Dandy, the heron and the beaver each thought its way out of a fix. But until recently few scientists would have been as impressed by any of these feats as they are with, say, chimps that use American Sign Language to name and ask for objects. Now that was thinking. But thanks to a trickle of new books, research and a reexamination of earlier results through a different prism, scientists are beginning to change their thinking about animal thinking. Researchers are trying to get past dolphins that respond to hand gestures from a trainer, or the sea otter that masters transitive thought (if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A…). Instead of asking whether animals can count and learn concepts like category, ethologists are probing a question more profound, and disturbing in its ethics implications: do animals think about thinking? Do they monitor their thoughts rather than just process information? Do they have an inner life, engage in introspection, rather than follow preset learned or genetic rules of behavior like an automaton? Do they, in short, possess that sublime thing called consciousness? And if they do, how should we treat them?
The answers are slow in coming. In part, that is because even asking the questions has long been considered a scientific faux pas. “Animal consciousness is still taboo,” asserts ethologist Donald Griffin in his 1992 book “Animal Minds.” Now at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Griffin says many science journals refuse to publish papers on the possibility of animal consciousness. And researchers whose field observations imply that animals are capable of forming intent–screaming warnings, deceiving their foes–still insist that it’s all just basic instinct. “If you are a young and insecure scientist trying to get grants, a job or tenure, you would be ill advised to get into this,” says the ethologist. “It is no coincidence that even I did not get into it until I was not only tenured but almost retired.” Part of the taboo stems from an insistence that only humans have minds. “When I began in the 1960s,” recalls chimp biologist Jane Goodall, “you couldn’t even ask about animal consciousness. [Even today,] there is strong pressure to make a distinction between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.”
For scientists open to the possibility of consciousness among the beasts of the field, nature is full of epiphanic moments. Animals display forethought and make plans, they show insight into the minds of their kin and kind, and they adapt their behavior to deceive the minds of others. They understand situations in a way that suggests they hold a mental representation of the world, of what was and of what could be, not merely of what is. A few years ago on the plains of Kenya, Griffin watched two lionesses climb little mounds of earth, in full view of two wildebeest herds, and remain as still as statues. A third lioness slinked along a ditch parallel to one herd. Suddenly a fourth lioness darted out from the forest, and the shaggy creatures thundered off toward the other herd–and right over the ditch. The third lioness jumped up, grabbed one of the leaping wildebeests and soon all four hunters were gorging on prime rib. Why would the two lionesses climb to conspicuous positions, if not to keep the wildebeest from stampeding in that direction (away from the lioness in the ditch)? Was it coincidence that a lioness darted from the forest to drive the prey toward the hidden lioness? Or had the big cats figured it all out by fast-forwarding the hunt in their minds?
Few wildlife biologists have seen such cooperative hunting in lions. To them, Griffin’s story is a mere anecdote. And science does not take kindly to anecdote–it demands repeatable examples, sturdy statistics. But when it comes to animal consciousness, habitual behaviors may be just what is not wanted. Something an animal does regularly–the dance of the honeybee, the grooming a low-ranking chimp gives a leader chimp–are more likely to be driven by a simple, learned rule: see leader of pack, stroke and pick out bugs from fur. In these cases, animals have no more consciousness than a thermostat that shuts off the furnace at 70 degrees. That’s why, despite science’s disdain for anecdote, some of the more convincing hints of consciousness come from rare, even unique acts. For unique responses to the unpredictable-call it the challenge of the new-the creature cannot draw on a rule, much less a genetic program. The puzzled critter must make it up as it goes along. “The more we find that an organism is not just following set routines,” says Oxford University biologist Marian Stamp Dawkins in a new book, “Through Our Eyes Only?” “the more plausible it becomes to infer that…[it has] conscious experiences.”
An animal particularly needs original, conscious thought to solve an unprecedented problem on the first try. In 1989, for instance, vandals tore a big bole in a beaver dam, and water rushed out of the pond. Such a cataclysm had never befallen these beavers before. Yet as soon as the adult male awoke and saw the broken dam that evening, he swung into action: he and his recruits dived to the bottom of the pond, collected mud and vegetation, and used it to plug holes from under-water. Beavers seldom patch with underwater gunk; they prefer sticks. But “this time they seemed to recognize that stick piling was ineffective” against the torrent, says Griffin, and altered their normal behavior. The next day, the first thing the male did upon waking was drag a stick from his lodge to the dam. Had he been consciously thinking about his leaky dam? No genetic program, no learned rule, says “wake up and drag stick to dam.” “These animals are not just walking around like the Martian land rovers responding to stimuli,” says Harvard biologist E. 0. Wilson. “They have a mental image of what they want and are able to review the options.”
Animals that make and use tools have gone way beyond basic instinct, too. They must find, work on and manipulate something quite other than food in order to obtain food. Chimps seek out, break and use twigs to dig out termites from a mound, for instance. (Termites to chimps are like chocolate-covered cherries to the scientists who study them.) Sometimes they find rocks that they had last used several days before. and left hundreds of feet away, to crack nuts. “Chimps use many different tools in different situations,” says Goodall, “depending on where they are and what they need to do.” A capuchin monkey presses leaves and mud to the wounded head of her crying baby. Sea otters collect rocks to crack bivalves into oysters on the half shell. Wilson, best known as the father of sociobiology (the theory that even complicated, cultural practices such as incest avoidance are biologically programmed in humans), tells the story of a chimp trying to reach some foliage: “He sat and looked at the tree for a long time, then went over to a log. He dragged it over to the tree, propped it against the trunk, then stood back and charged up his ‘ramp.’ It’s extremely difficult to explain that, other than to say the chimp was consciously thinking.”
None of this is proof positive of consciousness. Griffin laments that “if we were equally rigorous in what proof we demand of consciousness in people, we couldn’t infer conscious thought in each other, either.” Unless we, well, asked. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists tried to teach animals to use sign language, or keyboards, to answer questions like “What’s this?” This yielded all sorts of controversial papers about animals’ grasp of semantics and sentence structure. But when the data-recording cameras were off and the researchers’ pencils went still, the animals exhibited something beyond intelligence. At the University of Arizona, Irene Pepperberg has trained a gray parrot, Alex, to name objects, count them and answer questions about them, such as “What’s same?” or “How many?” Alex gets it right more than 80 percent of the time. More intriguing, though, are the bird’s unprompted outbursts. Once, Pepperberg took Alex to a veterinarian’s office for lung surgery. As she turned to leave–without Alex–he called out, “Come here. I love you. I’m sorry I want to go back.” He thought he had done something bad and was being abandoned as punishment.
The toughest consciousness test asks whether an animal thinks about what another is thinking. Logically, if a creature recognizes that another animal has a mind and thoughts, it likely knows the same about itself. And that would be thinking about thinking-consciousness. That is hard to get at. One way is to explore animal deceit. if an animal tries to deceive another, it probably recognizes that the other can be fooled. When a predator approaches the nest of a piping plover, for instance, the little bird scampers a few yards away and may flop around as though badly injured, in the “broken-wing display,” as if offering itself to the predator. Is the plover consciously trying to lead the intruder away from her eggs? When the intruder is a cow, the plover doesn’t bother trying to lure the herbivore into a hunt. She flies at it like a dive bomber, for cows are more likely to stupidly blunder on the nest than to try to eat the eggs. (Among plovers, cows get no respect.)
Monkeys and apes practice deception, too. When a low-ranking male chimp surreptitiously mates with a high-ranking female, he knows what to do if the dominant male (who has sole mating rights) walks by. The adulterer quickly covers his erect penis. To deceive, an animal must compare what he knows is true–uh-oh, I sneaked a quickie with the leader’s consort–with what he wants others to know. Dandy’s decision to wait until the troop slept before digging the grapefruit out of the sand points to conscious scheming, too. “He had the information and really stewed over how to use it,” says Frans de Waal, now at the Yerkes Primate Center. “It was pretty clear he was being thoughtful.”
Or consider Nikki and Luit, two adult males in de Waal’s colony at the Wisconsin center. During a recent fight, Luit chased Nikki up a tree, then sat, waiting, at the bottom. Luit’s face started forming itself into the “fear grin”–and Luit immediately averted his face, covered his mouth and pressed his lips together. Only when Luit had managed to wipe away the sign of submission did he face Nikki again. Luit, it would seem, was aware of his internal state–nervousness–and of what that would do to Nikki: make him more likely to attack. luit’s actions suggest he monitored his rival’s state of mind and thought he could manipulate it.
Skeptics attack animal consciousness by arguing that the behaviors result from natural selection and learning. Perhaps the chimp covered his penis simply because he had learned to associate its prominence with aggression in the dominant male, not from deeper thought. Maybe Luit learned, fear grin attack. But Wilson says, “It is wrong to say that if a behavior is adaptive–that is, evolutionarily advantageous–it cannot be conscious.”
Scientists, being scientists, have amassed more observations of animals’ mental life than of their emotional life. They are much more comfortable calling the nuzzling of two wolves an attempt to bond, rather than affection. But consider Timmy, a gorilla who lived alone for 23 of his 35 years until he was brought to the Bronx zoo to mate with Pattycake. They hit it off, and P.T. was born. When keepers removed mother and child from the troop for the baby’s health, “Timmy was miserable,” says James Doherty, general curator at the zoo. “He sat around and moaned. He wouldn’t eat.” He checked every crevice of his compound to see if Pattycake might have come back without his noticing. At night he lay awake and rattled at the bars of his cage. “Do they fall in love?” Doherty asks. “Often, it looks a lot like it.” Gorillas are pretty adept at disgust, too. When the zoo’s collections manager, Fred Sterling, gave a raw egg to a gorilla who loved hard-boiled, “He lifted it up and, with a light tap, broke the shell,” says Star. “You could see the disgust cross his face as the egg ran through his fingers. Finally, he picked up his lettuce and covered up the mess.” Chimps seem capable of empathy, something that eludes even children younger than 3 or so. “After a fight they will go over to the loser and put an arm around it or groom it to alleviate its stress,” says de Waal. “If that is empathy, there’s a good chance that implies real self-awareness: psychologists have made the link between empathy and self-awareness pretty clearly.”
What makes these more than “amazing animal stories” is that they go beyond cute and clever. They point to a mind that does not act reflexively but weighs options, that recognizes beliefs in others, that can conceive possible futures. Some animals are capable of more than rote learning and instinct; they think about what they know. And what clearer sign of an inner life is there? For every dog lover who knew it all the time, there are just as many others who squirm at the implications. “If you admit [animals have] sentience and emotion,” says Goodall, “you have to take a long hard look at how we abuse them.” There is a world of examples of animal consciousness. Maybe, finally, science is ready to see them.
