Karsten Brensing - What Do Animals Think and Feel?

W HAT D O A MIMALS T HINK AND F EEL?

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2020 by Karsten Brensing

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition October 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

Jacket Design: Faceout Studio, Molly von Borstel

Imagery: Shutterstock

ISBN: 978-1-64313-554-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-555-7

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

As a child, in my dealings with animals I was always guided by the golden rule my parents taught me:

Was du nicht willst, das man dir tu, das fg auch keinem andern zu.

(Do as you would be done by.)

D OLPHINS CALL one another by name and orcas inhabit a culture that is over 700,000 years old. Chimpanzees wage strategic conflicts, whereas bonobos delight in dirty talk. Humpback whales follow the dictates of fashion, while fish use tools and play with thermometers. Rats are avid party animals and crows like to toboggan on snow-covered roofs. Ants recognize themselves in mirrors and spruce themselves up before they return home. Ducklings can pass complicated tests in abstract thinking and snails voluntarily take a spin on a hamster exercise wheel. Dogs punish disloyalty, though they are also capable of forgiveness if you apologize to them. Spiders choose their occupation on the basis of their personality and their individual preferences. And humans, meanwhile, stand and scratch their heads in bafflement at all this.

What on earth is going on with these animals? Hardly a week goes by without some report or other appearing in the press about animals astonishing aptitudes. We are amazed and surprised, but what makes animals tick and conditions their thought processes remains a closed book to us.

My best friend ever to date was a dog. Oh dear, how sad! I hear you thinking to yourselves, and I grant you, it does indeed sound a bit pathetic; what does that say about my social life? Happily, though, thats not the subject of this book which is about animals and in large part also about their incredible social lives, with colleagues, friends, relatives, enemies and strategically planned territorial wars. The enigma that should engage our interest here is played out exclusively in animals themselves, or to be more precise within their nervous systems, and hence it cannot be directly perceived by us humans. Of course, it is easy enough for us to observe animal behaviour and to draw conclusions from what we have seen, but we cannot simply quiz them on whether weve got it right.

Instead, it may even be the case that our ideas rarely have anything to do with the real situation, as the following example which was humiliating for me demonstrates: I had grown up with Flipper, and it was a childhood dream of mine to one day have the opportunity to swim with dolphins. And so I chose to write my doctoral thesis in ethology on the interaction between humans and dolphins in swimming lessons and so-called dolphin therapy. In my pilot study something all canny research students conduct to begin with in order to make sure theyre not barking up completely the wrong tree relying on what I had seen with my own eyes, I wrote that dolphins in swimming teaching programmes clearly seek out the company of humans in the water. Indeed, the endless numbers of people offering swimming therapy use this very claim to promote their business. After a year of video observation and detailed evaluation of the results, however, precisely the opposite turned out to be the case: the dolphins were actually trying with a demonstrably high level of statistical significance to avoid the swimmers, no easy feat in a pool that was only as large as the designated childrens swimming area in municipal indoor swimming baths. This not only punctured a naive childhood dream but also placed a question mark over my planned career at the time. How could I have got it so badly wrong?

Some decades ago, a pod of orcas was trapped for a dolphinarium in British Columbia. The three whales were fed with fish like all the other animals at the facility, but refused everything they were offered. The management were faced with a choice: should they wait and see what transpired or return the animals to the wild? They waited until one of the orcas starved to death, which prompted the others to start eating the fish. Had the whales refused out of protest at the people who had abducted them, or was it just that they didnt like fish? In the same region, the spillage from the grounding of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez in 1989 brought several orca populations close to extinction, but they did not mate with passing orca pods. This behaviour flew in the face of all the logic of evolutionary theory, according to which the animals should have been overjoyed and fallen upon the visiting whales in order to increase their gene pool. Nowadays we know more: these animals live within a culture that is more than 700,000 years old, with a code of behaviour that prevents one individual from having anything to do with the mammal-consuming killer whales within their species, and stops another from eating fish. The global financial crisis and the behaviour of stock-market players shook the world, and the misconduct of a handful of individuals sent whole economies spiralling into a crash. But surprisingly, the real cause of the crisis did not lie in the greed of a few, as we were given to understand, but in irrational patterns of behaviour that go back over 30 million years, which we share with other primates.

So, there are insects that use tools, fish that inhabit a culture, dolphins that give themselves names, elephants that bury their dead, animals that play fair or deliberately lie, and animals that treat themselves with antibiotics or that get us humans to work for them. But what does it mean when a raven can mentally put itself in the position of another raven in order to predict how it will react, or when a magpie recognizes itself in a mirror, or when mammals in general manage to score just as well in cognitive research tests as human beings? How are we to classify this ability where, for instance, do animals stand as compared to humans, and when and under what circumstances have we all acquired these aptitudes?

I will endeavour to answer these and similar questions that arise by citing countless studies. When I have finished, you will no doubt ask: so what distinguishes us from animals? Not a lot, as it turns out, but this much I can reveal straight away: we humans have one tiny peculiarity that underpins our success as a species, and that is our ability to use language. As such, then, nothing is about to topple humanity from its throne but even so, in the world you will inhabit after reading this small volume, you and other human beings will no longer be alone; instead, you will be living alongside other self-aware and sentient beings, and who knows, perhaps hereafter youll exchange a polite greeting with this or that raven you chance upon in your neighbourhood.