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Do Animals Think?

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With our tendency to anthropomorphize everything, from playful puppies to temperamental automobiles, it stands to reason that the animal mind is a topic of hot debate.

Literally. Animal rights activists have torched and bombed facilities associated with medical research or product testing on animals. Wynne finds these zealots baffling. Why, he wonders, focus on researchers rather than farmers, who, for sheer numbers, do away with a lot more animals? The Animal Liberation Front, he notes, in 2001 documented "the rescue of 5,000 animals, not one of them a pig. Why not?"

People simply do not bring an objective eye to bear on the subject of animal minds and that includes scientists. In lively and provocative style, Wynne, psychologist and professor, attempts to remedy this. He devotes chapters to four well-studied species: the honeybee, the pigeon, the bat and the dolphin. Others, particularly apes, also make frequent appearances.

He examines what makes these animals different from us, and what we have in common. What is special about these creatures? What is it like to be them? Are animals self-aware? How can we know? Chapters are devoted to the faculties that - supposedly - set us apart and above the animal kingdom: reasoning, language, and "the ability to put oneself imaginatively into the position of another - what we would call `theory of mind.' "

No one argues for the intelligence of bees. Yet the dance of the honeybee conveys detailed information about the whereabouts of high-quality food. The bee knows her food is better than what her sisters are bringing in because unloader bees serve her quickly. Mediocre loads have to wait. But some bees, even when informed their offering is hardly worth unloading, do their dance anyway. They are able to reason that near and plentiful is worthwhile even if the quality is below average.

Most, perhaps all, animals learn from experience. Even the sea slug learns to anticipate a poke. But reasoning was thought to be the province of humans until monkeys were shown to do it in the 1980s. A few years later even pigeons demonstrated the ability to make fairly complex deductions.

But then, a setback. Monkeys who could negotiate complicated patterns to predict the next in a series, were unable to judge where a peanut would fall through a curved tube. Although the simple mechanism was right in front of them, they still assumed the peanut would fall in a straight line. Wynne deconstructs these experiments to show how the simple logic involved for the animal in each step contributes to a complex task, while what seems to us the simplest diversion of a curve could stymie another primate, unable to make the leap.

The language discussion naturally devotes a lot of its energy to ape studies, which seem to show that apes can learn to use sign or symbol language. Wynne debunks this by giving us chunks of original data alongside the researcher's conclusions, showing a clear bias for enthusiasm. Readers of the popular books he refers to may counter with numerous endearing or amazing chimp anecdotes, but Wynne would probably agree that these show a complex and fascinating animal, while not a user of language.

Chimps don't have the brain mechanisms for language, but we don't have the bat's echolocation or the dolphin's sonar. He likens the relationship of species to a similarity sandwich with commonalities in a squishy middle, dissimilarities on the bottom and qualities unique to each species on top.

Wynne is clear about his own biases - he is basically a skeptic, with an open mind. He has a great appreciation for animals, which does not depend on them being like us. And, like most scientists, he relishes demolishing his colleagues, particularly the ones who, like himself, have written books for the general reader.

His writing is clear, well-organized and witty. The jury is still out on whether (and what) animals think, but Wynne's book is a highly entertaining and informative contribution to the debate.

First of all, this is not the author's best book. His best book is a slim, concise textbook called Animal Cognition. I must admit the author is an excellent writer. His thoughts are clearly expressed without academic jargon. His textbook on animal intelligence is probably the most readable textbook on this subject on the market. However, his analysis is awful. For example, concerning the mark mirror recognition test on chimps, he argues that mirror recogntion does not indicate self-awareness, because one could imagine a robot being programed to identify itself in a mirror?? What a stupid remark! His critique of mirror recognition in dolphins is equally pathetic. He says nothing about positive results (disputed results, however) from research on birds, dogs and pigs. This scholar has been known to admit that he has a bias against the whole notion of animal intelligence. In other words, he is a confessing speciesist. His interpretation of signs of self-awareness in other animals is that they have an "own-body concept." I see this as a clear dodge, and in fact I see the whole book in this light. What you have here is a conservative apologetic for speciesism. You will notice how annoyed the author is at the concept of apes and humans being genetically near identical. He actually attempts to argue that this universally accepted conclusion is incorrect. In short, I find this scientist to be oddly cynical and narrow-minded. His work is hyper-critical and selective. He is basically avoiding the best research, and what he focuses on he focuses on with an eye towards shreding it to bits.


Chapter 9, the final chapter, may be the most disturbing part of the entire book. Here you see a scientist deliberating about whether animals experience pain, and you are left with the impression that he really does not think they do, or at least has his doubts. I would like to provide you with some very unfortunate quotes as a way of illustrating the author's attitude:

"Let me ask again, How do we know animals feel pain? Singer's answer, the standard answer, is because they act the way we do when we feel pain. Our dog Benji ... walked into the side of a parked car once ... Didn't seem to bother him at all." P.240

In other words an animal's physical reactions don't necessarily represent the experience of the animal. Here is another good one on the same point:

"When organs are removed from the brain dead ... doctors commonly give anesthetics. Why bother with anesthetics if there is no chance that the individual is conscious? Because without them the body reacts violently ... So this adds a further complication to the calculus of pain that Singer wants us to engage in: outward signs may correlate little with inner agonies." P.240

Please see my review of Dr. Wynne's Animal Cognition.

I would like to recommend some better books (all very readable) on this subject:

Animal Learning & Cognition 3rd Ed by John Pearce
Animal Intelligence by Zhanna Reznikova
The Cognitive Animal (multiple authors)
The Smartest Animals On The Planet (written for non-science students) by Sally Boysen
Cognition, Evolution & Behavior by Sara Shettleworth


Also worth reading:

The Ethology of Domestic Animals 2nd Ed by P. Jensen

This is a well-written but specious book by a man on a mission. That mission is to advance the notion that, in all of the animal kingdom, humans alone are truly conscious; because consciousness, if you believe Prof. Wynne, is predicated on human language. And that anyone who thinks otherwise, from Griffin to Goodall to the average dog or cat owner, is delusional, subconsciously projecting their own emotional states and cognitive abilities onto "dumb" animals. Based on such assumptions the author questions everything from the ability of nonhuman animals to feel fear, anger, frustration, love or jealosy, to experience pleasure, and even to perceive pain. This worldview has all the freshness of a moldering corpse -- a 17th Century one to be exact. Rene Descartes promoted similar views, only he based his on religious dogma while Wynne posits, with an equivalent paucity of scientific evidence, the primacy of human language.
Discredited during the Age of Darwin, this conceit that animals other than humans are unconscious automatons is periodically disinterred -- like an ober-vampire that can't be killed no matter how many stakes are driven into its heart -- and peddled by a new generation of sophists: first Watson, followed by Skinner, and now Wynne. In an era when cognitive ethology has supplanted behaviorism as the dominant paradigm, Prof. Wynne swims against the current; a very small fish but one who occupies an even smaller pool. Like the doubters who don't believe that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, or that smoking causes cancer, or that anthropogenic climate change is upon us, Prof. Wynne grasps for the seat at the table reserved for the contrarian position, thereby insuring frequent interview requests from journalists trying to cover all possible points of view, even the most outlandish.
It would be easy to dismiss Prof. Wynne's stated views as obsolescent and so much self-serving poppycock except that he has no hesitation about employing them to disparage and undermine justified public concerns about animal suffering. This plays directly into the hands of those sinister entities that profit from animal abuse and would understandably prefer to not be encumbered by animal welfare regulations as they go about their nefarious activities. Voltaire wrote, "if we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities." And one of the leading purveyors today of just such dangerous absurdities is Clive Wynne.
Prof. Wynne is now reportedly focusing his research attentions on the comparative behavior of wolves and domestic dogs, a field already amply picked over by everyone from Lorenz to Miklosi. Elsewhere, Prof. Wynne has confidently assured cat owners that the reason cats crawl into their owners' laps is all due to a simple thermotropism; a claim anyone who has actually lived with indoor domestic cats knows to be ludicrous. So, canid enthusiasts can, no doubt, look forward to another round of similar dubious speculations in Prof. Wynne's next book.

I wrote the letter (below) in reply to Marc Bekoff's American Scientist (AS) review of Clive Wynne's very informative and well written book. Professor Bekoff was given an opportunity by the editors of AS to reply to my letter but he declined. Let me just add a few additional comments evoked by Bekoff's comments on this site.

Bekoff writes that "Many observations show that members of some species imitate other animals, empathize with them, are able to take another's perspective in certain situations (there is neurobiological evidence to support the conclusion that some animals have a theory of mind), and have culture and rather sophisticated patterns of communication."

But by using words like "empathize," and, I would argue, even "think," Bekoff implies that when nonhumans do something that we describe as "empathizing" (or "thinking"), it is the same as when we use the word to describe human behavior. But that is a mistake. Without operationally defining such words each time we use them, we run the risk of confusing behaviors that most likely have different functions, even if they appear to have similar forms. And nonhumans cannot have a "theory of mind" because all the evidence for theory of mind is linguistic.

Bekoff is also wrong that, "The behaviorist view is little concerned with evolution. It also fails to recognize that the behavior of many animals is far too flexible and situationspecific to be explained in terms of simplified stimulusresponse contingencies. Marked withinspecies variability is quite common, and this adaptive variability often (although not always) lends itself readily to "cognitive" explanations invoking consciousness, intentions and beliefs."

All behaviorists that I know (and I know quite a few), including me, are all thoroughgoing Darwinians. We recognize the contribution of natural selction to the behavior of organisms, but, as Bekoff notes, we also recognize the flexibility or adaptiveness of behavior. Bekoff is correct that such flexibility cannot be explained by "simplified stimulus-response contingencies," but who, since John Watson, has tried to do that? That doesn't mean that the principles of operant learning (the science of adaptive behavior within the lifetime of an organism) aren't sufficient to explain the behavior. In fact, "explanations invoking consciousness, intentions and beliefs" are not only not sufficient, they are not parsimonious, invoking as they do unobservable, undefinable, and unmeasurable processes. Such concepts are simply not necessary to explain the behavior of human beings much less other animals.

Bekoff critizes Wynn for not providing any scientific support for his reductionistic explanations, but the scientific support is in the almost one hundred years of accumulated empirical research on animal (and human) learning. From there, any interpretation based on the principles derived from that research is more parsimonious that the made-up explanations involving cognitive structures and processes.

Bekoff implies that all one has to do is to watch free ranging animals to appreciate the flexibility and complexity of animal behavior and to realize that only cognitive exlanations will suffice to understand such behavior. But cognitive explanations, born as thay are from age-old philosophical speculation about unseen and unseeable events, have never sufficed as scientific explanations and they never will.

Wynne is right on target when he claims, according to Bekoff, that "we should be very cautious about ascribing consciousness to animals and that anthropomorphic explanations have no place in the study of animal behavior." To do so in no way diminishes the complexity of the behavior of any species. As another reviewer said, we don't need to compare nonhumans (we're animals too) to humans to appreciate or respect them.

Letter to the Bookshelf
Do Animals Think? by Clive D. L. Wynne
September 21, 2004

The question in the title of Clive D. L. Wynne's book, Do Animals Think? is the wrong question to ask. In his review (September-October 2004), Mark Bekoff continues and expands this line of questioning by asking, do "animals consciously process information about their social and nonsocial environments?" "What is going on in the minds of animals? Do they have desires and beliefs?"

These are not scientific, but rather philosophical, questions that have been debated without resolution for centuries. It is not a contest (between behaviorists and cognitivists or anyone else) that can be settled by appealing to any sort of data either. There is no experimentum crucis. Nevertheless, Bekoff doesn't hesitate to throw his hat into the ring by concluding that the answers lie somewhere in the middle; between the "firm behaviorist stance," presumably taken by Wynne, that "animals are merely thoughtless robotic automatons to those who argue that all are thinking creatures with rich cognitive lives." According to Bekoff ("a rich cognitivist"), "a number of animals have the capacity for thinking about certain situations and showing flexible, adaptable behavior, whereas others may behave reflexively, with little or no thought at all."

The real scientific question about nonhumans, however, is not whether or what they think or whether they "consciously process information," but what they do in what contexts and what causes them to do it. These are the only questions that can be addressed by an objective science without resorting to irresolvable speculation about vague and muddy philosophical concepts.

Do many nonhumans show flexible, adaptive behavior? Definitely. Does that indicate consciousness (whatever that is)? Who knows? It depends on how one uses the term "consciousness." Do we need to speculate about an animal's consciousness or so-called cognitive processes to fully understand its behavior? The answer is an unequivocal "no."

If we behavioral scientists (evolutionary biologists, ethologists, behavior analysts, neuroscientists and even geneticists) can discover the physical events that are responsible for behavior, then there is nothing left to explain or about which to speculate.

Psychologists, ethologists, and neuroscientists are still intrigued by the lofty and ultimately unanswerable philosophical questions about mind and consciousness. Despite persistent optimism in some ranks, these questions will never be answered until the concepts are defined in objective, measurable terms involving the animal's behavior and its physical causes. Once that is done, the questions will become moot because we will have a complete understanding of nonhuman (and human) behavior.

Until then, the debate about human and nonhuman mind and consciousness will continue ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

I looked forward to reading this book and was so disappointed with it. I found the author's attitude to be quite narrowminded. I was particularly offended by his comments on whether animals feel pain or not, and his argument that for the greater good it was OK to continue with animal experimentation left me feeling nothing but distate for his ideas.

Do animals think? Well, surely some do, you may think. And an increasing
number of researchers across disciplines would agree with you: They are
trying to determine hownot whetheranimals consciously process information
about their social and nonsocial environments.

What is going on in the minds of animals? Do they have desires and
beliefs? Zealots abound at both ends of a spectrum that ranges from those
who believe that animals are merely thoughtless robotic automatons to
those who argue that all are thinking creatures with rich cognitive lives.
I imagine that the truth lies somewhere in the middle: A number of animals
have the capacity for thinking about certain situations and showing
flexible, adaptable behavior, whereas others may behave reflexively, with
little or no thought at all.

Psychologist Clive D. L. Wynne takes a firm behaviorist stance on the
issue in his new book, Do Animals Think? He argues that animals, even
those commonly believed to have active minds and a good deal of conscious
thoughtcompanion animals, dolphins and great apesreally don't think much
about anything. Here, and also in a brief communication and an essay
published in the March 11 and April 8 issues of Nature, Wynne says that we
should be very cautious about ascribing consciousness to animals and that
anthropomorphic explanations have no place in the study of animal
behavior.

I should confess right away that I'm a member of the opposing campa rich
cognitivist. Thus I was skeptical of Wynne's position from the outset. But
I was also open to his arguments. And I did find some of the information
he presents about bees, bats and other animals to be both fascinating and
thoughtprovoking.

Unfortunately, Wynne's adversarial tone and narrow choice of data made
this book a difficult read for me. Throughout he takes potshots at
wellknown scientists, philosophers and advocates of animal protection:
Roger Fouts especially, and also the late Donald Griffin, Sue
SavageRumbaugh, Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, Peter Singer, Steven Wise and
even Linda McCartney. Wynne criticizes them for using questionable
information about animal sentience to support the view that we should be
deeply concerned with animal wellbeing. The book opens with an account of
violence against humans by a member of the Animal Liberation Front, and it
ends on a similar note, with Wynne criticizing animal protectionists for
flawed thinking. He claims that he longs for the certainty of those who
attribute consciousness and the ability to experience pain to many
animals. But in fact, he advocates the opposite point of view with that
same level of certainty.

Although Wynne admits that we do not know very much about animal thinking,
this does not stop him from arguing that his reductionist views are
correct. He believes that the differences between animals and humans are
greater, and more significant, than the similarities. But are they? Does
Wynne include all animals or only some species in his arguments for mental
dissimilarity? He claims that

The psychological abilities that make human culture possibleenthusiasm to
imitate others, language, and the ability to place oneself imaginatively
into another's perspective on eventsare almost entirely lacking in any
other species.


What does "almost" mean? Nobody claims that other animals are identical to
us, but arguments invoking evolutionary continuity leave room for the
conclusion that the differences are, in fact, smalldifferences in degree
rather than differences in kind. Many observations show that members of
some species imitate other animals, empathize with them, are able to take
another's perspective in certain situations (there is neurobiological
evidence to support the conclusion that some animals have a theory of
mind), and have culture and rather sophisticated patterns of
communication.

The behaviorist view is little concerned with evolution. It also fails to
recognize that the behavior of many animals is far too flexible and
situationspecific to be explained in terms of simplified stimulusresponse
contingencies. Marked withinspecies variability is quite common, and this
adaptive variability often (although not always) lends itself readily to
"cognitive" explanations invoking consciousness, intentions and beliefs.

It remains to be shown how large the differences are between humans and
other animals. Although Wynne claims to recognize that not enough data are
available to make definitive statements, he offers them nonetheless,
arriving at some sweeping generalizations. He argues for the objective
study of behavior, butironicallymuch of his book serves to illustrate that
science isn't valuefree and that every scientist has an agenda.

Scientists who are skeptical about research on animal thinking typically
criticize it for being anecdotal and anthropomorphic. They claim that
anecdotes don't provide sufficient data (a view with which I and other
rich cognitivists generally agree) and that anthropomorphic explanations
are extremely imprecise. Wynne favors reductionistic stimulusresponse
explanations over ones that appeal to such notions as consciousness,
intentions and beliefs. However, he doesn't offer any scientific support
for his position. And in fact there is no empirical evidence that the
explanations he favors are better for understanding and predicting
behavior than those he eschews.

Many who, like Wynne, favor mechanistic explanations have not spent much
time watching freeranging animals. Were they to do so, the complexity and
flexibility of animal behavior would force them to realize that no simple
explanatory scheme will be correct all of the time. What is more, they
would appreciate better how much more there still is to learn about animal
behavior.

Almost daily, surprising new findings crop up: New Caledonian crows are
better at making and using tools than many primates; fish show culture and
likely feel pain; a dog named Rico knows about 200 words and can figure
out, through exclusion learning, that an unfamiliar sound refers to an
unfamiliar toy. So it's best to keep an open mind. The fact that an animal
doesn't do something in one context doesn't necessarily mean that it won't
be able to do it in another.

Returning at the end of the book to the theme of his opening pages, Wynne
expresses heavy skepticism about whether animals feel pain and whether
that should influence how we treat them. On the one hand, he praises
philosopher Jeremy Bentham's claim that the key question for determining
the moral and legal standing of animals is "Can they suffer?"not "Can they
reason?" or "Can they talk?" But on the other hand, Wynne notes that even
if we could measure pain in animals, "it is still not clear that this
would tell us what to do and to whom." Feeling pain is not, in his view,
the only criterion for deciding whether animals are worthy of our concern.
He says, revealingly, that animals "are valuable to us because of who we
are, not what they are."

Unfortunately, a great divide remains between opposing camps. The
polemical tone and lack of balance in the book make it difficult for me to
recommend it as a text for a course unless it's read alongside a book that
presents a variety of views on animal thinking. And inconsistencies in the
argumentation make it hard for me to recommend it for a general audience.
I do think that the book will serve to stimulate discussion of such issues
as what it means to "know" something, how much information must be
available before we can draw reliable, sweeping conclusions, and how we
determine how certain we can be that those conclusions are correct.
Studies of animal thinking lend themselves nicely to that philosophical
exercise.

This is an extremely well written book. Wynne has an exceptionally clear style and the book is full of wit and humour. At the same time, Wynne has a very good grasp of these complex issues. On the one hand, he explains quite beautifully which impressive perceptual and cognitive capabilities different animal species have. On the other hand, the author demonstrates very clearly that there really is a gap between humans and other animals, and that the latter simply do not possess language, self-consciousness or theory of mind. Most of the prevailing myths about animal cognition are dispelled in this book. That is what makes this such an important volume, as most of the popular books on the minds of animals seem to want to perpetuate these myths. Rather than dishing out just so stories about the evolution of cognition, or coming up with fashionable manifestos on the future of mankind, Wynne is sticking to the facts and provides a thorough analysis of extant data. This impressive book is a badly needed breath of fresh air in a subject area that is dominated by woolly idealism. I recommend it strongly.