Sex, Lies, and Humiliated Seabirds
Our two young dogs came from the shelter in springtime. They grew up during the summer, and all during the warm weather they could come and go from the house at will through a propped-open door. They almost never had to ask to be let out. On very rare occasions when the door was closed and they were inside, wanting out, they’d stand by the door; they never barked to get someone to open it. They’d go out for the last time at about ten P.M., then come up to the bedroom, where they’d bed down for the night on their floor pillows. They would rest well until first light, when they’d get active and wake us up. During October of their first year, we were out one evening later than we’d expected, and we fed them unusually late. Disrupted from their usual schedule, at four A.M. they got the urge to go and went downstairs to the door. I became aware of their need because one of them barked several times. They’d never barked to be let out before; they’d never had to. Why would they bark now? They apparently understood that we were upstairs, asleep, and that, having found the door closed downstairs, they needed to get our attention. So they sent a message that we received and understood; that’s the definition of communication.
The first time Patricia drove separately with the dogs to our cottage at Lazy Point, I had been there for several days. When she arrived, Chula did a double take at the sight of my car and immediately went to it, looking for me. I’d gone for a walk, but Chula ran excitedly into each room of the house, hoping—it seemed to Patricia—to find and greet me.
You can’t know what your dog is thinking—except when you can. You both know if you’re about to go for a walk or get into the car; you both understand when you’re preparing to give them some leftovers. True, most of the time I don’t know what they’re thinking. But most of the time I don’t know whether my wife is thinking about how much she loves me or what she’d like for dinner. She can tell me or show me. Love and dinner occur to our dogs, too, but a dog’s ability to tell is limited. Their ability to show is a bit better. But they have whatever thoughts they have, regardless. And we find sufficient currency, in our few words and gestures, our deep affection and trust, for a shared life.
Jude is one of the sweetest dogs I’ve known but not the sharpest. We call him “the poet” because he always seems to be daydreaming, seldom paying attention. At least that’s what I thought. Once day I took him and Chula for a beach run. Halfway down the beach they caught a deer scent and disappeared into the woods atop a bluff. Usually they return in about five minutes. This time their absence stretched to twenty, twenty-five minutes, with me calling the whole time. I finally climbed the bluff. Calling, calling. Nothing. Then I saw Jude back down on the beach, galloping full speed in the direction we’d been headed when they’d bolted.
This was odd. Chula is always ahead of Jude, and Chula is always the first one who comes looking for me. I called Jude, and he immediately stopped and came scrambling up as I scrambled down the vine-tangled slope. On the beach, I leashed him. Now I was worried; where was Chula? Bad possibilities included: an injury, getting taken by someone who thought she was lost (she does wear a tag), a run-in with a car. Minutes peeled off the clock. No Chula. Maybe she’d gone back to the car. Jude has done that twice during lesser separations. I decided I’d walk back to the car, about half a mile, and if I didn’t find Chula, I’d put Jude in the car and come back.
Jude would have none of it. He resisted the change of direction. Very clearly, he wanted to keep going in the direction we’d all been headed. Was this because he was having too much fun? Unlikely. Usually when he’s had this much activity, he’s ready to stay close and go home. His insistence on pressing forward was odd. Then far, far down the beach—farther than we’d ever walked—I saw Chula running very hard, zigzagging. What a relief. But she was running away from us. I called as loud as I could and waved my arms, hoping the wind might help my voice reach her.
She heard and, in an instant, turned, saw me waving, and began running hard toward us. She must have thought that the whole time they were in the woods I’d continued walking in the same direction—as, in fact, I usually do when they run off briefly. Apparently, she’d returned to the beach about where she’d expected to intercept me. By how fast she was running when I saw her, it seemed that she was trying to catch up and find me. Did Jude know she was down there? Did he fear that I was going to abandon Chula? No way to know, but that’s certainly how he acted. Yes, you sweet boy, I’m talking about you (he’s lying next to my desk as I write this). In retrospect, I think the dogs knew what they were doing the whole time; I was the one who’d gotten confused.
We interrupt our days with doggies to bring you a news bulletin from Science magazine titled “Dogs Are No Mind Readers.” Well, who is? This is news? As if an experiment might have shown that dogs are clairvoyant? Purportedly, the article highlights an experiment “which shows that dogs continue to trust unreliable people and therefore lack a so-called theory of mind.” We’re going to forgo the temptation to ask whether clients of Bernie Madoff’s or victims of any petty scammer lack a so-called theory of mind. Does the writer mean to imply that humans never trust unreliable people? Sometimes people apply a weird double standard: we start with the premise that other animals are not as intelligent as humans, then we hold them to a higher standard of performance. And by the way, it’s going to turn out that what the news item says the experiment showed is not what the experiment showed.
The researchers tested two dozen dogs. They used two buckets that smelled equally like food. Only one bucket actually had food in it. Beside each pair of buckets stood a human the dog had never before met. Half of the humans always pointed to the bucket with the treat. Half always pointed to the empty bucket. Over five test sessions, each dog got a total of 100 trials with each kind of human. The truth tellers and liars were mixed among the trials. The dogs followed the pointing of the truth teller more than 90 percent of the time. On the first trial with a liar, they followed the liar’s suggestion only 80 percent of the time, and they took more than twice as long to even approach the person who was lying (14 seconds versus 6 seconds for the truth-telling stranger). Seems pretty doggone intuitive. Over time, the dogs went to the bucket the liar pointed to less and less, as the dogs learned to lose faith in the misinforming people. By the last test session, the dogs were essentially ignoring the deceptive humans and chosing based on chance, about 50-50. The researchers concluded—as would most sane people—that “the dogs were learning to treat the cooperator and deceiver differently.”
But then the researchers spun their result, suggesting that maybe “the dogs stopped trusting humans not because they could intuit what the humans were thinking but merely because they had learned to associate certain humans with a lack of food reward.” What? Wait a minute. No human in this setup would “intuit” what the person was thinking. And here, the person was showing whether they were reliable or not. And the dogs learned who was and who wasn’t. (After all, the dogs had never before encountered a lying human.) But the researchers were saying that the dogs would have to literally read humans’ thoughts in order to “prove” that they have theory of mind. And that’s just absurd. For goodness’ sake.
The researchers somehow failed to see that the dogs actually did prove that they had so-called theory of mind. The dogs understood that a human could know the whereabouts of a treat when the dogs themselves did not know; that is theory of mind. Understanding that some humans’ indications are not reliable: that is theory of mind. It’s not that dogs don’t have a theory of mind; it’s that humans often miss the point. Faced with a lying human, dogs refused to choose either bucket one-fifth of the time. They understood at some level that, in nontechnical terms, something was up, that the humans were messing with them. The researchers somehow concluded that their experiments “offer no support for the idea that dogs understand human intentionality.” So let’s try another experiment: accidentally trip over your dog, then intentionally kick him. See how surely dogs understand intent.
Some experiements say more about the researchers. When researchers can’t intuit the animals’ thoughts or viewpoint, it shows that many humans lack a theory of mind for non-humans. Many animals, though (mammals and birds, for starters), realize that if another animal is looking at them, it sees them. And they realize that their interests don’t always harmonize. (Unless, like Shackleton’s dogs, they’ve learned absolute trust and know only loyalty.)
SHACKLETON’S DECISION
At a certain point he decided they could not afford
the dogs. It was someone’s job to take them one by one
behind a pile of ice and shoot them. I try to imagine
the arctic night which descended and would not lift,
a darkness that clung to their clothes. Some men objected
because the dogs were warmth and love,
reminders of their previous life where they slept in soft beds,
their bellies warm with supper. Dog tails were made
of joy, their bodies were wrapped in a fur of hope.
I had to put the book down when I read about the dogs
walking willingly into death, following orders,
one clutching an old toy between his teeth. They trusted
the men who led them into this white danger,
this barren cold. My God, they pulled the sleds
full of provisions and barked away the Sea Leopards.
Someone was told to kill the dogs because supplies
were running low and the dogs, gathered around
the fire, their tongues wet with kindness, knew
nothing of betrayal; they knew how to sit and come,
how to please, how to bow their heads, how to stay.
—Faith Shearin
No one has ever suggested that tigers have theory of mind. If a tiger had theory of mind, it would know that you can discover that it is stalking you, and that you could act on that realization. Well—they do. In the Sundarbans delta in India, villagers working in the forest defeated a serious problem of tiger attacks by wearing Halloween-type face masks situated backward, so that the eyes and face were on the backs of their heads. Tigers would not attack if they thought they were being watched. Tigers had been killing about one person per week. But after the mask ruse was implemented, no one wearing a mask was attacked, though tigers were seen following mask-wearing humans, and in the same span of time they killed twenty-nine more people not wearing masks. (Talk about old habits dying hard; why didn’t everyone just get a mask?) Like mothers who want the kids to think they have “eyes in the back of their heads,” numerous butterflies, beetles, caterpillars, fishes, and even some birds have prominent “eye spots,” usually in the rear. The spots are an attempt to fool predators into thinking that potential prey is staring back, that they’ve lost the element of surprise. In sum, various predators operate with widespread understanding that prey can sometimes see you trying to sneak up, and that prey can act independently on that knowledge. That is “theory of mind.” It’s precisely why predators are stealthy, why they hide, approach from behind, and so on.
In Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater one morning, I watched a particular lion family wake and rouse, its members greeting each other. Then they walked single file to the ridge of a low, grassy hill. Beyond the hill, about half a mile off, grazed a small group of zebras. With no apparent signal, one lion sat. The others kept walking. Another lion sat. The rest kept walking. Another sat. This continued until the hill was lined by an evenly spaced picket fence of lions sitting upright in tall golden grass facing the distant zebras. One lion had not sat; she went toward the zebras. I’d just watched them set up a well-planned ambush. The walking lion’s job was to frighten the zebras toward the hill. The waiting lions had a commanding field of view from the hiding cover of the tall grass, and a downhill sprint at any zebras that might be forced to run uphill. It seemed tactically exquisite. But the zebras, no fools, detected the stalking lion early—and moved farther away from the hill.
Watch, and you easily see that many creatures’ lives depend on deciding—quickly and correctly—whether a predator is hunting or just traveling, whether a rival feels apprehensive or plans to attack, and that animals make other crucial judgments about the intentions of others.
Richard Wagner’s work involves watching birds living their real lives. We’ve known each other since we were both ten years old. In our twenties, together we studied seabirds and shared great adventures across Kenya. Now we’re sitting in my backyard on a summer day in the shade of maples and he’s telling me about seabirds called razorbills. He’s studied them at their breeding colonies for a long time, watching hour after hour, day upon month upon years. “When you watch razorbills,” he says, “you get to see who the good fighters are, who the good mates are, and who the sluts are. One female found her mate mating with another female. She pushed her mate off. The following day, she encountered that same female. She knew who she was. She lunged at her and pushed her off the rock she was standing on.”
Why would she care—might the male be sneaking a little food to the other female, or to her chicks? “That doesn’t happen,” says Wagner. “I’ve watched them for thousands of hours, and I’ve watched for exactly that. They don’t do it.” The reason for the aggressive behavior, Wagner found, is that the next year the male might run off with the other female. “Copulations this year lead to pair bonds next year. The female mate guards her pair bond. Meanwhile, the male guards his mate to protect his paternity.” Is that how the birds actually think of it? Likely not. But I’ll bet they feel something we’d recognize as jealousy. After all, jealousy—not a probabilistic understanding of evolutionary genetics—motivates humans to guard our own mates.
“The razorbills know each other like kids on the school bus know each other,” Wagner explains. “They don’t make mistakes. Razorbills are social. They see each other every day. They come to the same rock. They can live twenty years! They know who’s flying in before they land. Say a female arrives. Male A mounts her; Male B pushes male A off and mounts her himself. Male C mounts Male B. He’s just seen Male B demonstrate that he’s a male. The mounting isn’t a mistake made in a frenzy. It’s a fighting tactic. The one that got mounted has very publicly been dominated. Turns out, mounting other males helps eliminate competition. The more a male gets mounted by a male, the less he continues to show up on the mating rock. It’s possible that they feel something like what we’d call humiliated. They lose status.” We strive for status, too, but we don’t really understand our drives any more than they do theirs. Status boosts reproduction, but we don’t feel the calculation about lifetime reproductive averages that evolution has made and given to us on a crib sheet called urges. We feel the motivations of jealousy, of status seeking. And we often perform the behaviors we are driven to perform.
While we tend to lack a theory of their minds, other animals seem to have a theory about ours. They know that we can know. One day my good friends John and Nancy noticed a pair of free-living mallard ducks on their lawn. They gave them some bread. The ducks came back the next day. They fed them cracked corn. The ducks became regular lawn visitors. No surprise there. But one day John heard a knock at the door. He opened his front door and looked through the screen door, but apparently whoever was knocking had left. The screen door had a metal lower half, and he heard the knock again and looked down. Now, could a duck that was “not conscious” or “not self-aware” or had “no theory of mind” waddle to the front door and knock?
When a capuchin monkey in Trinidad came away from its group into a tree over our heads and started breaking branches and throwing them at us, it was clear that the monkey saw us, perceived us as potentially dangerous (people hunt them there), and was trying to discourage us from pursuing by intimidating us with hurled branches. It was not clear whether he was intentionally trying to protect his companions, but that was my impression. He was clearly communicating, “Go away.” My doctoral professor Joanna Burger used to watch capuchin monkey interactions at a tiny, nearly dried water hole. The monkeys didn’t like her hiding in an observation blind; they were less disturbed if she remained leaning against a tree, where they could see her. Each day, an hour before dawn when no monkeys were nearby, Joanna filled a plastic tub adjacent to the hole with water she brought in a bucket. When the monkeys came, they could drink from the tub instead of descending so far into the water hole that they couldn’t be seen. While she observed them, the pail was tucked behind a nearby tree. On Joanna’s last day she went for a final brief look but didn’t bother filling the plastic tub because she had no time for observations. Seeing that she had not filled the tub, one monkey went behind the tree, got the bucket, and brought it to her. A clear communication, understanding one another’s understanding.