Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(52)

Among the males, in contrast, power is always up for grabs. It is not conferred on the basis of age or any other trait but has to be fought for and jealously guarded against contenders. Soon after my long stint as chronicler of their social affairs, I put pencil to paper to produce Chimpanzee Politics, a popular account of the power struggles that I had witnessed.1 I was risking my nascent academic career by ascribing intelligent social maneuvering to animals, an implication I had been trained to avoid at all cost. That doing well in a group full of rivals, friends, and relatives requires considerable social skill is something we now take for granted, but in those days animal social behavior was rarely thought of as intelligent. Observers would recount a rank reversal between two baboons, for example, in passive terms, as if it happened to them rather than was brought about by them. They would make no mention of one baboon following the other around, provoking one confrontation after another, flashing his huge canine teeth, and recruiting help from nearby males. It is not that the observers did not notice, but animals were not supposed to have goals and strategies, so the reports remained silent.

Deliberately breaking with this tradition, describing chimps as schmoozing and scheming Machiavellians, my book drew wide attention and enjoyed many translations. The U.S. Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, even put it on the recommended reading list for freshmen congressmen. The account met with far less resistance than I had dreaded, including from fellow primatologists. Obviously, the time was ripe, in 1982, for a more cognitive approach to animal social behavior. Even though I learned about it only after my own book, Donald Griffin’s Animal Awareness had come out just a few years before.2

My work was part of a new Zeitgeist, and I had a handful of predecessors to lean on. There was Emil Menzel, whose work on chimpanzee cooperation and communication postulated goals and hinted at intelligent solutions, and Hans Kummer, who never ceased to wonder what drove his baboons to act the way they did. Kummer wanted to know, for example, how baboons plan their travel routes, and who decides where to go—those in front or those in the back? He broke down the behavior into recognizable mechanisms, and stressed how social relationships serve as long-term investments. More than anyone before him, Kummer combined classical ethology with questions about social cognition.3

I was also impressed by In The Shadow of Man by a young British primatologist.4 By the time I read it, I was familiar enough with chimpanzees to be unsurprised by the specifics of Jane Goodall’s description of life at Gombe Stream in Tanzania. But the tone of her account was truly refreshing. She did not necessarily spell out the cognition of her subjects, but it was impossible to read about Mike—a rising male who impressed his rivals by loudly banging empty kerosene cans together—or the love life and family relations of matriarch Flo, without recognizing a complex psychology. Goodall’s apes had personalities, emotions, and social agendas. She did not unduly humanize them, but she related what they did in unpretentious prose that would have been perfectly normal for a day at the office but was unorthodox with regard to animals. It was a huge improvement over the tendency at the time to drown behavioral descriptions in quotation marks and dense jargon in order to avoid mentalistic implications. Even animal names and genders were often avoided. (Every individual was an “it.”) Goodall’s apes, in contrast, were social agents with names and faces. Rather than being the slaves of their instincts, they acted as the architects of their own destinies. Her approach perfectly fit my own budding understanding of chimpanzee social life.

Yeroen’s allegiance to the young alpha was a case in point. Not that I could resolve how and why he had made his choice, in the same way that it was impossible for Goodall to know if Mike’s career might have been different in the absence of kerosene cans, but both stories implied deliberate tactics. Pinpointing the cognition behind such behavior requires collecting a mass of systematic data as well as performing experiments, such as the strategic computer games that we now know chimps are extraordinarily good at.5

Let me briefly offer two examples of how these issues may be tackled. The first concerns a study at the Burgers’ Zoo itself. Conflicts in the colony rarely remained restricted to the original two contestants, since chimps have a tendency to draw others into the fray. Sometimes ten or more chimps would be running around, threatening and chasing one another, uttering high-pitched screams that could be heard a mile away. Naturally, every contestant tried to get as many allies on his or her side as possible. When I analyzed hundreds of videotaped incidents (a new technique at the time!), I found that the chimpanzees who were losing the battle beseeched their friends by stretching out an open hand to them. They tried to recruit support in order to turn things around. When it came to the friends of their enemies, however, they went out of their way to appease them by putting an arm around them and kissing their face or shoulder. Instead of begging for assistance, they sought to neutralize them.6

To know the friends of your opponents takes experience. It implies that individual A is aware not only of her own relations with B and C but also of the relation between B and C. I dubbed this triadic awareness, since it reflects knowledge of the entire ABC triangle. It is the same with us, when we realize who is married to whom, who is a son of whom, or who is the employer of whom. Human society could not function without triadic awareness.7

The second example concerns wild chimpanzees. It is well known that there is no obvious connection between a male’s rank and his size—the biggest, meanest male does not automatically reach the top. A small male with the right friends also has a shot at the alpha position. This is why male chimps put so much effort into alliance formation. In an analysis of years of data collected at Gombe, a relatively small alpha male spent far more time grooming others than did larger males in the same position. Apparently, the more a male’s position depends on support from third parties, the more energy he needs to invest into diplomacy, such as grooming.8 In a study in the Mahale Mountains, not far from Gombe, Toshisada Nishida and his team of Japanese scientists observed an alpha male with an exceptionally long tenure of more than a decade. This male developed a “bribery” system, selectively sharing prized monkey meat with his loyal allies, while denying such favors to his rivals.9