner doesn’t make him stupid. It makes him innocent. Dogs may well have lower reasoning ability and general intelligence than people do, but a dog’s “blind devotion” isn’t evidence one way or another.
Although Ildefonso didn’t have an abstract sense of just and unjust, he did have an immediate, concrete sense of right and wrong, which he showed when he gave Susan the stern lecture on friendship. That shows that you don’t have to have language to have a conscience, which means it’s at least possible for an animal to have a conscience, too. Many owners have seen their dogs act remorseful after doing something wrong, but animal behaviorists always reject this interpretation. However, no one has shown that an innocent animal can’t feel bad for doing something he knows is wrong, the same way an innocent child can feel bad for doing something he knows is wrong. We shouldn’t assume that we know for a fact animals never experience the emotion of guilt, because we don’t.
A friend of mine has a story about one of her dogs showing remorse that I think is probably right. She has two dogs, a male and a slightly younger female, and she had taken them for a walk with one dog on-leash and one dog off-leash. Unfortunately, when she got up the hill close to her house a neighbor saw them and started yelling at her about the loose dog.
Since she didn’t have another leash with her, she had to thread the leash through one dog’s collar and hook it to the other dog’s collar, which meant their heads were pulled so close together they were touching. The dominant dog didn’t like that at all, because dominant dogs guard their body space closely and need more of it. So this was a violation of his dominant-dog rule.
They had to walk all the way home like that, with the dominant dog looking more and more irritated and tense. Finally, when they got back to their own driveway, the dominant dog snapped. He burst out in a loud snarl and bit his housemate on the nose, something he had never done before. The younger dog shrieked.
My friend jumped over to the dogs and got them unhooked, but the dominant dog didn’t run off to his freedom. He stayed right by the subordinate dog, licking and licking her on the lips. My friend said he looked mortified. She’d never seen him kiss his pack mate like that, and it was obvious to her, as well as to her next-door neighbor, who saw the whole thing, that he was sorry for what he’d done and was trying to make it up to his friend. He acted like he felt remorse, and I don’t think you can rule it out. He was the alpha, and he didn’t need to be kissing the subordinate dog to keep on being the alpha. If anything, it was the subordinate dog who should have been doing the groveling, not the dominant dog. But she didn’t. She accepted his kisses, and they went back to being friends.
Even though Ildefonso was an innocent, a lot of the abstract “reality” people express through language was still there. Religion is a good example. Ildefonso had gone to church when he was little, but he didn’t know what any of it meant, although he instantly figured out that the baby Jesus in a crèche in his adult classroom was the same as the grown-up Jesus he had seen on crucifixes, which I think is pretty amazing.
Although he didn’t know anything about the Christian religion his family practiced, he still had a religious sense. This is obvious to me from the fact that he picked up the word “God” within three weeks of first discovering language, and understood that “God” meant “unseen greatness.”
I think some of the other language-less Mexicans Susan met years later probably also had a religious sense. She says that Ildefonso’s language-less friends, some of whom were living together, treated their precious collection of Green Cards like they were “gold.” To me it sounded as if they were treating them like magic, not gold. They had a special place in their house where they kept the cards, like a shrine. The cards were like a religious idol or talisman that could protect them from the evil green men, and their “religion” was like the pagan religions indigenous populations have. The cards were also their savior, the way to get into the Promised Land where there was more food and jobs.
The men didn’t know the difference between valid Green Cards and fake ones, and they probably didn’t even have the abstract categories for fake and real. But over time they would have realized that some of the Green Cards had more magic than others, because if you get caught by a green man and you show him one of the Green Cards, sometimes it works but other times he takes it away from you. So some cards are more powerful than others. In religion, you don’t test God; you don’t stand in front of a train and say God should save you. That’s how the language-less men would have felt about the cards. You don’t test the cards; it’s not right. So you stay away from the green men.
Religion is probably hardwired into the human brain, so it doesn’t surprise me that a religious feeling or sense managed to shine through in Ildefonso even without words.16 By the same token, it wouldn’t surprise me if animals have religious feelings like Ildefonso’s or a sense of some higher reality or unseen world they can’t express. Do some animals have religious feelings and perceptions? Do animals believe in magic? I don’t think anyone can rule it out.
The lesson from Ildefonso is that although language does make thought more abstract, without language you can think more abstract thoughts than probably anyone has believed possible. Dr. Pepperberg says the real question about language and animals should be: at what point do concepts get so complex that you have to have language to form them?
WORDS GET IN THE WAY
One aspect of Ildefonso’s mental life that Susan Schaller doesn’t mention is his memory for visual detail. I wonder whether his visual memory was superior to a normal person’s visual memory before he learned sign. Research shows that language suppresses visual memory. This is called verbal overshadowing and is a well-established phenomenon, which I mentioned in Chapter 3. For example, in one study people watched a short videotape of a bank robbery, then spent twenty minutes doing something unrelated.17 Then one group spent five minutes writing down everything they could remember about the bank robber’s face, while the other group did an unrelated task.
Two thirds of the people who wrote nothing down and did unrelated tasks could identify a photograph of the robber, while only one third of the people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick him out. This is a well-established effect; many studies have found exactly the same thing, and some studies have extended the effect to auditory memory as well. People who write down a description of a voice are less able to pick it out from other voices than people who didn’t describe the voice in words.
These studies have also found that language doesn’t erase visual memories for good; it just suppresses them. When the researchers asked the people who wrote descriptions to do something nonverbal for a while, like work a puzzle or listen to music, their visual memories came back, and they could identify the bank robber’s face as well as the people who hadn’t written descriptions in the first place.
I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don’t have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do, too. The details never go away, either. If I think of the word “bowl,” I instantly see many different bowls in my imagination, such as a ceramic bowl on my desk, a soup bowl at a restaurant I ate at last Sunday, my aunt’s salad bowl with her cat sleeping in it, and the Super Bowl football game.
I think that probably happens to animals, too, and I wonder what Ildefonso’s visual memory was like while he was still a language-less person.
AWAKE AND AWARE—ANIMALS ON THE INSIDE
One last thing about Ildefonso: there’s no question he was conscious. Many people over the years have argued that if you don’t have language you don’t have consciousness. I remember in college when one of my professors told the class that animals weren’t conscious because they didn’t have words to think in. Since I didn’t think in words myself, I was shocked when he said that. If an animal isn’t conscious, I remember saying to myself, then I’m going to have to assume I’m not conscious, either.
Obviously I am conscious, even though I don’t think in words, so there’s nothing to say an animal can’t be conscious just because an animal doesn’t think in words. Ildefonso was conscious, and he had no language at all.
I think animals are conscious, too. My question is: does the horse who’s scared to death of black hats see mental images of whatever happened to him over and over again inside his head the same way a person with post-traumatic stress syndrome does? Do animals see pictures of food when they’re hungry the way I do? Do they see a picture of water when they’re thirsty?
Another question I have is: do animals have constant mental activity the way people do, or do they walk around with their minds a blank?
We know they have constant mental activity of some kind, because their EEGs aren’t that different from ours. I expect the content of their consciousness is mostly pictures and probably sounds, too. Animals might even have conscious “thoughts” of smells, touch, or taste.
A report in January 2001 about dreaming mice gives us pretty good indirect evidence that animals think in pictures.18 In that study, two researchers, Matthew Wilson, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences in the biology department at MIT, and Kenway Louie, a biology graduate student there, implanted electrodes in the brains of mice, then taught them to run a maze. When they recorded all of the mice’s neural firings they found the brain wave patterns were so precise they could see in the recordings exactly what a mouse was doing at any given moment: making the first turn left, making the first turn right, running down the first passageway or the second passageway, and so on.
Later on, when the mice were asleep and had gone into the REM phase, Wilson and Louie recorded the exact same firing pattern the mice had shown when they were awake and running the maze. The sleep firings were so exact the researchers could tell where in the maze each mouse was, at any given moment, in his dreams. Since people dream in pictures during REM sleep, this is pretty good evidence that animals dream in images, too. There’s no way to know for sure that Wilson and Louie’s dreaming mice were seeing images of the maze, since the only way to know what pictures anyone is seeing in a dream is to wake him up and ask him. Of course you can’t do that with a mouse. But the fact that the dreaming mice were firing the exact same sequence their brains fired when their eyes were open is a good reason to suspect that mice, like people, see pictures when they dream. It’s not a huge leap to assume they probably think in pictures when they’re awake.
ANIMAL SPECIALISTS
Animals are probably cognitive specialists. Some animals, like the Holsteins, are manipulation specialists. Dogs are smell experts. Other animals, like pigeons, are visual specialists.
Some bird and mammal species that have to remember where they’ve hidden their food are memory specialists and have extra large brain areas devoted to visual memory. The Clark’s nutcracker, a type of crow, buries as many as thirty thousand pine seeds in the fall in a two-hundred-square-mile area, then finds over 90 percent of them during the winter.
Compared to animals and people with autism, normal humans are generalists. Typical people are usually good at some things and bad at others, but a person who’s really smart in one subject tends to be really smart in a lot of subjects. There is one exception to this, which is that gifted children have greater variability on their IQ test sub-scores than children with normal intelligence. But it’s not a case of gifted children being brilliant at some tasks and hopeless at others. They’re still highly intelligent overall, and they do extremely well on all the different IQ tests, not just on one or two of them.
One important piece of evidence that may support the idea that people are generalists while animals are specialists is the new findings on g or general intelligence (also called general fluid intelligence). The idea of general intelligence, which is what classic IQ tests measure, has been controversial. People like the psychologist Howard Gardner emphasized multiple intelligences over one single, general intelligence, and some psychologists have rejected the idea of g altogether.
But new brain research supports the idea that g exists, and that it’s localized to one spot in the brain: the lateral prefrontal cortex, an area at the top of your head and off to the side that handles working memory, abstract thought, and response inhibition, which is stopping yourself from doing something you’re on track to do, like answering the phone when it rings. If you’ve decided not to answer the phone while you fix dinner, your lateral prefrontal cortex has to block the impulse to pick up the receiver every time you hear the phone ring.
Jeremy Gray from Washington University, one of the researchers on the g study, found that the higher a subject’s general intelligence, the higher the activity level in his lateral prefrontal cortex. Dr. Gray told the New York Times that the hardest IQ tasks he used in the experiment are like “trying to remember a new 10-digit telephone number while listening to people who are having an interesting conversation.”19
This finding fits in with behavioral research showing that being able to integrate a lot of information is a big part of being “school smart.” Jennifer Symon, a graduate student working with Bob and Lynn Koegel, did a really interesting study comparing “regular” schoolchildren to children whose teachers said they were gifted.20 She found that the gifted kids were much better at doing multifaceted tasks. She tested the children using tasks that increased in complexity. In the one-component task a child was given four bears that were identical in every respect except color, and asked to choose the blue bear. To do this the child had to pay attention to only one element of the task, color. In the two-component task children chose among items that varied along two dimensions, like bears and dogs in different colors. The researcher would ask them to pick the green dog. A typical three-component task asked the child to pick the “big polka dot circle,” and a four-component task asked them to pick two objects, such as the big teddy bear and the little square, that added up to four components altogether.
Dr. Symon found that by age three the gifted children could do four-component tasks—tasks where they had to pay attention to and pull together four different things in order to succeed. The regular kids couldn’t do four-component tasks until they were six.
No one has tried to find g in an animal or bird brain yet, and I don’t know what we’ll see when they do. For now, since animals—especially domestic animals—as a group have a smaller and weaker prefrontal cortex, I’m assuming they probably have weaker general intelligence. That probably opens the door for them to become super-specialists, which I’ll talk about in the next chapter. For now I’ll just say that I think the kind of specialization I see in animals and in autistic people probably depends on having a weaker prefrontal cortex.
THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT
There are definitely times when normal people’s high level of general intelligence makes them too smart for their own good. My favorite example is the rats who beat the humans in a lever-pressing task. Years ago someone decided to compare rats to humans in the kind of standard operant conditioning task experimenters usually do only with animals. (Remember, operant conditioning means the animal or person gets a reward when he does what the experimenter wants him to do.) The rats and the humans had to look at a TV screen and press the lever anytime a dot appeared in the top half of the screen. The experimenter didn’t tell the human subjects that’s what they were supposed to do; they had to figure it out for themselves the same way the rats did.
The experiment was set up so that 70 percent of the time the dot was in the top of the screen. Since there wasn’t any punishment for a wrong response, the smartest strategy was just to push the bar 100 percent of the time. That way you’d end up getting a reward 70 percent of the time, even though you didn’t have a clue what the pattern was.
That’s what the rats did. They just kept pressing the bar every time the screen changed.
But the humans never figured this out. They kept trying to come up with a rule, so sometimes they’d press the bar and sometimes they wouldn’t, trying to figure it out. Some of them thought they had come up with a rule, which they then used to tell them when to press the bar and when not to press the bar. But they were deluded. They hadn’t come up with the rule at all, and the rats ended up with lots more rewards than the humans.
I believe the rats did better than the humans either because of weaker frontal lobes or because rats don’t have language or both. One thing we do know about humans is that the left brain, which is the conscious language part of the brain, always makes up a story to explain what’s going on. Normal people have an interpreter in their left brain that takes all the random, contradictory details of whatever they’re doing or remembering at the moment, and smoothes everything out into one coherent story. If there are details that don’t fit, a lot of times they get edited out or revised. Some left brain stories can be so far off from reality that they sound like confabulations.
The interpreter probably got in the way on the lever-pressing experiment. The human subjects kept trying to come up with a story about the dots, and when they did come up with a story they stuck to it. Then the dot story kept them from realizing they should just forget about the dots and press the lever every time the screen changed.
ANIMAL WELFARE: TAKING CARE OF ANIMALS THE WRONG WAY
Working in animal welfare, I constantly have to reason with normal humans who are too smart for their own good.
My most important contribution to the field has been to take the idea behind Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point analysis, or HACCP (pronounced hassip), and apply it to the field of animal welfare. The animal welfare audit I created for U.S. Department of Agriculture is a HACCP-type audit.
My HACCP system works by analyzing the critical control points in a farm animal’s well-being. I define a critical control point as a single measurable element that covers a multitude of sins. For instance, when I’m auditing the animals on a farm, one thing I want to know is whether the animals’ legs are sound. There are a lot of things that can affect a cow’s ability to walk: bad genes, poor flooring, too much grain in the feed, foot rot, poor hoof care, and rough treatment of the animals. Some regulators will try to measure all of these things, because they think a good audit is a thorough audit.
But that’s not my approach. I measure one thing only: how many cattle are limping? That’s all I need to know, just how many cattle are limping. That one measurement covers the multitude of sins that can cause cattle to go lame. If too many animals are limping, the farm fails the audit and that’s it. The only way the farm can pass the next audit is to fix whatever it is that’s making their animals lame. If management knows what the problem is, they can get busy fixing it. If they don’t know what the problem is, they have to hire someone who can tell them, and then fix it.
For my animal welfare audit, I came up with five key measurements inspectors need to take to ensure animals receive humane treatment at a meatpacking plant:
I also have a list of five acts of abuse that are an automatic failure:
This is all you need to know to rate animal welfare at a meatpacking plant. Just these ten details. You don’t need to know if the floor is slippery, something regulators always want to measure. For some reason whenever you start talking about auditing the plants everybody turns into an expert on flooring. I don’t need to know anything about the flooring. I just need to know if any of the cattle fell down. If cattle are falling down, there’s a problem with the floor, and the plant fails the audit. It’s that simple.
The plants love it, because they can do it. The audit is totally based on things an auditor can directly observe that have objective outcomes. A steer either moos during handling or he does not.
Another important feature of my audit: people can remember two sets of five items. That level of detail is what normal working memory is built to hold on to.21
But I find that people in academia and often in government just don’t get it. Most language-based thinkers find it difficult to believe that such a simple audit really works. They’re like the people in the lever-pressing experiments; they think simple means wrong. They don’t see that each one of the five critical control points measures anywhere from three to ten others that all result in the same bad outcome for the animals.
When highly verbal people get control of the audit process, they tend to make five critical mistakes:
All five of these mistakes hurt the animals. When you make the audit process more complicated, the auditors veer off into all the fine detail that goes into making a humane slaughterhouse, which leads to wanting to micromanage the plants. Instead of looking at outcomes to the animals, they want to tell the plant how to build its floors. Then they want to send auditors out to inspect the construction to make sure the floors are right. The animal gets lost in the confusion. I don’t care about floors. I care about cows. Are they falling down? That’s all I need to know.
The other thing that happens is that auditors lose track of what’s important. If you give an auditor a 100-item checklist, he’ll tend to treat 50 of the items as if they’re major, whereas maybe only 10 items are so critical that if the plant fails any one of those 10 it should fail the audit, period. When a plant fails 1 critical item out of 10, it’s easy to fail the whole plant. But when it fails that same item on a list of 100, it doesn’t look so bad.
Even worse, an auditor working with a long, overly complicated checklist can miss the huge problems completely, even though they’re on the list. A friend of mine told me a horrible story about a plant where the stunning equipment wasn’t working right, and they had live animals hanging from hooks going down the slaughter line. The USDA inspector missed it. He got focused on some worker who was whacking the pigs too hard on the butt, and he wrote them up for that. Meanwhile the plant had a hideous, enormous problem of live animals on the slaughter line that ought to mean an automatic fail. The inspector didn’t see it, or maybe he did see it but it didn’t register on him.
I think this kind of blindness must have to do with the limits on normal human perception. Somehow, when an inspector has to audit 100 different aspects of a plant’s functioning, he stops seeing the lady in the gorilla suit. I’m not saying it’s okay to be whacking the pigs, of course. It’s not, and it should be corrected. But when the audit checklist is too long, auditors start hyper-focusing on small details and missing the great big details that matter the most.
I’ve seen this happen many times. About a year ago I visited plants in Europe, where the plants and the inspectors were supposed to continuously monitor and improve 100 different items on a checklist. The plants were horrible.
Sometimes the standards that verbal thinkers want to include aren’t even connected to reality. For instance, I’ve been working with KFC—Kentucky Fried Chicken—to raise standards for animal welfare in the poultry industry, and one of the standards an abstract, verbal thinker will want to put on the audit form is that the lights have to be off for at least four hours every night. Well, how am I going to get out to the farm at 3:00 A.M. to make sure the lights are off? I’m not. And I’m not going to trust the paperwork.
What I need to audit isn’t the lights, it’s the outcome of turning off the lights to the chickens’ welfare. The lights have to be off because darkness slows down a baby chick’s growth. Today’s poultry chicken has been bred to grow so rapidly that its legs can collapse under the weight of its ballooning body. It’s awful. Darkness slows down the baby chick’s growth just enough to prevent this from happening, so getting those lights off is important, because lameness is a severe problem in chicken welfare. I’ve been to farms where half of the chickens are lame. When I audit a chicken farm, what I want to know is, can the chickens on this farm walk? If the chickens are lame, something is wrong, and the farm fails the audit.
And I strongly object to paper audits, because anyone can change his paperwork if he wants to. However, a plant can’t falsify things I can directly observe. I don’t want to see the maintenance records on the stunner. If the stunner is well maintained, it’s going to work. That’s all I need to know. I’ve measured broken wings on chickens. I want to see the animals.
The other dangerous thing about paper audits and 100-item checklists is that they can set you up for a situation of things slowly getting worse without anyone knowing it. When you drift away from the animals themselves and start auditing the paperwork, the bad can become normal pretty quickly.
I want to stress this point. Maintaining animal welfare standards in a meatpacking plant is an ongoing responsibility. The whole principle of HACCP is that you have to keep measuring standards and compliance or everything goes bad on you. It’s kind of like maintaining your weight: you have to keep on top of it. Paper audits end up masking small, incremental declines in standards that result in very large drops in animal welfare.
Unfortunately, to an abstract verbal thinker, a list with 100 different animal welfare items sounds more caring than a list with only 5. But I can prove beyond question that animals in plants undergoing 10-question audits are handled much more humanely than animals in plants undergoing 100-question audits. And it’s not just that plants using my checklist do well on the big details. They also do better on the smaller details, because the smaller details are part of the big ones.
Even though my list contains only five critical control points, it is so strict that most plants thought they wouldn’t be able to pass. But then McDonald’s started auditing the plants. In 1999 they threw a major plant off the approved supplier list for flunking the audit, and they suspended some other plants. After that the industry got religion, and boy has the cattle handling changed. Let me tell you, you go out there now and they’re handling the cattle nice. All of the plants being audited using my list treat their animals better than plants using 100-item checklists.
Most large plants are now audited by restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s International. Just four years after McDonald’s began requiring its suppliers to audit their plants according to my standards, almost every plant is passing easily. Now when you go into a plant it’s like a magical change. I think of all the years up to 1999 as the pre-McDonald’s era and the years since then as the post-McDonald’s era. Up until 1999 the plants might buy the best equipment, but they didn’t manage it. They’d let stuff break, and they didn’t spend enough time and money training and supervising their staff or firing people who needed firing. Then as soon as McDonald’s started auditing, they were hitting up my Web page to learn the stuff they had to do. There were light-years of change.
For the twenty-five years up to 1999 I’d been putting equipment into plants. Some of the plants used it right, but others just tore it up and ruined it. Now my equipment is perfectly maintained and there’s nothing broken on it anywhere. For the first twenty-five years of my career I was a hardware engineer; now finally I’m installing the management software. Training those auditors: that’s the software installation for the hardware I put into half the plants in North America.
My simple five-point checklist works beautifully. But even though it works, and even though I can show that animals being audited by 100-point checklists are being handled poorly, I have to fight constantly to keep it in place.
DO ANIMALS TALK TO EACH OTHER THE WAY PEOPLE DO?
Those are fighting words in the fields of animal and linguistic research. A lot of people are emotionally invested in the idea that language is the one thing that makes human beings unique. Language is sacrosanct. It’s the last boundary standing between man and beast.
Now even this final boundary is being challenged. Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University has done some of the most amazing studies in animal communication and cognition.22 Using sonograms to analyze the distress calls of Gunnison’s prairie dog, one of five species of prairie dogs found in the U.S. and Mexico, he has found that prairie dog colonies have a communication system that includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They can tell one another what kind of predator is approaching—man, hawk, coyote, dog (noun)—and they can tell each other how fast it’s moving (verb). They can say whether a human is carrying a gun or not.
They can also identify individual coyotes and tell one another which one is coming. They can tell the other prairie dogs that the approaching coyote is the one who likes to walk straight through the colony and then suddenly lunge at a prairie dog who’s gotten too far away from the entrance to his burrow, or the one who likes to lie patiently by the side of a hole for an hour and wait for his dinner to appear. If the prairie dogs are signaling the approach of a person, they can tell one another something about what color clothing the person is wearing, as well as something about his size and shape (adjectives). They also have a lot of other calls that have not been deciphered.
Dr. Slobodchikoff was able to interpret the calls by videotaping everything, analyzing the sound spectrum, and then watching the video to see what the prairie dog making a distress call was reacting to when he made it. He also watched to see how the other prairie dogs responded. That was an important clue, because he found that the prairie dogs reacted differently to different warnings. If the warning was about a hawk making a dive, all the prairie dogs raced to their burrows and vanished down into holes. But if the hawk was circling overhead, the prairie dogs stopped foraging, stood up in an alert posture, and waited to see what happened next. If the call warned about a human, the prairie dogs all ran for their burrows no matter how fast the human was coming.
Dr. Slobodchikoff also found evidence that prairie dogs aren’t born knowing the calls, the way a baby is born knowing how to cry. They have to learn them. He bases this on the fact that the different prairie dog colonies around Flagstaff all have different dialects. Since genetically these animals are almost identical, Dr. Slobodchikoff argues that genetic differences can’t explain the differences in the calls. That means the calls have been created by the individual colonies and passed on from one generation to the next.
Is this “real” language? A philosopher of language might say no, but the case against animal language is getting weaker. Different linguists have somewhat different definitions of language, but everyone agrees that language has to have meaning, productivity (you can use the same words to make an infinite number of new communications), and displacement (you can use language to talk about things that aren’t present).
Prairie dogs use their language to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.
Their language probably has productivity, too, since they can apply the same adjectives to different animals. Dr. Slobodchikoff has also done some interesting experiments to see what calls prairie dogs would make to an object they’d never seen before.
He built three plywood silhouettes, a skunk, a coyote, and a black oval, and dragged them through the prairie dog colony on a pulley. The prairie dogs gave alarm calls to all three objects, and each prairie dog used the same call for the same plywood object. These calls weren’t invented on the spot, either. At least one of the calls—for the plywood coyote—was a variant of an old call Dr. Slobodchikoff had already recorded them using. That’s more evidence the prairie dogs were combining their old “words” to describe something new.
Another interesting finding: all three plywood objects were new to the prairie dogs, but the prairie dogs used different calls to identify each one. Dr. Slobodchikoff says that means it’s unlikely the prairie dogs were simply using a rote call meaning “something new is coming.” He also says that the prairie dogs seem to be using transformational rules to create their calls. In human language, a transformational rule allows you to turn words into sentences that make sense. The person listening to you uses the same rules to decode what you’re saying. The prairie dogs seem to have a transformational rule based on speed. Depending on how fast a predator is moving, they speed up their calls or slow them down.
We don’t know yet whether the prairie dogs ever use their calls to talk about things that aren’t present. But since other animals have used language to talk about things that aren’t present, there’s no reason to assume prairie dogs can’t do it, too. Some of the apes whom researchers have trained in English over the years have used their words to talk about food that was in another room and not visible, which is spatial displacement, and at least two of them have used signs to ask about animal companions who had been taken away from them to go to the vet. I think it’s unlikely that Dr. Slobodchikoff’s prairie dogs would have nouns, adjectives, verbs, semanticity, and productivity without also being able to use their calls to communicate about something that is not immediately present.
WHY PRAIRIE DOGS?
From what we know now, it seems prairie dogs’ ability to communicate may be greater than that of animals with more complex brains, including the primates. Why would prairie dogs develop more complex calls than the monkeys? Maybe because they had to. Prairie dogs are super-prey—there’s almost no meat eater in the vicinity of prairie dog burrows that doesn’t eat them. Dr. Slobodchikoff’s list of prairie dog predators is so long it has animals on it most people have never even heard of: “coyotes, foxes, badgers, golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, ferruginous hawks, harriers [a kind of hawk], black-footed ferrets, domestic dogs, domestic cats, rattlesnakes, and gopher snakes.”23 For eight hundred years Native Americans hunted prairie dogs for food, and today humans hunt them for target practice and sport.
To make things worse, prairie dogs live in the same burrows for hundreds of years. That means every single predator in the vicinity knows exactly where to find them. It also means the prairie dogs get to know the local predators on an individual basis. All told, it’s likely prairie dogs are so vulnerable they had to develop a really good system of communication to survive as a species. Dr. Slobodchikoff speculates that instead of looking for animal language in our closest genetic relatives, the primates, we should look at animals with the greatest need for language in order to stay alive.
If he’s right, that’s probably another blow to the idea that human language is unique. If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what’s unique about language isn’t the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What’s unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.
THE MUSIC LANGUAGE
I think it’s likely that the language of the prairie dogs is a musical language. Dr. Slobodchikoff used special computer programs to analyze the prairie dog calls and found that the calls had different frequency ratios, which he thinks are patterns the prairie dogs created. He theorizes that frequency ratios may form patterns. To put it in simpler language, the calls are different pieces of music.
Sophie Yin at the University of California, Davis, found something similar in analyzing thousands of dog barks. Her analysis shows that dogs have different barks depending on the circumstances.24 When a dog spots a stranger its barks are rapid and urgent. When a dog is playing, its barks are slower and richer in harmony. No one knows what those harmonies mean, but the fact that they vary consistently depending on the dog’s situation tells me they likely have meaning to another dog. Dogs are also highly sensitive to tone of voice, which is the musical part of language.
Some scientists such as Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist at MIT who wrote the books The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, think music is just evolutionary baggage with no real purpose, but so many birds and animals create music that it doesn’t make sense to me that music could simply be so much evolutionary baggage.25 And if music is just evolutionary baggage, then why does the brain have different areas to analyze the five different components of music? Studies of patients with brain damage have shown that the five distinct brain-processing systems for music are melody, rhythm, meter, tonality, and timbre. My hypothesis is that music is the language of many animals.
Brain scan studies are beginning to offer some support for this idea. A study reported in Nature Neuroscience found that the same brain area that understands spoken language—Broca’s area—also understands music. That’s a big finding, because cognitive scientists have always believed that Broca’s area handles language and nothing else. So far researchers seem to be interpreting the new findings as possibly meaning that Broca’s area may be specific not to language but to processing the “implicit rules that organize complex information, such as music and language” instead.26
But I think the explanation could be that cognitive scientists were right in the first place. Maybe Broca’s area does handle language exclusively, and maybe that’s why it also handles music, because music is a language, too—or it could be. It’s possible that music, or something like it, once was the human language, and maybe it still is the language of birds and animals.
One thing that makes me believe this is high-functioning autistic people who’ve told me that when they were children echoing sentences they’d heard on TV, they didn’t know that the meaning was in the words. They thought all the meaning was in the tone. I can relate to that, because tone of voice is the only social cue I pick up easily. I also know of at least one parent who could communicate with her autistic daughter only through singing. If the mom sang, “Set the table now,” her daughter understood. If the mom said, “Set the table now,” her daughter didn’t understand. She got the meaning through the music. I wonder whether this is a case of autistic people falling back on earlier, animal forms of communication that are closer to music.
Probably all parents communicate with babies through music. Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto points out that lullabies are found in every culture, and parents speak to babies in singsong musical baby talk. She thinks music is a special communication channel between parent child.27
Last but not least, my mother has told me that the reason she knew I could be worked with was that she realized I was humming Bach along with her while she was playing it on the piano. I was two years old and not talking, and I was doing things like ripping the wallpaper off the wall and eating it. I hadn’t been diagnosed, but my mom knew something was drastically wrong, because I wasn’t developing like the little girl next door who was my same age. But I could hum Bach.
All of these things make me believe there’s a connection between music and language.
Scientifically speaking, I think we have some indirect support for this idea. DNA research on African tribes who speak click languages, languages in which the meaning comes from a change in tone, shows that tonal languages were probably the first language early humans spoke. Mandarin Chinese is also a tonal language. Tonal language isn’t considered to be the same thing as music, but researchers who are studying nonnative speakers’ ability to hear tone changes in Mandarin Chinese have found that music students outperform nonmusic students.28
We also have good evidence that music developed in animals long before humans evolved. That evidence comes from a study of animal music by a pianist named Patricia Gray of the National Music Arts program and five biological scientists that was published in the prestigious journal Science. The authors write, “The fact that whale and human music have so much in common even though our evolutionary paths have not intersected for 60 million years, suggests that music may predate humans—that rather than being the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene.”29
Animals are the originators of music and the true instructors. Humans probably learned music from animals, most likely from birds. More evidence that humans copied music from birds, rather than reinventing it for themselves: only 11 percent of all primate species sing songs.
Mozart was definitely influenced by birdsong. He owned a pet starling, and in his notebooks he recorded a passage from the Piano Concerto in G Major as he had written it, and as his pet starling had revised it. The bird had changed the sharps to flats. Mozart wrote, “That was beautiful” next to the starling’s version. When his starling died, Mozart sang hymns beside its grave and read a poem he had written for the bird. His next composition, “A Musical Joke,” has a starling style.30 If a musical genius like Mozart admired and learned from a bird, it seems extremely likely early humans learned from birds when they were inventing the first human music.
Animal music is another case where human researchers are reluctant to say animals can do the same thing humans can do—animals can create music. Even Patricia Gray uses the phrase “musical sounds,” not “animal music.” Still, everyone agrees that individual elements of animal music are the same as individual elements of human music. Humpback whale songs contain repeating refrains the same way human songs do, and some whale songs rhyme. Whales probably use rhymes for the same reason people do, which is that rhymes help you remember what comes next in your poem or song. At Cornell University, Linda Guinee and Katy Payne (Katy Payne is the person who discovered that elephants use infrasonic sound to communicate) have found that long, complicated whalesongs are much more likely to rhyme than the shorter, easier songs.
Birds compose songs that use the same variation in rhythms and pitch relationships as human musicians, and can also transpose their songs into a different musical key. Birds use accelerandos, crescendos, and diminuendos, as well as many of the same scales composers use all over the world.
Animals and humans also have similar musical tastes. Rats and starlings can distinguish between “good” chords that sound consonant and dissonant chords that sound “bad.” Luis Baptista, curator and chairman of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences until his death in 2002, has a tape of a white-breasted wood wren in Mexico singing the exact opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’s unlikely that bird ever heard a recording of Beethoven’s symphony before he sang it himself. The music that sounds beautiful to us also sounds beautiful to birds, and the bird composed the same theme.
Researchers also agree that animal song is highly complex, which makes it a good candidate for being a true animal language. Most animal communication researchers think animal calls are too simple to be real language. But nobody thinks animal song is simple. It could have the complexity to serve as a true animal language. To give just one example, it’s likely that birds invented the sonata. A sonata begins with an opening theme, then changes that theme over the body of the piece, and finally ends with a repetition of the opening theme. Ordinary song sparrows compose and sing sonatas. A music psychologist named Diana Deutsch at the University of California at San Diego divides the sounds humans make into three categories: music, speech, and paralinguistic utterances like laughter or groans. She thinks animal calls are like our paralinguistic utterances but says, “When we come to birdsong, with its elaborate hierarchical patterning, it seems that [human] music provides a better analogy.” In other words, animal music is music.31
Researchers who study animal songs say that animals use their songs to defend territory and attract mates, but I think animals probably use tone language to do more than that. We know music is deeply linked with emotions, because it lights up the emotional centers in the middle of the brain and even deep down in the cerebellum, which is the oldest part of the brain. A brain scan study by Carol Krumhansl of Cornell University found that music with a fast tempo played in a major key turned on the same physiological changes that happen when a person feels happy (such as faster breathing), while music in a minor key and a slow tempo produced the physiological changes that happen when you feel sad (slower pulse, higher blood pressure, drop in temperature).32
Maybe animals use tone to convey complex emotions to one another.
GIVING ANIMALS THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
The fact is, we don’t know very much about animal communication and animal language. If the history of animal research is anything to go on, we probably don’t even know what we think we know, since every time researchers think they’ve proved animals can’t do something along comes an animal who can. In animal communication and language, as in every other field of animal research, animals are going to turn out to be more capable than we know.
On the subject of animal communication, the debate comes down to two camps: people who think human language and animal communication are two separate and distinct things, and people who think human language and animal communication are on the same spectrum. Researchers who believe animal language is on a spectrum with human language believe that animal language might turn out to be simpler than human language, the way a two-year-old’s language is simpler than a grown-up’s, but it’s still language. The difference is quantitative, not qualitative.
I vote with the spectrum people. I also believe animal researchers should change their paradigm. We’ve seen so many animals do so many remarkable things that it’s time to start from the assumption that animals probably do have language rather than that they don’t. The questions you ask set limits on the answers you find, and I think we’ll learn more if we give animals the benefit of the doubt.
I’m going to end with a story about Alex. Dr. Pepperberg stays out of the language wars. She never says Alex has language, and she says she never will. I think that’s probably more because she wants to stay out of the crossfire than because she thinks the language Alex has learned isn’t “real.” I say this because currently she is trying to see if Alex can disprove Noam Chomsky’s latest proposal for what makes human language unique.
Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser, and W. Tecumseh Fitch published an article in Science in 2002 arguing that humans are the only animals to have a language that is recursive. Loosely defined, recursive means that humans use rules to combine individual sounds and words into an infinite number of different sentences with different meanings.33
But Dr. Pepperberg points out that both dolphins and parrots can understand recursive sentences. Dolphins can handle sentences like “Touch the surfboard that is gray and to the left” versus “Swim over the Frisbee that is black and to your right.” Apparently Noam Chomsky and his colleagues think that doesn’t count, because the dolphins aren’t creating these sentences; they’re just understanding them. How any scientist can assume he knows for a fact that a dolphin doesn’t produce recursive sentences in real life is a mystery to me.
Not very long ago, Dr. Pepperberg began trying to teach Alex and another gray parrot, Griffin, to sound out phonemes, which are the sounds that letters and letter combinations represent. English has forty phonemes altogether. She and her colleagues wanted to see if the birds understood that words are made out of letters that could be recombined to make other words, so they started training the birds with magnetic refrigerator letters.
One day their corporate sponsors were visiting Dr. Pepperberg’s lab, and she and her staff wanted to show off what Alex and Griffin could do. So they put a bunch of colored plastic refrigerator letters on a tray and started asking Alex questions.
“Alex, what sound is blue?”
Alex made the sound “Sssss.” That was right; the blue letter was “S.”
Dr. Pepperberg said, “Good birdie,” and Alex said, “Want a nut,” because he was supposed to get a nut whenever he gave the right answer.
But Dr. Pepperberg didn’t want him sitting there eating a nut during the limited time she had with their sponsors, so she told Alex to wait, and then asked, “What sound is green?”
The green example was the letter combination of “SH” and Alex said, “Ssshh.” He was right again.
Dr. Pepperberg said, “Good parrot,” and Alex said, “Want a nut.”
But Dr. Pepperberg said, “Alex, wait. What sound is orange?”
Alex got that one right, too, and he still didn’t get his nut. They just kept going on and on, making him sound out letters for his audience. Alex was obviously getting more frustrated by the minute.
Finally Alex lost his patience.
Here’s the way Dr. Pepperberg describes it: Alex “gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, ‘Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh.’”
Alex had spelled “nut.” Dr. Pepperberg and her team were spending hours and hours training him on plastic refrigerator letters to see if Alex could eventually be taught that words are made out of sounds, and he already knew how to spell. He was miles ahead of them.
Dr. Pepperberg says, “These kinds of things don’t happen in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize there’s a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains than you might at first imagine.” I would like to add that there is a lot more going on than humans perceive. Dr. Pepperberg and her team are probably the world’s foremost authorities on parrot cognitive abilities, they’ve been working with Alex for twenty years, and yet they had no idea Alex had learned to spell.34
It’s time to start thinking about animals as capable and communicative beings. It’s also time to stop making assumptions. Animal researchers take a lot for granted: “animals don’t have language,” “animals don’t have psychological self-awareness”—you find blanket assertions like this sprinkled throughout the research literature. But the truth is, we don’t know what animals can’t do any better than we know what they can do. It’s hard to prove a negative, and proving negatives shouldn’t be the focus.
If we’re interested in animals, then we need to study animals for their own sake, and on their own terms, to the extent that it’s possible. What are they doing? What are they feeling? What are they thinking? What are they saying?
Who are they?
And: what do we need to do to treat animals fairly, responsibly, and with kindness?
Those are the real questions.