Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(66)

When Tulving came up with the spoon test, he wondered if it was perhaps unfair. Wasn’t it too demanding for animals? He proposed this test in 2005, well before most experiments on future planning were conducted, apparently unaware that apes pass the spoon test every day in their spontaneous behavior. Franje did so when she gathered straw in a different location and under different circumstances than where it was needed. At the Yerkes Primate Center, we also have a male chimp, Steward, who never enters our testing room without first looking around outdoors for a stick or branch that he uses to point at the various items in our experiments. Even though we have tried to discourage this behavior, by removing the stick from his hands so that he’ll point with a finger like everyone else, Steward is stubborn. He prefers to point with a stick and will go out of his way to bring one with him, thus anticipating our test and his self-invented need for a tool.

But perhaps the nicest illustration, out of dozens I could offer, is a bonobo named Lisala, who lives at Lola ya Bonobo, a jungle sanctuary near Kinshasa where we conducted studies of empathy. The observation in question was unrelated to this topic, however, and was made by my coworker Zanna Clay when she unexpectedly saw Lisala pick up an enormous fifteen-pound rock and lift it onto her back. Lisala carried this heavy load on her shoulders while her baby clung to her lower back. It was rather ridiculous, of course, since it impeded her travel and required extra energy. Zanna turned on her video camera and followed the bonobo to see what the rock might be for. Like any true ape expert, she immediately assumed that Lisala had a goal in mind, because, as K?hler had noted, ape behavior is “unwaveringly purposeful.” The same holds for human behavior. If we see a man walking in the street with a ladder, we automatically assume that he wouldn’t be carrying such a heavy tool for no reason.



Lisala, a bonobo, carries a heavy rock on a long trek toward a place where she knows there are nuts. After collecting the nuts, she continues her trek to the only large slab of rock in the area, where she employs her rock as a hammer to crack the nuts. Picking up a tool so long in advance suggests planning.

Zanna filmed Lisala’s trek of about half a kilometer. It was interrupted only once when she put down the rock and picked up some items that were hard to identify. Then she put the rock back onto her back and continued her travels. She walked all told almost ten minutes before she reached her destination, which was a large slab of hard rock. She cleared it of debris with a few swipes of her hand, then put down her rock, her infant, and the collected items, which turned out to be a handful of palm nuts. She set out to crack these extremely tough nuts, placing them on the large anvil while banging them with her fifteen-pound rock as a hammer. She spent about fifteen minutes on this activity, then left her tool behind. It is hard to imagine that Lisala had gone through all this trouble without a plan, which she must have had well before she picked up the nuts. She probably knew where to find those, hence planned her route via this location, to end up at a point that she knew had a hard enough surface for successful cracking. In a nutshell, Lisala fulfilled all of Tulving’s criteria. She picked up a tool to be used at a distant location for the processing of food that she could only have imagined.

Another remarkable instance of future-oriented behavior was documented at a zoo by the Swedish biologist Mathias Osvath, this time involving a male chimpanzee, Santino. Every morning before visitors arrived, Santino would leisurely collect rocks from the moat surrounding his enclosure, stacking them up in neat little piles hidden from view. This way he’d have an arsenal of weapons when the zoo opened its gates. Like so many male chimps, Santino would several times a day rush around with all his hair on end to impress the colony and the public. Throwing stuff around was part of the show, including projectiles aimed at the watching masses. Whereas most chimps find themselves empty-handed at the critical moment, Santino prepared his rock piles for these occasions. He did so at a quiet time of the day, when he was not yet in the adrenaline-filled mood to produce his usual spectacle.12

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord. Their accomplishments are quite different from the way many other animals orient to upcoming events. We all know that squirrels collect nuts in the fall and hide them for retrieval in winter and spring. Their hoarding is triggered by the shortening of day length and the presence of nuts, regardless of whether the animals know what winter is. Young squirrels na?ve about the seasons do exactly the same. Whereas this activity does serve future needs and requires quite a bit of cognition regarding what nuts to store and how to find them again, the seasonal preparations of squirrels are unlikely to reflect actual planning.13 It is an evolved tendency found in all members of their species and limited to only one context.

The planning of apes, in contrast, adjusts to the circumstances and is flexibly expressed in myriad ways. That it is based on learning and understanding is hard to prove from observation alone, however. It requires subjecting apes to conditions that they have never met before. What happens, for example, if we create a situation in which clutching a spoon, so to speak, is advantageous later on?

The first such study was conducted in Germany by Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call, who let orangutans and bonobos select a tool that they couldn’t use right away even though the rewards were visible. The apes were moved away to a waiting room to see if they would hold on to their tool for later use even if the right occasion would arise only fourteen hours later. The apes did so, yet it could be (and has been) argued that they might have developed positive associations with certain tools, hence valued them regardless of what they knew about the future.14