Animal wise : the thoughts and emotions of our fellow creatures

Morell gathers some interesting researchers and profiles their work in animal cognition. She quickly summarizes the field in the introduction, then moves to cover different species in each chapter. Ants, fish, birds/parrots, rats, elephants, captive and wild dolphins, chimpanzees, and dogs are covered. Each chapter doesn't reach over much work in the field; Morell focuses on the work of one researcher in particular.

Animal Wise is easy to read and provides a nice beginning in animal mind research. As a science writer, Morell has a good understanding of what is required to be considered valid, but she does make some interesting cognitive leaps of her own. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw how thorough her personal grasp of the topic was.

I must confess, however, that I put the book down halfway through and was not motivated to pick it up again for a few months. The basic information is there, but it lacked a bit of personality. The comments on the researchers, the mentions of how much the author traveled, the anecdotes - they're entertaining, but not entirely engaging. I read a review galley, so the frequent typos will likely be corrected in the final version.

Overall, it was a good work - better than many on the topic - but needed something just a touch more. ( )

I'd read a fantastic article on animal intelligence by Virginia Morell a couple of years ago on National Geographic. In fact, I mentioned it in one of my recent reviews. When I entered to receive this book from LibraryThing, I didn't realize it was the same author. So when I finally got it, I was excited to find out that it was.

I absolutely loved this book! It was a great introduction to the field of animal cognition, the study of the mental capacities of animals. Now granted, I'm not a huge skeptic on the question of, can animals think? - however, I wasn't much aware of many of the studies happening in the field, beyond the very well-known ones (Jane Goodall's chimps, Alex the grey parrot, etc.). So this book really served as a great way to delve into some of this research.

The breadth of the types of studies covered by Morell is really awesome: she goes from ants, to fish, to birds - some of the "lesser" animals; to elephants, dolphins, great apes; and even dogs. It was really interesting to read not only about the studies themselves, but the researchers who are conducting the studies. They went from being seen as "illegitimate" in the past, because *scoff scoff* animals can't think! - to finally having their work recognized as actual scientific research.

Speaking of "lesser" versus more "evolved" creatures, I thought this was a great reminder, and something I'm probably guilty of myself sometimes:

- There is one more point to be made about animal minds and evolution. Evolution is not a progressive force. Although it was once thought that there was a scale of nature or a Great Chain of Being, with all the fond of life ascending in some orderly, preordained fashion - from jellyfish to fish to birds to dogs and cats to us - this is not the case. We are not the culmination of all these "lesser" beings; they are not lesser and we are not the pinnacle of evolution. [...] Evolution is not linear. It is divergent - which means that we all sit on the limbs of a bushy tree, each species as evolved as the next, the anatomical differences largely a result of ecology and behavior. (p23)

And another thing, which people usually confuse, is that just because some animals have behaviors that seem non-advantageous to us doesn't mean they aren't advantageous to the animal. They probably evolved that way for a purpose. For example, I saw a recent post on Quora asking how sloths have managed to survive despite being such slow movers. The answer was great, starting out with: "Despite? They survive because of their slow movement."

In the Introduction, Morell discusses the short history of the field, which I really enjoyed learning about. In particular, it was interesting to find out how much Darwin had to say about animal intelligence and the similarities to humans. It certainly makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.

Another thing that I'd never considered until I read this book is how an animal actually thinks. We humans think in terms of words, a language, but as far as we know, animals don't have a language so how can they think? Some scientists speculate that they might think graphically, in pictures or animation.

The study of animal intelligence is a tricky thing. There's a history of constantly moving the goal posts of what defines intelligence so that humans can maintain their "special" status. But, as I've previously said, I wonder that if science posits that humans evolved in the same process as any other animal, why is it not possible that other animals also developed traits similar to us - including intelligence, emotions, minds?

- I've also heard it argued that animal emotions are likely very simple and/or vastly different, even "alien," from those of humans (as if species other than us came from another planet). There is simply no evidence to back up such statements. Because evolution is conservative (for instance, human brains and those of all vertebrates, including fish and amphibians, use the same set of chemicals to transit signals), it's more likely that many of our emotions are similar to those of other animals, as de Waal notes. Why, after all, reinvent sensations, such as fear, pain, or love, and the internal states or mental representations that accompany these? (p21)

Even Jane Goodall has ran across these issues in her chimpanzee research:

- Goodall nodded. "Yes, it doesn't make much sense to say they aren't thinking or don't have emotions," she said. "Most of us studying animals in the wild see things like this [Dilly's deception] all the time. But we've learned to be careful. We *can* say, 'If Dilly were a human, we would say she was acting deceitfully.'" To say that Dilly - or any animal - had what we would call subjective or personal experiences would be considered unscientific. Although some animals might have an inner, mental life, we had no way of asking them about it and so could not study it.
I asked Goodall how scientists could possibly get around this dilemma. The rules of the game seemed stacked in such a way as to forever preclude knowing what was in the mind of another creature. Goodall agreed but added that because so many researchers were witnessing similar behaviors (and in a variety of species, not just chimpanzees), she thought the science - the study of animal cognition and emotions - would change. "It has to," she said. "It's just a matter of time." (p8)

Morell is optimistic, saying "But knowing more about the minds and emotions of other animals may help us do a better job of sharing the earth with our fellow creatures and may even open our minds to new ways of perceiving and thinking about our world." (p25) I'm more on the glass half-empty side myself, but I hope I'm wrong. She asks, "And even if an animal could talk, would we listen?" (p73) My answer, sadly, is no.

The book is divided by chapters into each of the various species or groups. I really liked how Morell mentioned common ancestors with humans and the animals she discussed. I spent a lot of time picking out a bunch of quotes that I really liked or responded to, so I'll list them below.

On ants: Nigel Franks, a researcher studying ants, paints little dots on individual ants to be able to identify them. He says, "If they didn't have the little paint spots, we wouldn't see them as individuals. The colors and patterns change our whole outlook on them - which is very intriguing. We humans respond so differently when we see animals as individuals." (p33)

I think we are working at a higher cognitive level, but this is an intriguing thought:

- "The ants provide a cautionary note to us" about our own thought processes, Franks continued. "Could it be that, like the ants, all we have are algorithms in our heads, and we just put a gloss of reasoning on these? That all we're doing is saying to ourselves, 'I think I thought it through?'"
It was a humbling thought. Are our brains really working at a higher cognitive level, or do we just think so because we have a bigger store of instincts, experiences, and memories and have a constant mental monologue, reviewing and revising what we just did? (p47)

On fish:

- "People don't expect much from fish, but that's where they're wrong," [researcher Stefan Schuster] says. "Fish are capable of much more than people think." (p50)

- Although scientists don't understand fully the relationship between cognition and sentience, they know that the two are intertwined - that one ability informs the other. For instance, human athletes sometimes compete even when in great pain; they are aware of the pain, but they choose to ignore it to achieve another goal. Rats also can elect to ignore a painful heat sensor attached to their tails if they smell a cat - it's better for the rat to remain in a frozen position on the hot plate, as it were, than move and expose itself to a predator. Can fish do something like this? And if they are able to experience the sensation of pain, are they mentally conscious of suffering? (p65)

- Pain has been missed in fish, [fish biologist Victoria] Braithwaite thinks, because we humans really do not understand them. Their faces are immobile and don't convey the type of emotional signals we're used to reading. We also have trouble understanding and appreciating what life is like in their aquatic world. (p67)

Morell goes on to talk about how fish gather information as well as communicate. For example, they make a range of calls, including squeaks, squeals, and chirps! Many build nests for their young or sing to woo partners. Either the vocalizations don't fall within our hearing range or it's due to our inability to hear well underwater.

- The sounds of each reef are apparently so unique that the young of some fish can identify where they were hatched and use these noises to find their way home again, although ocean currents carried the fish miles away when they were larvae. (p67)

And on studying emotions in insects:

- Several weeks before my visit, Braithwaite had spoken to a group of human psychologists who wondered if she would next be asking if insects suffer emotionally.
"My response was: Well, shouldn't we have a look? Wouldn't it be interesting to know if insects have some kind of mental representation of pain? And if they don't, why not? It seems very unlikely that insects would have feelings, yet these kinds of emotions have clearly shaped us and other vertebrates. They help us learn to protect ourselves - to say, 'Oh, that really hurts; I really don't want to face that again.' What's wrong with exploring this question in other animals?"
Darwin would have said, "Nothing." He would expect to find some degree of our own senses of pain and suffering in other animals, from primates to insects. For him, all creatures were capable of intense emotions. Even insects could express "anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulations [the sounds crickets, for instance, make by rubbing their back legs together]," he wrote, and made other, grating noises "from distress or fear." He wrote descriptively of the pain animals felt, and their suffering; and he noted that if they suffered unduly they became dispirited, depressed, and lethargic - just like Braithwaite's venom-injected fish. (p72)

On tool-building and birds:

- As amazing as her report was, it also seemed to make sense: chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor that used tools. But our last common ancestor with birds was a reptile that lived about three hundred million years ago. How can we explain the discovery of these ingenious behaviors in creatures so far removed from our evolutionary lineage?
"This is not a trivial matter," [behavioral ecologist Alex] Kacelnik said. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once - that it is not something reserved only for primates or mammals." In other words, creativity and inventiveness, like other forms of intelligence, are not limited to the human line. (p87)

On birds: I found this fascinating!

- No longer hampered by Edinger's bias, scientists in recent years have discovered a remarkable variety of cognitive talents in birds: Clark's nutcrackers have tremendous memories; they can hide up to thirty thousand seeds and find them six months later. Rooks, close relatives of crows, are highly inventive, making and using tools in captivity, even though they don't do this in the wild. Magpies and parrots have a sophisticated understanding of the physical world. At a very young age, they realize that when an object disappears behind a curtain it has not vanished - an ability that children also develop as toddlers. Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror as well, an ability that suggests they are self-aware. Crows and pigeons can recognize and discriminate among human faces; pigeons can also distinguish between cubist and impressionistic styles of painting. One group of birds - bowerbirds, which live in Australia and on the island of New Guinea - even have an artistic sensibility, the only animal in which this has ever been discovered. Greater bowerbirds, for instance, use the illusion of perspective (the method an artist uses to make objects in a painting look far away) when arranging piles of progressively smaller bits of glass and stone in front of their bowers, structures they build of twigs and decorate to attract females for mating. And Kacelnik and others studying the New Caledonian crows have now shown that these crows are able to use various tools in the correct sequence and in the wild may have tool technology cultures that are distinct from one region on the island to another.
Some birds are also psychologically savvy. Western scrub jays understand that sometimes other jays are likely up to no good. The jays stash numerous nuts and seeds for the winter, just as nutcrackers do. If they can, jays will steal each other's caches, too. So a smart scrub-jay that sees another jay watching him hide his nut will return later, alone, and hide the nut elsewhere. (p88)

On rats:

- A room full of laughing rats! Their joyful chirps were ricocheting all around us, but we couldn't hear a bit of it. If there was a moment that encapsulated all that we don't know or miss about animals, for me, this surely was it. It was like being in a foreign country when all the locals break into big guffaws at someone's joke or quip, and you-not speaking the language-can only look on, a passive spectator. (p121)

On elephants:

- Most mammals are born with brains that don't expand much beyond birth; their brains are about 90 percent of their adult weight. Human infants, in contrast, are only about 23 percent of their final capacity — a difference that neuroanatomists explain by our need to learn. Baby elephants, too, have much to learn, and their brain size at birth is around 35 percent of what it will be at maturity. When poachers target the matriarchs or older females — as they often do, because older elephants usually have larger tusks — they also destroy that lifetime of learning and knowledge. For an elephant family, the death of a matriarch must feel like losing an encyclopedia, or an entire library — and for us, the loss makes stopping the poaching even more urgent, if only to protect the experienced matriarchs, who keep their families out of harm's way. (p145)

I was uneasy reading about how the experiments with elephants could affect them mentally since they seem to have long memories. Was glad to see that the researcher had some qualms:

- And, too, there was another experiment McComb staged, using the call of a fifteen-year-old female elephant who had died. She played the deceased elephant's call to her family twice, once three months after her death and again twenty-three months later. They rumbled back to her in greeting, and walked directly to the loudspeaker. "They hadn't forgotten her," McComb said, "but I was uneasy doing that test." It may have left the elephants confused or raised some feelings in them akin to sorrow. (p148)

I didn't have any quotes from the dolphin chapters, I think because I was so engrossed. I think they were probably my favorites in the book. I loved that she started off with the famous Douglas Adams quote, and The Educated Dolphin was such a poignant chapter overall.

It was fascinating to read about testing the great apes. You could see how it is similar to humans taking, say, standardized tests, where it's not only testing intelligence to a certain point but also largely testing how well they take tests! For example, with the silverback gorilla, he has to constantly monitor his troop, which can affect his speed and how well he does on the test.

- "There are so many factors that affect their success at these tasks " added [primatologist Elizabeth] Lonsdorf, who had joined us. Her dark hair spiraled in curls to her shoulders, and she had the kind of direct gaze and patient manner of an ethologist who spends months in the field, focused on her study animals. "Kwan takes longer than the chimpanzees because he has to keep an eye on his females and make sure that Amare's behaving," Lonsdorf continued. "But you can't have Kwan down here alone without his family; silverbacks have to keep an eye on all their members -- that's their job. If you didn't know this, or take it into account, you could conclude that gorillas aren't as good as chimpanzees at this test." (p218)

I was glad to be introduced to Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa, head of the University of Kyoto's Primate Research Institute, who says, "I really do not understand this need for us always to be superior in all domains. Or to be so separate, so unique from every other animal. We are not. We are not plants; we are members of the animal kingdom." (p232)

And finally, to conclude with a bit of Virginia Morell's optimism:

- Old-school skeptics and naysayers ("killjoys," as one prominent philosopher calls them) may dismiss the latest findings on animal intelligence as so much sentimental, romantic anthropomorphizing. But why is it romantic to acknowledge that animals are thinking and feeling beings? Considering the weight of recent scientific evidence, I would argue that it's actually realistic to do so. By embracing this larger understanding of our fellow creatures, we may yet succeed in overcoming the great tragedy of the Sixth Extinction." (p267) ( )

Have you ever thought about what was going on in the mind of your pet dog, a wild elephant, or even that ant scurrying through the grass? We may never know the exact thoughts of these and other animals, but scientists have discovered that there’s a lot going on in the minds of these creatures.

Virginia Morell’s book focuses on what science has discovered about the minds of ten different types of animals including ants, fish, rats, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, and dogs. To find this information, she traveled the world, spending time with researchers who work with these animals. Morell learned that characteristics such as memory, feelings, self-awareness, and personality can be found throughout the animal kingdom, and not just in humans, as many scientists previously thought. For example, rats enjoy being tickled, and giggle when this happens. Dolphins are able to recognize themselves in mirrors. Chimpanzees grieve for their dead. Animals as simple as fruit flies have the basis of a personality, some being more adventurous than others.

In short, if you are interested in animals and what they may be thinking, Animal Wise is definitely a worthwhile read.

Virginia Morell's Animal Wise is an interesting book that never quite coalesces into an excellent one. A thinly linked series of chapters – most covering different animals, but two on dolphins – are fascinating essays on their own, that stop just short of cohesively addressing the book's topic.

Perhaps that's a bit much too expect, as we don't really know what animals are thinking or feeling. But each chapter at a certain portion of each animal's mind and behavior as its own narrow slice, without trying to integrate it with the rest of the animal's actions, and what it could mean for the animal's mind as a whole. Even the two dolphin chapters – one about those in captivity, and one about those in the wild – are largely unlinked.

Which is not to say it wasn't an enjoyable and informative read. The tone is somewhat conversationalist, but never belabors it; the book stays about the animals, and not the author. And I certainly learned a fair amount. ( )

The research reported is not particularly revolutionary but the noteworthy aspect of this book is the positive presentation of the researchers' relationship with their {animal} colleagues. The stories of researcher and subject are rather touching and the part of the book that requires the most reflection. ( )