Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(32)
In the meantime some of his relatives had begun to impress as well. Another African gray not only mimicked sounds but added accompanying body movements. He’d say “Ciao” while waving goodbye with a foot or wing, or say “Look at my tongue” while sticking out his tongue, just as his owner had shown him. It remained a puzzle how a bird was able to draw such parallels between the human body and its own.9 Then there was Figaro, a Goffin’s cockatoo who was seen breaking off large splinters from a wooden beam in order to rake in nuts placed outside his aviary. Before Figaro, there had been no reports of toolmaking parrots.10 It makes me wonder if Kohts ever conducted similar experiments on her cockatoo, macaw, and ara. Given her keen interest in tools and her six untranslated books, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about it one day. There is obviously still much to discover, as also became clear from tests of Alex’s counting abilities.
Alex’s talents were accidentally revealed while researchers were testing Griffin—a parrot named after Donald Griffin—who was staying in the same room with him. In order to see if Griffin could pair quantities with sounds, they would click twice, to which the right answer would be “two.” But when Griffin failed to answer and got two more clicks, Alex, from across the room, chimed in with “four.” And after two more clicks, Alex said “six,” while Griffin remained mute.11 Alex was familiar with numbers and could correctly answer the question “what number is green?” after having seen a tray with many objects, including several green ones. But now he was doing addition, and more than that: he was doing it without visual input. Again, adding up numbers was once thought to be language-dependent, but this claim had already begun to wobble a few years back when a chimpanzee succeeded at it.12
Irene set out to test Alex’s capacities more systematically by placing a few differently sized items (such as pasta pieces) under a cup. She’d lift the cup up for a few seconds in front of Alex, then put it down again. After this she would do the same for a second cup, then a third. The number of items under each cup was small, and sometimes there were none. After this, with only the three cups visible, Alex would be asked “how many total?” Out of ten tests, Alex mentioned the correct total eight times. The two that he missed, he got right the second time he heard the question.13 And all this in his head, because he couldn’t see the actual items.
Unfortunately, this study was broken off by Alex’s unexpected death. But by then this diminutive mathematical genius in a grey suit had given us ample evidence that there is more knocking around in a bird’s skull than anyone had suspected. Irene concluded that “for far too long, animals in general, and birds in particular, have been denigrated and treated merely as creatures of instinct rather than as sentient beings.”14
Red Herring
At times, Alex’s talking made perfect linguistic sense. For example, once when Irene was fuming about a meeting in her department and walked to the lab with angry steps, Alex told her “Calm down!” No doubt the same expression had in the past been aimed at Alex’s own excitable self. Other famous cases include Koko, the sign-language gorilla spontaneously combining the signs for “white” and “tiger” upon seeing a zebra, and Washoe, the chimpanzee pioneer of this entire field, labeling a swan a “water bird.”
I am prepared to interpret this as a hint of deeper knowledge, but only after I see more evidence than we have today. It is good to keep in mind that these animals produce hundreds of signs every day and have been studied for decades. We’d need to know more about the ratio between hits and misses among the thousands of utterances recorded. How are these fortuitous combinations different from, say, Paul the octopus (nicknamed Pulpo Paul) who rose to fame after a string of correct predictions during the 2010 World Cup? In the same way that no one assumes that Paul knew much about soccer—he was just a lucky mollusk—we need to compare striking animal utterances with the probability of them coming about by chance. It is hard to evaluate linguistic skills if we never get to see the raw data, such as unedited videotapes, and hear only cherry-picked interpretations by loving caretakers. It also doesn’t help that whenever apes produce wrong answers, their interpreters assume that they have a sense of humor, exclaiming “Oh, stop kidding around!” or “You funny gorilla!”15
Upon the death of Robin Williams, in 2014, when the whole country was grieving one of the world’s funniest men, Koko was said to be mourning, too. It sounded plausible, especially since the Gorilla Foundation, in California, called Williams one of her “closest friends.” The problem is that the two of them had met just once, thirteen years before, and that the only evidence of Koko’s “somber” reaction was a photo of her sitting with her head down and eyes closed, which was hard to distinguish from a dozing ape. I found the grieving claim to be a huge stretch, not because I doubt that apes have feelings or can grieve, but because it is nearly impossible to gauge an animal’s reaction to an event it has not witnessed. While it is entirely possible that Koko’s mood was affected by the people around her, this is not the same as grasping what had happened to a member of our species whom she barely knew.
All responses to death and loss thus far observed in apes concern individuals who were truly close (such as mother and offspring, or lifelong friends) and whose corpses the apes were able to see and touch. Mourning triggered by the mere mention of someone’s death requires a level of imagination and understanding of mortality that most of us don’t assume. It is precisely because of such inflated claims that the whole field of talking apes has fallen into ill repute over the years, and why no new projects of its kind are being initiated. Those that still do exist tend to resort to feel-good stories and publicity stunts to raise funds. There is too much of this going around, and too little hard-nosed science.