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Animals That Speak (and Think)
What if you could see out of the eyes — and brain — of animals? What would you see?
What would you hear?
More to the point, how smart would that brain turn out to be?
The answer is more intelligent than the vast majority of homo sapiens give them credit for being.
Take a “dumb,” ugly, feared creature like the American alligator (alligator mississippiensis). I often kayak the creeks and lakes of Florida, encountering this animal often and talking with those who’ve been observing the reptiles all their lives.
Some of what you hear is hard to fathom.
For example, in the Everglades a airboat guide told me that that gators can distinguish between the color of pickup trucks that pull up along a waterway. They stay low if it’s the color of a truck they associated with someone who hunts them. If the same hunter were to drive up in a differently colored vehicle, the animal might linger — until it knows better…
Alligators also know where hunting occurs and where it doesn’t: At Midway Airboats in Christmas, Florida, the owner, a hunter himself, told me old, wise gators migrate south of a bridge on the St. Johns River at dusk, because its off-limits for hunting. They do this only during hunting season. Meanwhile, the director of the Alligator Farm in St. Augustine (a scientist) says gators there know their names, lifting their appreciable, jaw-dominated, scaly heads when their names are called. All this with a brain the size of a quarter!
When a psychologist named Dr. Irene Pepperberg wandered into a specialty pet store in 1977, science had no idea that birds could communicate with man beyond mimicking their voices. Now at Harvard, she had simply asked the store owner to pick out an African Grey for her, which he did, choosing one from a caged flock of eight, flipping it on its back, clipping its wings (you don’t a $1,400 bird winging out the door), and popping it into a small box.
Soon, she told me, the parrot, which she named “Alex,” not only learned motions but also words associated with objects, able to discern the color of a sheet of paper or pick up the right number from plastic alphabet letters. If Alex desired a grape (“Wanna grape“), but was given a banana, he’d toss it back and with insistence say, “Want a grape!” He looked down his beak at less able parrots: When another wasn’t responding clearly — to Dr. Pepperberg’s cues — Alex would tell the bird to “say better.” Once, when Dr. Pepperberg shrieked at the bird for chewing up a grant application, he cowered and said, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry.” When a toy bird was introduced into the cage, Alex said, “You tickle,” and when the toy obviously did not respond, the irate parrot said, “You turkey!” The last words of Alex to Dr. Pepperberg before he died at age thirty-one: “You be good… I love you…”
Many parrots can repeat an entire sentence after hearing it once, and laugh at appropriate times. How many words can a parrot say in proper sequence? For one, it was two-hundred-and fifty — comparable to reciting an entire page from a book. The Grey is the only animal tested so far that grasps the concept of “zero.” In one countdown on animal intelligence, it placed third — just behind chimps and dolphins. Yet we use the pejorative, “bird brain…”
Crows? Like parrots they have been known to fashion sticks as tools, and to fly down with nuts they can’t crack and nudge them under the tires of cars stopped at intersections — then fly back up to power lines, wait for the light to turn green, and descend when the automobiles have done the cracking for them. This has been documented from Upstate New York to Sendai in Japan. At Assisi in Italy, there a statue of Saint Francis in the garden of Santa Maria d’ell Angeli and doves roost in a basket held by the statue’s hands. I saw this for myself: wild doves. Francis was known as a bird lover!
Might animals also have ESP?
We’ve all heard of pets that somehow find their way back to their owners even if they were lost hundreds of miles away. How? Or — and here we go a bit beyond regular intelligence — they may know when an owner dies, even if that owner is miles away… howling uncannily. Some refuse to leave graveyards where their masters are interred. Back to the mundane, there’s a dog that can identify a thousand different toys.
Can anything top the case of Wilhelm Von Osten? A mathematics teacher, phrenologist, amateur horse trainer, and — it’s said — something of a mystic, Osten had a horse, “Hans,” was taught to add, subtract, divide, multiply, work with fractions; tell time; keep track of the calendar; differentiate musical tones; and read, spell, and understand German. Von Osten posed questions like: “If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?” Hans could answer by tapping his hoof. Or so it is said. After Professor E. Clarapede at the University of Geneva tested the stallion for several weeks, he reported that “Hans could do more than mere sums: he knew how to read; he could distinguish between harmonious and dissonant chords of music.” A connoisseur to boot! The estimated level of intelligence: that of a fourteen-year-old…
Was the horse simply taking cues from the owners and those who tested him?
In another case a horse who had been trained a code suddenly stopped responding and when asked why tapped out, “Tired.” Then he added, “Pain in leg.” A code-adept horse named Muhamed took it to another level. When asked by two Berlin scientists why he didn’t simply talk (ala “Mr. Ed”), instead of answering with his hooves, the horse made a few pitiful noises (in an effort to verbalize) and after a few frustrating minutes, tapped out a code that was deciphered as, “I have not a good voice.”
And then, stranger, was the African Grey who had been left at home longer than ever before. When his owners returned, he said — and plaintively, to their shock — “Where you been?”