Review of Are We Smart Enough.doc

Jacobs, G. M. (2017, May). [Review of the book Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? by Frans de Waal]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/humananimalstudiesnewzealand/posts/1411583718880939 2016 was a banner year for books that used layperson-accessible language to review scientific evidence that nonhuman animals are indeed sentient beings with their own unique cognition and affect. These books represent just the tip of a growing (and not melting) iceberg of research in this area. For instance, What a fish knows: The inner lives of our underwater cousins (Balcombe, 2016) reviewed research on fishes, and The genius of birds (Ackerman, 2016) did the same for birds. While both those books speak about the specific group of animals in the books’ titles, as well as to the larger picture of animal sentience, the book reviewed here – Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? – offers a more comprehensive view, although de Waal’s background in primatology does lead to a disproportion number of primate examples. All these books provide essential impetuses for the paradigm shift in scientists’ (and, hopefully, the general public’s) view of our fellow animals. One key understanding is that we should attempt to understand a species’ intelligence only within that species’ own context, or umwelt: the animal’s “self-centered subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds” (p. 8). Thus, we need to honour the complex cognitive capacities of other animals based on those beings’ umwelt not because of how their capacities and behaviours appear to be similar to those of humans. Given de Waal’s long career as a researcher and author on ethology, i.e., the study of animal behaviour, he has had first-hand experience with many of the shifts in the field, as humans’ place atop a supposed animal hierarchy has been increasingly challenged. For instance, in a TED Talk, de Waal (2012) described some of this ethological research and the thinking behind it, as well as some of the negative reactions from scholars who believed that the term ‘animal intelligence’ was an oxymoron and anyone who talked about cognition in animals was guilty of being. On page 5 of Are we smart enough, he explained: I love the history of my field—but the two dominant schools of thought viewed animals as either stimulus-response machines out to obtain rewards and avoid punishment or as robots genetically endowed with useful instincts. There was no need to worry about the internal lives of animals, and anyone who did was anthropomorphic, romantic, and unscientific. Before reading the book, I had heard of de Waal and his work at the Yerkes Primate Centre in the U.S., and I wondered if legitimate research could be done on captive animals. On pages 173-175, de Waal, who also studied animals in the wild, addresses some of the differences in research done with captive and wild animals, with the proviso that the captive animals must live in spacious conditions and have opportunities for social interactions. de Waal contends that while research done in the wild provides insights into how animals live naturally, it is too anecdotal, although it does provide valuable suggestions for research done in more controlled situations where videotaping and other more thorough forms of observation are possible. Comparisons of behaviours in the two settings can lead to new approaches. This is a bit like mixed methods in research with humans. The book uses a narrative format for explaining many of its insights, with an absence of the accoutrements of textbooks, such as chapter previews and summaries, although the book is extensively referenced with a glossary and an index. The chapters are illustrated with drawing, but readers hoping for tables and other graphic organisers will be disappointed. The following paragraphs are a poor and brief attempt to provide chapter summaries and highlights. Chapter 1, Magic Wells, opens by further explaining the concept of umwelt, beginning with Kafka’s novella, The metamorphosis, originally published in 1915, about a human who wakes up as an insect. The chapter’s title comes from a quote by von Frisch (1947), a pioneer in research on animal cognition, who compared the study of bees to a magic well because the more humans learned about bees, the more they found there was still left to learn. von Frisch was largely alone at that time, as research on other animals tended to be “self-congratulatory” (p. 13) towards humans, but de Waal warns that claims about superiority “must be treated with suspicion given how hard it is to prove a negative” (p. 13). Chapter 2, A Tale of Two Schools, contrasts behaviourism, which was the dominant view in psychology generally as well as in the study of nonhuman animals when de Waal was a student, with ethology, which had been the main view previously and is again today. Behaviourism talks about the law of effect; we (yes, humans too) do what we do because we have been shaped by the rewards and punishments that followed our past actions. de Waal recalled a class he took in which the “professor made fun of anyone who believed to what animals ‘want,’ ‘like,’ or ‘feel,’” (p. 30). Are we smart enough contains many fascinating tales of the studies which led to cracks in the behaviourist paradigm. Chapter 3, Cognitive Ripples, provides more tales of the research which led to the construction of a new way of seeing our fellow animals. For instance, tool use and then tool fabrication had been thought to be unique to humans. In 1957, the book, Man the Toolmaker¸ trumpeted this view. de Waal provides details the research that muted that trumpet. Interestingly, as cognitivism was challenging behaviourism in the study of nonhumans, in the study of humans, cognitivism was also causing ripples and emerging as the new dominant paradigm. Chapter 4, Talk to Me, recounts research by pioneers, such Nadia Kohts, in the first half of the 20th century, and Irene Pepperberg, more recently, into the language and other cognitive capacities of animals. Of course, these scholars faced resistance, as language was seen as another domain unique to humans. Fortunately, this research continues, including using tools of noninvasive neuroscience, and de Waal notes that there is so much more to learn. Chapter 5, The Measure of All Things, looks at other cognitive abilities, such as memory, that other animals share with humans: “claim after claim about how we differ [is] followed by the subsequent erosion of these claims (p. 126). In his lectures, after de Waal recounts all the similarities between us and other animals, he almost invariably is asked about what are the unique qualities of humans. His reply uses an iceberg analogy, i.e., we have many similarities (that is the iceberg), but yes, there are differences (the tip of the iceberg) (p. 125). My favourite chapter was Chapter 6, Social Skills. Perhaps, the chapter’s key point is that nonhuman animals’ society are complex constructions populated by unique individuals. An earlier book of de Waal’s, Chimpanzee politics, described some of the Machiavellian manoeuvrings within chimpanzee society. However, nonhuman societies are not, as de Waal previously thought, mostly about competition and zero sum games. Over the past few decades, his view has changed, and he has focused on cooperation and social cognition and feelings which contribute to them, such as empathy. This chapter provides many examples of cooperation among a wide variety of species, including fishes, and even between species, such as between trout and eels, and between humans and killer whales. Specific examples of altruism include an adult helping an injured mother carry her child, and a fight between two juveniles over a branch ending happily when an adult breaks the branch in half and gives each one half. Chapter 7, Time Will Tell, and Chapter 8, Of Mirrors and Jars, deal with two controversies: (1) whether nonhuman animals only think about the present, or do they also consider the past and future; and (2) can nonhumans recognise themselves in a mirror, i.e., are they conscious of themselves as individuals. One of the studies of animals’ understanding of time involved birds, western scrub jays, who not only remembered where they had hidden food, but also remembered which food they had hidden where. One type of food, worms, quickly becomes inedible, whereas another food, peanuts, last longer. After hiding both the worms and the peanuts, four hours later, the jays sought out the worms, their favourite food, but five days later, they went for the peanuts and ignored the worms, which they knew would be inedible. As to self-awareness, de Waal makes two important points. First, we should not use the same test, e.g., the mirror test, with all species (p. 243). Second, cognition should not be seen as a contest, because “such comparisons barely make any sense … [thus] we should avoid putting apples next to oranges” (p. 248). The book’s final chapter, Evolutionary Cognition, sums up de Waal’s journey from the past – “I can’t count the number of times I have been called naïve, romantic, soft, unscientific, anthropomorphic, anecdotal, or just a sloppy thinker” (p. 265) – to the future, based on evolutionary cognition, i.e., “the study of all cognition, human and animal, from an evolutionary perspective” (p. 320) and a greater role for neuroscience. de Waal concludes by calling for humans to be more empathic towards other animals (p. 275): True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they [italics in original] are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination. Conclusion de Waal answers the question in the book’s title by stating, “Yes, but you’d never have guessed” (p. 3). We can speculate on whether our underestimation of nonhuman animals’ intelligence is due to simple ignorance, now being rectified by the research of de Waal and other ethologists, or due to wilful denigration. However, the fact of the matter is that the devaluing of our fellow animals has been taken as license to exploit them (Kupsala, Vinnari, Jokinen, & Räsänen, 2016), just as humans exploit and neglect fellow humans under the pretext that they are inferior. No doubt critics of de Waal will claim that his case for the sentience of nonhuman animals is built on a weak foundation of cherry picked data interpreted through the self-deceiving eyes of those who want to believe. That said, there seems no denying the base case for hugely improved human treatment of our fellow animals, a case made more than 200 years ago by Bentham: “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’” (cited in Loughnan, Haslam, & Bastian, 2010). No scientific research, no pre-test, post-test, randomly assigned, blinded and controlled studies are needed to know that other animals suffer; a visit to the factory farms and slaughterhouses from whence came the chickens’ wings we ate with our beer should suffice. Whoops - Such a visit might lead to the visitors being arrested and charged with terrorism (Fiber-Ostrow, & Lovell, 2016); thus, we may have to rely on second hand accounts, which are readily available on video (e.g., Mercy for Animals, 2012), in books (e.g., Safran Foer, 2010), and via other media. The readers of Society & Animals can play a vital role both in ending humans’ ignorance of nonhumans and in changing our behaviours towards them. References Ackerman, J. (2016). The genius of birds. New York, NY: Penguin Press. Balcombe, J. (2016). What a fish knows: The inner lives of our underwater cousins. New York, NY: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. de Waal, F. (2012, April). Moral behavior in animals [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk de Waal, F. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? New York, NY: W.W. Norton. Fiber-Ostrow, P., & Lovell, J. S. (2016). Behind a veil of secrecy: Animal abuse, factory farms, and Ag-Gag legislation. Contemporary Justice Review, 19(2), 230-249. Kafka, F. (2014). The Metamorphosis: (S. Bernofsky, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Kupsala, S., Vinnari, M., Jokinen, P., & Räsänen, P. (2016). Public Perceptions of Mental Capacities of Nonhuman Animals: Finnish population survey. Society & Animals, 24(5), 445-466. DOI: 10.1163/15685306-12341423 Top of Form Bottom of Form Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Bastian, B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite, 55(1), 156-159. Mercy for Animals (2012). Pro-vegetarian MTV commercials. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHdLRrUocOA Safran Foer, J. (2010). Eating animals. New York, NY: Back Bay Books. Von Frisch, K. (1947). The dances of the honey bee. London, United Kingdom: Institute for the Study of Animal Behaviour.