Wall Street Journal 10/27/06: What Your Pet is Thinking

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What Your Pet is Thinking

By SHARON BEGLEY

October 27, 2006; Page W1

 

From the day they brought her home, the D'Avellas' black-and-white

mutt loathed ringing phones. At the first trill, Jay Dee would bolt

from the room and howl until someone picked up. But within a few

weeks, the D'Avellas began missing calls: When the phone rang, their

friends later told them, someone would pick up and then the line

would go dead.

 

One evening, Aida D'Avella solved the mystery. Sitting in the family

room of her Newark, N.J., home, Ms. D'Avella got up as the phone

rang, but the dog beat her to it. Jay Dee ran straight to the ringing

phone, lifted the receiver off the hook in her jaws, replaced it and

returned contentedly to her spot on the rug.

 

 

Just about every pet lover has a story about the astonishing

intelligence of his cat, dog, bird, ferret or chinchilla.

Ethologists, the scientists who study animal behavior, have amassed

thousands of studies showing that animals can count, understand cause

and effect, form abstractions, solve problems, use tools and even

deceive. But lately scientists have gone a step further: Researchers

around the world are providing tantalizing evidence that animals not

only learn and remember but that they may also have consciousness --

in other words, they may be capable of thinking about their thoughts

and knowing that they know.

 

In the past few years, top journals have been publishing reports on

self-awareness in dolphins and wild chimps whose different

nut-cracking " technologies " constitute unique cultures. Others argue

that rats have a sense of fun, mice show empathy for cage-mates and

scrub jays are capable of " mental time travel " that enables them to

remember where they stashed worms and seeds.

Rhesus macaque monkeys have been the subject of memory studies in Atlanta

 

While researchers have yet to attain the field's holy grail --

proving that animals are self-aware -- the findings already have

broad implications. For the 69 million U.S. households that own a

pet, such knowledge might lead owners to question their animal

companions' awareness of what they're fed, how they're housed and how

often the kitty litter is changed. All of that would be a boon for

the pet industry, which generates $38 billion in annual revenue,

according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association,

selling everything from food and grooming services to pet exercise

gear, hotels and psychics.

 

Drug companies are already addressing animals' feelings. Some 15

million dogs have taken Pfizer Inc.'s animal pain-reliever Remadyl.

The company's Anipryl targets " cognitive dysfunction syndrome " in

dogs. (In a dog, symptoms include failing to recognize people or

respond to its name and getting lost in the house.) Experts expect a

steady stream of drugs aimed at pets' minds instead of bodies.

 

The research is also coloring thinking about everything from science

labs to farms and food-production facilities. Having demolished

concrete cages in favor of naturalistic enclosures, many zoos are

also offering animals " environmental enrichment " designed to exercise

their minds, and housing them in social groups where they can express

their emotions. The nonprofit Great Ape Project, Seattle, is

campaigning on behalf of the primates for " life, liberty and

protection against torture. " And this year a member of the Spanish

parliament introduced a resolution to protect great apes from

" maltreatment, slavery, torture, death and extinction. " Federal

animal-welfare acts have long required researchers who use primates

to take into account their " psychological well-being, " but

researchers say more institutions that use lab dogs, rabbits and

other small animals are voluntarily adopting the rules. " Without

question, these discoveries [on animal awareness] are having an

effect, " says Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive officer of

the Humane Society of the U.S.

I bark, therefore I am: above, a groomed standard poodle

 

And if chimps and monkeys have hints of consciousness, do less-brainy

animals have it, too? Does that mean people shouldn't hunt them,

imprison them or eat them? Opponents of experimenting on animals say

creatures as low on the evolutionary ladder as rats and mice are

capable of suffering, even if they can't engage in self-reflection.

 

Some researchers say humans may be a bit too eager to attribute

high-level mental functioning to animals, and end up inferring mental

states that don't exist. Bonnie Beaver, professor of veterinary

medicine at Texas A & M University and former president of the American

Veterinary Medicine Association, says that when dogs act distressed

in a boarding kennel, they're showing unfamiliarity with the

surroundings, not resentment that their owner is vacationing in Bali.

And if a dog looks guilty over leaving a mess on the rug, it is being

submissive, she says, not showing a more complex emotion. " Most

times, " she says, " owners are reading things that are not there. "

 

Not too long ago, scientists scoffed at the idea that animals could

have consciousness. Philosophers haggle endlessly about the meaning

of the word, of course. But they generally agree that it isn't enough

to solve problems, learn or remember -- a semiconductor can do that

-- but to be aware of the contents of one's own mind. When it comes

to animals, the question " was thought of as impossible to answer with

objective observations, " says Clive Wynne, an associate professor of

psychology at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Now he sees an

increase in such studies aimed at discovering what's going on inside

animals' heads.

 

At the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Robert

Hampton, who has made some of the field's most significant findings,

studies whether rhesus monkeys know if they know something. In one

series of experiments, he gave the monkeys memory tests over a period

of weeks. After seeing four images on a monitor, the monkeys would be

asked to choose which one they had seen before. But before taking the

test, the monkeys had a choice of pressing one of two icons whose

meaning they already knew. One meant, " Yup, I'm ready to take the

test. " The other meant, " No test for me, thanks. " They had an

incentive to take it only if they remembered the target image:

Failing the test brought them no reward, passing it got them a

handful of peanuts, and declining to take the test got them

monkey-chow pellets, which they don't like as much as peanuts but are

better than nothing.

African elephants play-fighting

 

When the monkeys chose to take the test, they passed more than 80% of

the time, apparently declining to take the test when their memory was

poor. When they weren't given a choice and Prof. Hampton gave them

the test anyway, they chose the correct image much less often. That

suggests they knew the contents of their memory and assessed it

before deciding whether to take the test -- a sign of self-reflective

consciousness. " The monkeys know whether they remember something, "

says Prof. Hampton, who reported his latest monkey findings in May in

the journal Behavioural Processes.

 

A key ingredient of consciousness is having a sense of self, a

feeling that there's a " you " inside your brain. One sign of that is

being able to imagine yourself in a different time and place. Some

scientists have said that's why chimps in a forest pick up a stone so

that they can crack a nut that they left far away, and why New

Caledonian crows make hook-shaped devices to fish for bugs.

 

But maybe, skeptics say, chimps and crows learned that a rock, or

hook, equals lunch and just act reflexively. To try to rule this out,

scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

in Leipzig, Germany, taught orangutans and bonobos, considered the

great apes closest to humans, how to use tools to snare grapes that

were otherwise out of reach. Then they gave the animals a chance to

take the right tools into a " waiting room, " where they were kept for

times ranging from five minutes to overnight, before being led back

to the room with the grapes. The clever move, of course, was to grab

a tool before going to the waiting room.

 

All 10 animals managed this at least sometimes, the researchers

reported in May in the journal Science. Because the animals had to

plan so far ahead, the scientists argue, the experiment showed an

ability to anticipate needs. " It's hard to argue that these animals

do not have consciousness, " says primatologist Frans de Waal at

Yerkes.

 

Dissenters argue that any behavior that meets a basic need such as

hunger shouldn't be ascribed to anything as lofty as consciousness.

More and more, however, scientists are observing what they call

altruistic behavior that has no evident purpose. Prof. de Waal once

watched as a bonobo picked up a starling. The bonobo carried it

outside its enclosure and set the bird on its feet. When it didn't

fly away, the ape took it to higher ground, carefully unfolded its

wings and tossed it into the air. Still having no luck, she stood

guard over it and protected it from a young bonobo that was nearby.

 

Since such behavior doesn't help the bonobo to survive, it's unlikely

to be genetically programmed, says Marc Bekoff, emeritus professor of

ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado,

Boulder. If a person acted this way, " we would say this reflects

planning, thought and caring, " he adds. " When you see behaviors that

are too flexible and variable to be preprogrammed, you have to

consider whether they are the result of true consciousness. "

 

In June, scientists reported new insights about compassion in African

elephants. These animals often seem curious about the bodies of dead

elephants, but no one knew whether they felt compassion for the dying

or dead. A matriarch in the Samburu Reserve in northern Kenya, which

researchers had named Eleanor, collapsed in October 2003. Grace,

matriarch of a different family, walked over and used her tusks to

lift Eleanor onto her feet, according to Iain Douglas-Hamilton of

Save the Animals, Nairobi, and colleagues at the University of Oxford

and the University of California, Berkeley, reporting in the journal

Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

 

But Eleanor was too shaky to stand. Grace tried again, this time

pushing Eleanor to walk, but Eleanor again fell. Grace appeared " very

stressed, " called loudly and often, and kept nudging and pushing

Eleanor. Although she failed, Grace stayed with the dying elephant as

night fell. Eleanor died the next day.

 

Grace's interest in an unrelated animal can't be explained by her

genetic disposition to help a close relative, a behavior that's been

well established. The scientists instead argue that the elephant was

showing compassion. Mr. Douglas-Hamilton has also seen elephants

guard and help unrelated elephants who have been hit by tranquilizer

darts to let researchers tag the animals. Since standing by an animal

that has been shot puts the other animals in harm's way, it's hard to

argue self-interest.

 

Critics say that consciousness is in the eye of besotted observers,

and animals are no more than stimulus-response machines. Florida's

Prof. Wynne, for one, is skeptical that chimps know what they know.

" To know one's own mental states does not necessarily imply conscious

awareness, " he says. " You can be unconsciously aware of what you

know. " Game-show contestants, for instance, sometimes press a buzzer

to answer before they consciously know the answer -- knowing

unconsciously that they know.

 

Anyone whose dog has ever run to the front door, leash in its mouth,

assumes that animals form intentions. But that might also reflect

dumb learning: the dog figured out that leash equals walk. A computer

could be rigged to learn the same cause-and-effect relationship. Some

scientists also see intentionality when beavers plug holes in their

dam, bowerbirds build baroque nests, ants cultivate fungus farms and

plovers feign injury to lure predators away from their hatchlings.

But many researchers give genes, not conscious intentions, the credit

for these clever behaviors.

 

As for emotions, the conventional view has long been that while

animals might seem to be sad, happy, curious or angry, these weren't

true emotions: The creature didn't know that it felt any of these

things. Daniel Povinelli of the University of Louisiana, who has done

pioneering studies of whether chimps understand that people and other

chimps have mental states, wonders whether chimps are aware of their

emotions: " I don't think there is persuasive evidence of that. "

 

The trouble is that all sorts of animals -- from those in the African

bush to those in your living room -- keep acting as if they truly do

have emotions remarkably like humans'. Last month, Ya Ya, a panda in

a Chinese zoo, accidentally crushed her newborn to death. She seemed

inconsolable -- wailing and frantically searching for the tiny body.

The keeper said that when he called her name, she just looked up at

him with tear-filled eyes before lowering her head again. The

conventional view is that these were instinctive, reflexive

reactions, and that Ya Ya didn't know she was sad. As the evidence

for animal consciousness piles up, that view becomes harder to

support.

 

Write to Sharon Begley at sharon.begley

 

URL for this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116190929805905465.html

 

VIDEO

 

* In this cognitive memory test1, a monkey demonstrates that he knows

when he remembers.

 

* Sasha, the Husky2, and Woody, the black dog, stop to assess what is

going on when the play gets too rough.

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