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1. THE BLOOD-RED MENAGERIE

1.7   The Unlearnt Lesson of Clever Hans

In attempting to pin-point the circus' true identity, the Encyclopaedia Britannica declares that "Dramatising real life may be appropriate in the movies or television, but the circus must remain a fantasy, forever unreal and divorced from life's routine." This prescription unfortunately, also includes the myth that animals are happy and well-treated in the menagerie and dolphinarium, content under a rigorous training regime. Hagenbeck's so-called 'soft dressage' provided a convenient alibi for the numerous trainers who had neither the patience nor the wits to adopt his methods. Even to this very day, cruelty and deprivation is common in the training of animals, whether that be in circuses, films and television, or in science. Surprisingly enough for an institution which prides itself on being at the forefront of scientific and technological advancement, primates owned by the USA's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have regularly been trained for space flight by the use of electric shocks and beatings with sand-filled hose pipes. Such treatment prompted American astrophysicist Carl Sagan to declare: "If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?"

But it was probably an episode at the turn of the century that became a landmark in modern attitudes towards animal intelligence. It was then, in Germany, that a horse called Clever Hans was baffling both scientists and public audiences alike with his intellectual abilities, which included mathematics, an aptitude for identifying musical intervals and a working knowledge of the German language. If someone were to ask him the square root of 16, Hans would dutifully reply with four taps of his hoof. So sceptical were scientists that an investigating panel was formed, composed of two zoologists, a psychologist, a horse trainer and a circus manager. Yet even they could find no flaw in the horse's talents. Indeed, Clever Hans seemed to be on the verge of embarrassing the entire scientific community until one young psychologist set out to discover how Hans would perform if asked questions by someone who didn't know the correct answers. It was then that the horse's score plummeted to almost zero. Thus it transpired that Clever Hans had not mastered mathematics, music or German after all, but had in effect learned to read peoples' minds by observing subtle changes in their posture, breathing and facial expressions. A triumphant scientific community promptly declared poor Hans a fraud, and portrayed the entire affair as final, unequivocal proof that animals can only react, not think. But ironically, perhaps the same could be said of the scientists themselves: merely labelling it the 'Clever Hans Syndrome', they displayed not the slightest interest in understanding the horse's uncanny, extra-sensory abilities. It was as though science was betraying its own superstitious fear of the unknown and indulging in one of the most comforting tenets of Descartes' brand of scientific enquiry - 'that which cannot be proved conclusively does not exist'. This is often lauded as objectivity and yet even today, when it comes to animal intelligence, it seems as though reality has to conform to existing scientific theories rather than the other way around. But at least Hans the horse had showed up the absurdities of gauging the intelligence of animals by strictly human criteria.

Unfortunately, few researchers were prepared to learn this profound lesson from Hans. In 1947, for instance, a young American psychologist adopted a 4-week old chimpanzee which, for six years up until its premature death, was brought up like a human child, and subjected to an intensive language-training programme. During those years the animal learnt to utter only four barely coherent words - Papa, Mama, Cup and Up - which finally led scientists to conclude that non-human primates simply do not possess the vocal apparatus necessary for human speech. Similar research is continuing today using hand gestures and abstract symbols instead of speech and so far the results have proved quite remarkable, with some chimps learning 150-sign vocabularies. Falling back into their old anthropocentric habits however, the scientists are now being tormented by another momentous question: are the animals only capable of memorising unordered strings of signs or are they able to grasp grammatical rules? It is thus that to pass an intelligence test in a behavioural laboratory, animals are still required to master singularly human skills. Out in its own domain however, the animal is often more than a match for the human being in terms of observation, cunning, conscious deliberation and other survival skills.

The mysterious theft of abundant quantities of bananas was baffling an harassed plantation manager in Sri Lanka. Suspicion initially fell on some anonymous gang of local thieves, but only after mounting several armed, all-night vigils, did he finally discover the true culprits. Hardly believing his own eyes, he watched as a troop of working elephants from a nearby forest padded stealthily into the banana groves for their midnight feast. So as not to disturb the slumbers of the plantation workers and guards, every night before setting off on their raid, the ingenious creatures had stuffed mud into the great bells slung around their necks.

The power to reason, the ability to differentiate, to analyse and associate, to perceive continuity and arrive at the concept of cause and effect - these qualities have all been cited as definitions of intelligence. But if intelligence means different things to different people, just consider what it might mean to the animal kingdom as a whole with its mind-blowing diversity. Out in their own environment, animals must use their cunning and intelligence to survive. And as if each species inhabits a separate reality, intelligence is unique in form to each and then varies widely again with the individual. The skills they demonstrate are similarly unique, with certain animals displaying everything from abstract thought to complex communication abilities. For at least a thousand years, humans have believed that they are the only beings on the planet capable of conscious thought. This conviction did not change even when society accepted the fact that human beings were physically descended from, and related to, other species. Yet the implication of contemporary research into animal intelligence is that our minds too are also part of an evolutionary continuum, with conscious thought not a special aptitude that divides us from the animal world, but something that joins us intimately with it.

But as we have already seen with the 'talking' chimpanzees and those swotting-up their teacher's grammatical rules, that ubiquitous anthropocentrism that afflicts the human race is even glaringly apparent in this branch of science. It is perhaps especially ironic that in such behavioural experiments, the researchers study the animal with that special brand of stilted impassiveness so peculiar to science. It is typified by the many hard-line behaviourists who, rather than stooping so low as to admit that animals care about their young, describe a monkey's, or wildcat's attentiveness and grooming as "instinctive licking behaviour." The reductionist approach so inherent in establishment science is also much in evidence, not least of all because even research into comparative psychology is invariably conducted not in the animal's natural habitat, but in the most artificial of conditions in the laboratory. Yet evidently having been unable to see the wood for the trees for years, increasing numbers of scientists are now coming to the momentous conclusion that valid tests of animal intelligence can only be conducted in a species' unique natural environment. Indeed, as field biologists have been discovering for years, outside the artificial conditions imposed upon them in behavioural laboratories, animals may display their cognitive powers in the wild with far more complexity than the ones the scientists are so eager and insistent upon teaching them in captivity.

Dolphins have become favourite subjects for the behavioural laboratory in recent years. Internationally-acclaimed cetacean expert Professor Giorgio Pilleri of the Brain Anatomy Institute of the University of Berne, Switzerland, has long denounced the anthropocentric nature of such research. "Keeping dolphins in artificial conditions can do little else than produce artificial scientific results," he reasons. "We are dealing with animals of the highest levels of development, intelligence and sensitivity," but these qualities he adds, "are only evident in the dolphin's own unique aquatic environment where that intelligence has evolved to meet specific needs. It is nonsense to attempt to teach the dolphin algebra or human language, in just the same way that it is absurd to try to test animal intelligence in general by human criteria." Furthermore, Pilleri believes that the pressures of captivity often cause a "profound psychological disturbance" in the animals. Ironically, one of the first symptoms of this condition is a "loss of communication" and Pilleri insists that he has "proved that dolphins actually become less intelligent in captivity."

Out in the open sea, a dolphin school, composed of anything between a dozen to more than a thousand animals, is kept together by means of acoustic communication. While high-frequency sonar clicks are used for orientation and hunting, lower level sound serves as language. "In the wild, dolphins are highly gregarious creatures with pronounced individuality," says Pilleri. "On numerous occasions, wounded dolphins have been observed being supported by their companions, brought to the surface of the water to breathe, and nursed until they become well again. Females, acting as midwives, assist each other in giving birth. They help the exhausted mother by raising the newborn calf to the surface to enable it to breathe. Even before the onset of labour, the other females surround the mother. This also points clearly to a capacity for differentiated communication."

In some dolphin species the sonar emissions can reach frequencies of 200,000 Hz, Pilleri continues. "The Platanista or blind river dolphin is capable of detecting balls 2mm in diameter at a distance of several metres as well as distinguishing between materials - whether an object is made of wood or stone for instance. And in addition to identifying the species of fish, it can tell whether it is alive or dead." From all the available evidence, Pilleri concludes, "the ultimate status of man's brain in the ranking of mammals is today beginning to be in doubt."

A curious episode which took place on the Black Sea several years ago may also shed light on dolphin thought. A small Russian fishing boat was suddenly surrounded by several dolphins who began to push the vessel towards a buoy. There, the bemused fishermen discovered a young dolphin trapped in the buoy's anchor line. The men proceeded to free the dolphin baby and when they succeeded, the dolphin school let out whistles of joy and thanks. They then escorted the fishing boat all the way back to port. Other incidents also attest not only to the intelligence of dolphins, but also their ability to grasp the abstract concept of cause and effect. Danish ethologist Holger Poulsen related an episode in which two dolphins were playing with an eel. When the eel eluded them by swimming into a hole, one of the dolphins seized a small fish with a poison sting, took it carefully in its mouth, and pushed it into the eel's hiding place. The eel immediately fled the hole and thus the game continued.

The legendary compassion of the dolphin, of course, also extends to the human race, with numerous stories from every corner of the Earth recounting how the animals have protected swimmers in shark-infested waters, or have saved drowning seafarers. But to a science still steeped in speciesism, there is always a "rational" explanation, as evidenced by the views of unabashed dolphinarium fan Prof. Paul Schauenberger, a researcher at the Museum of Geneva. Though "there are countless examples" of dolphins coming to the rescue of human beings, Schauenberger reasons, "we shouldn't believe that the dolphin is saving people intentionally. It is rather that all dolphins, from the smallest to the biggest, show an innate tendency to carry on their foreheads every object drifting on the surface. It is a game, an instinct." Schauenberger seems reluctant to explain why the dolphins habitually carry their human objects to the nearest shore rather than out to sea.

Elephants Never Forget

Research at Kenya's Amboseli nature reserve has discovered that elephants, like dolphins, can also communicate with each other over several kilometres using calls inaudible to the human ear. "Such communication could explain co-ordinated movements by separated elephants and herds which have puzzled observers," says Peter Jackson of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "The elephant's use of tools also implies a well-developed intelligence," reports Dr Fred Kurt, a lecturer in ecology and a specialist on elephants both in captivity and the wild. The tip of an elephant's trunk, says Kurt, "is a kind of olfactory hand and it is used for shaping and manipulating tools, such as tiny pieces of wood for grooming the skin, or logs that it can throw with considerable skill at its adversaries." Their intelligence is also reflected in their nimbleness of movement. An elephant, says Kurt, despite its massive bulk, "would be quite capable of cautious movement in a china shop, and not be at any means as clumsy as the popular phrase implies." Memory is cited as yet another test of intelligence, and according to Kurt, the memories of elephants, for so long regarded as legendary, "can measure up to those of humans." As evidence for this, he points out that the elephants of Knie's Swiss National Circus "know the way unaided from the railway station to the circus ground in at least sixty towns - and wild herds are just as good at finding the way to their feeding grounds." American ecologist Cynthia Moss has spent 13 years studying an elephant family in Kenya. She concludes that the animals not only possess virtues of loyalty and kindness but can readily grasp the concept of mortality. Using the tips of their trunks, she reports, they rarely fail to examine the skeletons of fallen companions. On one occasion, Moss observed how a grown elephant gently fondled the sun-bleached skull of her long-dead mother, as if in recognition.

But even intelligence research in an animal's natural environment can sometimes have an amusing way of showing-up a scientist's own intellectual limitations. When chimpanzees embark on a termite hunt for instance, they will look for a suitable branch, carefully strip off the leaves and, with great concentration and dexterity, probe down into the openings of the termite hill. Much to their embarrassment, researchers who tried to mimic the practice discovered that they were as clumsy and ineffective as the adult chimps' children who had not yet fully learnt their skills.

But what of smaller creatures? For many years, science has attempted to categorise the comparative intelligence of animals with the concept of "cephalization" - measuring the ratio of brain to body weight. Thus, allowing for complexity of the brain, dolphins, gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans share the same level of cephalization as human beings. But by this criterion, the complex behaviour of smaller animals with low degrees of cephalization can only be explained as being dictated almost entirely by instinct - a legacy of Descartes' "clockwork" mechanisms. It may be however, that the entire basis of such scientific theory is at fault. Donald Griffin, emeritus professor at Rockefeller University and author of a 1984 book entitled Animal Thinking, dismisses the automatic-instinct theory. He argues that few animal brains could even store the huge volumes of behavioural instructions they would need to survive in constantly changing environments. Making conscious decisions, he declares, is far more economical than carrying around automatic responses to all the many contingencies of daily life. Indeed, he adds, "animals with relatively small brains may have greater need for simple conscious thinking than those endowed with a kilogram of grey matter."

This might explain the sophisticated abilities of some migratory birds which are believed to navigate by stars and by measuring subtle changes in the Earth's magnetic field and polarised light. In one recent experiment in the USA, for instance, a number of Shearwaters were tagged and then released several thousand miles outside their customary migration route. Although their subsequent journey involved flying over alien terrain with no familiar landmarks, the birds arrived at their usual nesting sites only a few days late. Other small animals also show convincing signs of conscious intelligence: the intricate dance language of honey bees discovered by Karl von Frisch in which a bee scout will explain to its compatriots at the hive in what direction and at what distance food can be found; a species of desert ant in southern India which has developed its own water management system by piling feathers around the entrances to its underground colonies, trapping morning dew; the woodcock, wagtail and robin who are known to nurse their wounded companions, expertly plastering fractures with mud.

Without doubt, the very concept of animal wisdom raises profound implications for human society; for, if animals can think and reason and are conscious of varied emotions, what possible justification could there be for their mistreatment in industrial farms, their exploitation in animal shows and zoos, their abuse in laboratories? What would be the fate of the current brand of establishment science, with its neutered morals, always ready to serve the highest bidder? Yet for expedience's sake, to preserve a self-serving utilitarian view of creation, perhaps human society would prefer to stick to the belief in the non-thinking clockwork animal, and let the worn-out ghost of Descartes continue to haunt.

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