Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(58)

It has become commonplace to assert that only humans truly understand how cooperation works or know how to handle competition and freeloading. Animal cooperation is presented as mostly based on kinship, as if mammals were social insects. This idea was quickly disproven when fieldworkers analyzed DNA extracted from the feces of wild chimpanzees, which allowed them to determine genetic relatedness. They concluded that the vast majority of mutual aid in the forest occurs between unrelated apes.32 Captive studies have shown that even strangers—primates who didn’t know each other before they were put together—can be enticed to share food or exchange favors.33

Despite these findings, the human uniqueness meme keeps stubbornly replicating. Are its proponents oblivious to the rampant, varied, and massive cooperation found in nature? I just attended a conference on Collective Behavior: From Cells to Societies, which addressed the extraordinary ways in which single cells, organisms, and entire species realize goals together.34 Our best theories about the evolution of cooperation stem from the study of animal behavior. Summarizing these ideas in his 1975 book Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson helped launch the evolutionary approach to human behavior.35

Excitement about Wilson’s grand synthesis seems to have faded, though. Perhaps it was too sweeping and inclusive for disciplines that consider humans in isolation. Chimpanzees in particular are nowadays often depicted as so aggressive and competitive that they can’t be truly cooperative. If this applies to our closest relatives, so the thinking goes, we can justifiably ignore the rest of the animal kingdom. One prominent advocate of this position, the American psychologist Michael Tomasello, extensively compared children and apes, which has led him to conclude that our species is the only one capable of shared intentions in relation to common goals. He once condensed his view in the catchy statement “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together.”36



At Burgers’ Zoo, live trees are surrounded by electrified wire, yet the chimps manage to get into them anyway. They break long branches out of dead trees and carry them to a live one, where one of them holds the branch steady while another scales it.

This is quite an assertion, given Emil Menzel’s photographed and filmed sequences of juvenile apes recruiting one another to collectively prop a heavy pole up against the wall of their enclosure in order to get out.37 I have regularly seen chimps use long sticks as ladders to get across hot wire surrounding live beech trees; one chimp holds the stick while another scales it to reach fresh leaves without getting shocked. We have also videotaped two adolescent females who regularly tried to reach the window of my office, which overlooks the chimp compound at the Yerkes Field Station. Both females would exchange hand gestures while moving a heavy plastic drum right underneath my window. One ape would jump onto the drum, after which the other would climb on top of her and stand on her shoulders. The two females would then synchronously bob up and down like a giant spring; the one standing on top would reach for my window every time she came close. Well synchronized and clearly of the same mind, these females played this game often in alternating roles. Since they never succeeded, their common goal was largely imaginary.

Literally carrying a log together may not be part of these efforts, but this behavior is trained for all the time in Asian elephants. Until recently, the forest industry in Southeast Asia employed elephants as beasts of burden; now they are rarely used for this purpose anymore, but they still demonstrate their skills for tourists. At the Elephant Conservation Center near Chiang Mai, in Thailand, two tall adolescent bulls will effortlessly pick up a long log with their tusks, each standing on one end, draping their trunks over the log to keep it from rolling off. Then they will walk in perfect unison several meters apart, with the log between them, while the two mahouts on their necks sit chatting and laughing and looking around. They are most certainly not directing every move.

Training is obviously part of this picture, but one cannot train any animal to be so coordinated. One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same. Trainers build on natural abilities. Obviously, if one elephant were to walk slightly faster than the other while carrying the log, or hold it at the wrong height, the whole enterprise would quickly unravel. The task requires step-by-step harmonization of rhythm and movement by the bulls themselves. They have moved from an “I” identity (I perform this task) to a “we” identity (we do this together), which is the hallmark of collective action. They end their performance by lowering the log together, moving it from their tusks into their trunks and then slowly to the ground. They set the heaviest log down on a pile without a single sound, impeccably coordinated.

When Josh Plotnik tested elephants on the cooperative pulling paradigm, he found a solid understanding for the need to synchronize.38 Teamwork is even more typical of group hunters, such as humpback whales, which blow hundreds of bubbles around a school of fish; the column of bubbles traps the fish like a net. The whales act together to make the column tighter and tighter, until several of them surface through its center with mouths wide open to swallow the bounty. Orcas go even further, in an action so astonishingly well coordinated that few species, including humans, would be able to match it. When orcas along the Antarctic Peninsula spot a seal on an ice floe, they reposition the floe. It takes lots of hard work, but they push it out into open water. Then four or five whales line up side by side, acting like one giant whale. They rapidly swim in perfect unison toward the floe, creating a huge wave that washes off the unlucky seal. We don’t know how the killer whales agree on the lineup or how they synchronize their actions, but they must be communicating about it before making their move. It is not entirely clear why they do it, because even though the orcas afterward carry the seal around, they often end up releasing it. One seal was deposited back onto a different ice floe to live another day.39