by Pa Rock
"C" Student of Nature
Years ago when I was working a few evenings a week as an "adjunct" instructor for a community college, one of the classes I occasionally taught was "Introduction to Psychology," something for which my background as a public school teacher had prepared me well..
(Adjunct instructors are brought in from the community to teach courses on a part-time basis. They are paid reasonably well, but receive no benefits such as a retirement plan or health insurance, which make them a bargain for overpaid college administrators to seek out and use to fill as many teaching position on campus as is humanly possible.)
Most of my classes were filled with retirees who just came back to take a class for something to do on a Tuesday evening, and the psychology class was no exception. My task was to explain human behavior to a class of students, almost all of whom had life experiences which far exceeded my own. One evening during a discussion period, I brought up a question which had been addressed in our text. The question was "Do animals think?", and the response from the class bordered on being explosive. It was a resounding "Yes!" Everyone had pet stories to share, most of which showed the pets to be smarter than their humans.
I have family members who are currently vacationing in Thailand. They are staying in what appears to be a very modern apartment that is located in a jungle setting. I had heard that they have to sleep under mosquito netting, and one morning they awoke to find animal scat (excrement) on the floor of their kitchen where some creature had broken in the night before looking for food. Very primitive! Last night I received a video that was taken from a camera they had set up in front of the main door to their quarters. In that candid video, two very energetic monkeys try unsuccessfully and multiple times to yank the door open so they can go inside and forage for food.
Were those monkeys "thinking," or was that just instinctual behavior, something they have been biologically programmed to do? That had been a major thrust of our discussion that night in the psychology class.
On one of the warm winter days this week I drove to town, and during that short trip there were two instances of squirrels running across the road in front of my approaching car. Both were successful in their efforts, but their rapid runs across the road set me to thinking about the squirrels of my youth.
Sixty years ago when I was learning to drive, when a squirrel ran across the road in front of a vehicle, he would invariably get about three-quarters of the way, and then turn and run back in the direction from which he had started - usually getting run over in the process. But now, a mere five dozen years later, they know better and just keep on running - meeting with much less road slaughter.
Something has happened, but what? Have the squirrels just had more time to observe the relatively new, and increasingly more common, vehicular traffic, and learned from their observations, or have they biologically evolved, perhaps as a consequence of the dumb ones getting killed of by cars and the most mentally and physically fit surviving to breed future generations of smarter squirrels.
My training was in the social sciences and I honestly don't know the answer to the question that I have posed. Perhaps if some retired park ranger reading this has an opinion on the subject, he would enlighten us.
On a related note, the number of dead armadillos along the Ozarks' roadways seems to be decreasing also. Some of that may be due to whatever phenomenon is saving the squirrels, but I also suspect that humans are changing as well and know that bouncing an armored armadillo beneath a modern lightweight car can do devastating amounts of damage.
And don't even get me started on deer!
Oh well, just a quick note. The number of roadkill deer in my hood would indicate that deer are neither getting any smarter nor evolving, but there seem to be an inordinate amount of Joe Bobs around here who take some pride and bragging rights with regard to the number of deer they have hit with their big trucks. While deer may not be getting any smarter, Joe Bobs are clearly devolving.
That's all!
1 comment:
Do animals think (let’s limit this to mammals)? Do they make observations and rationally decide to change their behavior? Do squirrels learn that speeding cars need to be avoided? I can tell you that my dog would stand beside the road while a speeding pickup truck narrowly avoided him. He didn’t flinch. Was he brave or naïve? I kept him in the house or on a leash after that.
Ethology is the study of animal behavior. It is a branch of biology. When I think of animal behavior that might indicate thought, three things immediately come to mind. During my graduate level Ethology class, my professor told the story of an old dog that was lying on a front porch beside a busy residential street. A young puppy was playing in the street in front of the house. The old dog jumped down, made his way to the street, picked the pup up by the scruff of the neck and brought it back to the safety of the yard just before a car zipped past. I had always been told that animals didn’t think. The same professor, while on a field trip: we saw an owl’s nest with a couple of owl chicks patiently waiting for a parent to return with food. I commented that it must be boring to just sit in the nest. The prof said, “It helps when you don’t think.” My third thought is my association with my dog, Buddy. He experienced emotions very similar to ours. There’s no doubt in my mind of that, but that is not science. It’s my intuition.
I’ve heard that some mammals have the cognition of a three-year-old human child. I don’t know of the science that shows that but intuitively, I suspect that it is correct. Koko, the “talking” gorilla was a star in interspecies conversation but unfortunately, Penny Patterson, Koko’s person was not a scientist as such and her work was not well respected in the scientific world. There are some other studies of interspecific communication with primates and even dogs but to my knowledge, they lack rigorous scientific study.
As a matter of natural selection, a squirrel would have to see another squirrel suffer under the wheel because very few would live to learn the consequences otherwise. But even so, evolution is not about individuals, it’s about populations. At a minimum, a scientific study would have to test populations that lived next to roads with heavy traffic, populations that lived near roads with light traffic, and populations that lived far away from roads. Comparisons among those populations would show, or at least, some scientific gravitas to the conversation.
So the short answer is that I suspect there is a lower level of thought processing amongst “lower” mammals. As a skeptic, I believe in nothing. I only have tentative conclusions.
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