Scientists are supposed to study animals in a totally objective fashion, similar to the way in which we inspect a rock, or measure the circumference of a tree trunk. Emotions are not to interfere with the assessment.
Some scientists have proudly broken out of this mold, however. Roger Fouts, known for his work in training chimpanzees to use symbols to communicate with humans, wrote in Next of Kin (Morrow, 1997), “I had to break the first commandment of the behavioral sciences: Thou shalt not love thy research subject.” Similarly, in When Elephants Weep (Delacorte, 1995), Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy presented themselves as almost the first scientists interested in the emotional lives of animals.
But, really, the image of the unloving and unfeeling scientist is a caricature, a straw man erected by those wishing to pat themselves on the back for having their hearts in the right place. Unfeeling scientists do exist, but most researchers take great pleasure in the animals they study. If one reads the books of Jane Goodall, Konrad Lorenz, Cynthia Moss, E.O. Wilson, Robert Yerkes, and so on, one simply cannot maintain that researchers invariably study animals in a cold, callous way. Those authors touch large audiences precisely because they communicate, either directly or between the lines, how they feel about their animals.
I have met many other scientists who may not write in the same style -- and who may not dwell on their feelings, not considering them relevant to their science -- but for whom the frogs, budgerigars, cichlid fish, bats, or whatever animals they specialize in hold a deep attraction. How could it be otherwise? Can you really imagine a scientist going out every day to capture and mark wild prairie voles -- getting bitten by the voles, stung by insects, drenched by rain -- without some deeper motivation than the pursuit of scientific truth? Think of what it takes to study penguins on the pack ice of the Antarctic, or bonobos in hot and humid jungles overrun by armed rebels. Equally, researchers who study animals in captivity really need to like what they are doing. Care of their subjects is a round-the-clock business, and animals smell and produce waste -- which chimpanzees, my favorite animals, don’t mind hurling at you -- something most of us hardly think about until we get visitors who hold their noses and try to escape as fast as they can.
I would turn the stereotype of the unfeeling scientist around and say that it is the rare scientist who is not at some level attached to the furry, feathered, or slippery creatures he or she works with. The maestro of observation, Konrad Lorenz, didn’t believe one could effectively investigate an animal that one didn’t love. Because our intuitive understanding of animals is based on human emotions and a sense of our connection with animals, he wrote in The Foundations of Ethology (Simon & Schuster, 1981), that understanding seems quite separate from the methodology of the natural sciences. To marry intuitive insight with systematic data collection is both the challenge and the joy of students of animal behavior.
Attraction to animals makes us forget the time we spend watching them, and sensitizes us to the tiniest details of behavior. The scientific mind uses the information thus gathered, formulating penetrating questions leading to more-precise research. But let us not forget that things did not start with a scientific interest: The lifeblood of science is our fascination with nature. This always comes first, usually early in life.
Almost every Saturday when I was a boy, I jumped on my bike to go to the polder, a Dutch word for low-lying land reclaimed from the water. Bordering the Maas River, our polder contained freshwater ditches full of salamanders, frogs, stickleback fish, eels, water insects, and so on. Carrying a crudely constructed net, I would jump over ditches, occasionally sliding into them, to get to the best spots to catch aquatic life. I returned in a perilous zigzag, balancing a heavy bucket of water and animals in one hand while steering my bike with the other. Back home, I would release my booty in glass containers and tanks, adding plants and food, such as water fleas caught with a net made out of one of my mother’s old stockings.
Initially, the mortality in my little underwater worlds was nothing to brag about. I learned only gradually that salamanders don’t eat things that don’t move, that big fish shouldn’t be kept with little ones, and that overfeeding does more harm than good. My animals started to live longer. Then one day -- I must have been around 12 -- I noticed a dramatic color change in one of my sticklebacks in a neglected tank with unchecked algae growth. Within days, the fish turned from silvery to sky blue with a fiery red underbelly. A plain little fish had metamorphosed into a dazzling peacock! I was astonished and spent every free minute staring into the aquarium, which I didn’t clean on the assumption that perhaps the fish liked it better that way.
This is how I first saw the breeding behavior of the three-spined stickleback. The two females in the tank grew heavy bellies full of roe, while the male built a nest out of plant material in the sand. He repeatedly interrupted his hard work by performing a little dance aimed at the females, which took place closer to the nest site each time. I did not understand everything that was going on, but I did notice that the females suddenly lost their eggs, whereupon the male started moving his fins rapidly. (I later learned this was to create a current that would provide additional oxygen for the eggs.) I ended up with a tank full of fry. It was an exhilarating experience, but one that I had to enjoy all by myself. Although my family tolerated my interests, they simply could not get excited about a bunch of tiny fish in one of my aquariums.
I had a similar experience years later, when I was a biology student at the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In a welcome departure from the usual emphasis on physiology and molecular biology, one professor gave a lecture on ethology -- the naturalistic study of animal behavior -- showing detailed drawings of the so-called zigzag dance of the stickleback. Because of the work of Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch zoologist, the stickleback’s display had become a textbook example. The drawings my professor had were wonderful, showing the male pushing out his red belly, with spines pointing outward, then leading the female to the nest while performing abrupt back-and-forth movements in front of her. When I nudged my fellow students, excitedly telling them that I knew all this, that anyone could see it in a small aquarium at home, once again I met with little interest. Why should the other students believe me, and what was the big deal about fish behavior, anyway?
A few years later, Tinbergen received a Nobel prize: The stickleback had won. By that time, however, I had moved to another university, where ethology was taken more seriously.
I now study the behavior of monkeys and apes. This may seem incongruous, given my early interests, but I have never had a fixation on a particular animal group. If there had been any chimpanzees in the polder, I would have brought them home as well.
Like every biologist, I have learned that one needs to build up an extensive background knowledge before one can even begin to address detailed questions. As Lorenz put it in The Foundations of Ethology, one needs to grasp the whole before one tries to grasp its parts: “One cannot master set research tasks if one makes a single part the focus of interest. One must, rather, continuously dart from one part to another -- in a way that appears extremely flighty and unscientific to some thinkers who place value on strictly logical sequences -- and one’s knowledge of each of the parts must advance at the same pace.”
In the study of animal behavior, this means that one follows each and every move of the species one is interested in, preferably under a wide range of circumstances. Behavior makes sense only in the larger context of the animal’s natural history, social organization, general temperament, adaptations to its environment, and so on. One cannot expect predators to react the same as prey, solitary animals the same as social ones, vision-oriented animals the same as those relying on sonar, and so on.
I came across an amusing illustration in the scientific literature of the pitfalls for those who fail to pay attention to the whole animal. Bruce Moore and Susan Stuttard, psychologists at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, reported in Science in 1979 that they had tried to replicate a 1946 study widely cited as demonstrating the ability of cats to work their way out of a puzzle box, a container whose door was operated by moving a rod. The earlier study, done by Edwin R. Guthrie and George P. Horton, documented in great detail how cats rubbed against the interior of a box with stereotyped movements. In the process, they moved the rod and escaped. Guthrie and Horton had deemed it highly significant that all the cats in the experiment showed the same rubbing pattern, which they believed they had taught the animals through the use of food as rewards: This proved the power of conditioning.
When Moore and Stuttard repeated the experiment, their cats’ behavior struck them as nothing special. The cats performed the usual head-rubbing movements that all felines -- from house cats to jaguars -- use in greeting and courting each other. Domestic cats often redirect these movements to inanimate objects, such as the legs of a kitchen table. Moore and Stuttard showed that food rewards were absolutely irrelevant: The only meaningful factor for the cats in the box was the visibility of people. Without training, every cat who saw people while in the box rubbed its head, flank, and tail against the rod and got out of the box. Cats who didn’t see people just sat there. Instead of a learning experiment, the 1946 study had been a greeting experiment.
The lesson is painfully obvious: Before testing an animal, one needs to know a bit about its typical behavior. Yet, all too often, scientists -- especially behaviorists -- think of animals as interchangeable. They reason that if the laws of learning are universal, one animal is as good as another. As B.F. Skinner, the founder of behaviorism, put it in “A Case History in Scientific Method": “Pigeon, rat, monkey, which is which? It doesn’t matter.”
Some animals have larger brains than others, which means that they may learn a bit faster, but reward and punishment motivate all animals. Behaviorists, then, assume that all brains work the same. But is a monkey brain really no more than an expanded rat brain, and is the human brain no more than a large monkey brain? Wouldn’t it be surprising if evolutionary adaptation affects every anatomical feature one can think of -- from limbs and teeth to stomach, eyes, and lungs -- except for the brain? If the architecture and function of brains were that invariable, the species with the largest brain would be superior in every respect. This is not the case, however.
Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark’s nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers, and they can find most of the caches again months later. As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as a car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.
Biologists readily accept that the ability to recall locations accurately makes perfect sense for an animal that relies on stored food -- but such specializations are annoying to behaviorists. And so, when Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, demonstrated in a 1970 article in Science a cognitive gap between apes and the rest of the animal kingdom, including monkeys, this was sufficiently upsetting that two generations of behaviorists have broken their teeth on it.
Gallup noticed that chimpanzees and monkeys respond differently to mirrors. Like most other animals, a monkey reacts to its reflection as if it were a friend or enemy, whereas an ape appears to realize that the image in the mirror is itself. Chimpanzees soon use the mirror to inspect parts of their bodies that are normally out of sight, such as the inside of their mouths or (in the case of females) their swollen pink behinds. Anyone who has ever seen an ape do this knows that the animal is not simply opening its mouth or turning around accidentally: The ape’s eyes closely monitor the movements of its body in the mirror.
To corroborate the observational evidence, Gallup designed an elegant experiment in which chimpanzees needed a mirror to detect a small change in body appearance. Known as the mark test, the experiment consists of painting a dot above the eyebrow of an anesthetized animal. Once the animal wakes up, it is shown a mirror. It cannot see the dot directly, but can detect its presence only in the mirror. In these experiments, the ape would stare at the dot in the mirror, then bring a finger to the real dot on its own face and inspect the finger afterwards -- a clear sign that the animals linked their reflections to themselves. Apart from humans and apes, no animals have convincingly passed this test, despite valiant efforts by many scientists.
Gallup spoke provocatively of self-awareness, and of the mental uniqueness of the hominoids, the family of animals made up of apes and humans. This triggered one of the greatest travesties in behavioral science: an attempt to demonstrate the same ability in pigeons. Surely, if pigeons have self-awareness, some scientists reasoned, the quality can’t be so special. In 1981, B.F. Skinner and his colleagues reported in Science that, with enough trials, food rewards, and patience, they had managed to get pigeons to recognize themselves in a mirror. The birds pecked at dots projected onto their bodies, dots the birds could not see directly because they had bibs around their necks. A marvel of conditioning, no doubt, but the experiment did not convince many people that what these birds were doing after extensive human intervention was the same as what chimpanzees do spontaneously, without any help. Furthermore, attempts to replicate the results have remained suspiciously unsuccessful.
Fifteen years later, another skeptical behaviorist tried a different approach. Cecilia Heyes, a reader in psychology at University College London, who was making a name for herself in Great Britain as a critic of the growing field of ape-intelligence studies, zoomed in on apes’ responses to mirrors. Without the benefit of familiarity with primates, she came up with the creative suggestion that self-recognition might be a byproduct of the anesthesia that is part of the mark test. Perhaps a chimpanzee recovering from anesthesia has a tendency to touch its own face, in a random manner that produces occasional contacts with the dot. What other scientists had interpreted as self-inspection guided by a mirror might be a mere accident.
Heyes’s idea was quickly disproved by an experiment in which Daniel Povinelli and his colleagues at the New Iberia Research Center at the University of South western Louisiana carefully recorded which areas of the face chimpanzees touched in the mark test, and how soon after recovery from the anesthesia. They found that the touching is far from random: It is specifically targeted at the marked areas, and it peaks right after the animal’s exposure to the mirror. That is, of course, exactly what ape experts had been claiming all along, but now it was official.
What makes critics such as Heyes unfathomable to me is their total absence of humility when faced with a group of animals they have never worked with. Behaviorists really do believe that they can generalize from rats and pigeons to all other species. But their “which is which?” approach to the diversity of life, and their talk of higher and lower forms, is essentially pre-Darwinian: It ignores the fact that every animal is a unique product of natural selection, in both body and mind. Only those scientists who try to learn everything there is to know about a particular animal have any chance of unlocking its secrets -- all others will keep tripping over the cat.
And so we return to scientists who erect no artificial barriers between themselves and other life forms, and who are not afraid to identify with them, project emotions onto them, or trust their own intuitions about them rather than relying on preconceived notions.
I often see a parallel with so-called “computer geeks.” In the same way that some kids love animals, others spend all their time clicking away at computers, playing electronic games, browsing the World-Wide Web, testing software, and so on. A few lucky people with this inclination are now highly visible billionaires, but they didn’t start out with wealth in mind. They were just obsessed with the technology. Similarly, ethologists and naturalists are driven by a power beyond their control to work with animals, watching them for inordinate amounts of time. Their science follows naturally. The only difference, sadly, is that they never get rich.
The study of animal behavior is among the oldest of human endeavors. As hunter-gatherers, our ancestors needed intimate knowledge of flora and fauna, including the habits of their prey as well as the animals that prey on humans. The human-animal relationship must have been relatively egalitarian during that period. Hunters exercise little control: They need to anticipate the moves of their prey and are impressed by the animals’ cunning if they escape. A more practical kind of knowledge became necessary when our ancestors took up agriculture and began to domesticate animals for food and muscle power. Animals became dependent on us and subservient to our will. Instead of anticipating their moves, we began to dictate them.
Both perspectives are recognizable today in the study of animal behavior, and, to be successful, we need both -- the observer/hunter and the experimenter/farmer. But whereas the first can easily exist without the second, the second gets into all sorts of trouble without the first.
Frans B.M. de Waal is a professor of psychology and director of the Living Links Center at Emory University. His recent books include a new edition of Chimpanzee Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (University of California Press, 1997).
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