Beyond Words What Animals Think and Feel Chapter Summary

Carl Safina's Beyond Words is an extended plea to see humans not as "special, resplendent, transcendent, translucent, divinely inspired, weightlessly imbued with eternal souls" but as other animals, unique in our own way but similar in others. He does this by telling stories—stories that help us see animals as people who share with us common roots and common goals. We meet Teresia, the elephant matriarch born in 1922 and killed by Maasai spears; we meet wolf Oh-six, who cleverly and ferociously retaliated against the coyotes stealing her pups' food; and we meet Luna, a young killer whale who, separated from his pod, chose humans for company. These stories are just as much the researchers' as they are the animals' narratives. We see Ken Balcomb's fresh excitement spotting transient killer whales hunting a seal, even after 40 years of observations; Rick McIntyre's sorrow reminiscing about the old-age death of Twenty-one, the wolf reintroduced into Yellowstone as a pup who went on to father the population; and Vicki Fishlock's realization that every elephant family in Amboseli National Park has suffered human violence. Safina is also a character in this story; as an ecologist by training, his vast experience with animals in their natural settings creates the lens through which he relays the experiences of others.

The book is organized into four main sections. In three of these, his focus is on a species: elephants, wolves, and killer whales (with discussion of other cetaceans as well). In each case, Safina traveled to the field to spend time with the researchers whose work forms the core of the section. And in each case, we are first introduced to the animals in terms of life history, social structure, and individual personalities. Through a review of the science flavored with anecdotes, we are led to see individuals as intelligent and emotional creatures with important relationships, and then we are shown the sad reality of habitat destruction, conflict with humans, and population decimation. The other section, which appears in the middle of the book, is an extended discussion—and critique—of comparative cognition research on captive animals and of philosophical analysis.

As a whole, Beyond Words is a sweeping romp, full of provocative stories, tidbits from research programs, and descriptions of animal behavior as evidence that other animals also love; teach; feel sympathy, empathy, and grief; perform acts of transcendent mercy; imitate; communicate; and have personalities. Safina covers evolutionary hypotheses about altruism and the evolution of culture, including the social-intelligence hypothesis, the grandmother hypothesis, and the self-domestication hypothesis. He considers research programs in the theory of mind and mirror self-recognition. Such a tour de force will naturally leave much unsaid—and not get everything quite right.

As Safina keeps reminding us, research on other animals is very young, and cultural knowledge has been lost as industrialized humans move away from interacting with other species in their daily lives. There is much that we do not yet know. It is a mystery how elephants communicate over long distances. Scientists cannot explain why elephants rescued and released by Lawrence Anthony came to his home and stayed two days after he passed away or why 80 elephants living in sanctuary outside a tourist lodge disappeared the day officials began killing hundreds of elephants 90 miles away to control the population—the elephants ultimately turned up in the part of the sanctuary farthest from the killing. Safina spends a chapter relaying accounts of what looks like dolphin telepathy: knowing where a lost researcher wants to go and leading her there; rescuing lost dogs; acting oddly when, unknown to the humans, a human died in a boat while taking a nap; and performing a novel behavior after the trainer merely thought of the behavior. Stories such as these abound, but science has no explanation for them yet. For science to move forward, Safina thinks that we should attend to anecdotes like these.

Unfortunately, Safina expresses skepticism about the role that philosophy and comparative psychology can play in the progress of animal-mind sciences. In the 40 pages of the book's third part, beginning with the chapter "Never mind theory," Safina's discussion of work in comparative cognition is disdainful, to the detriment of his stated interest in not only what animals do but also how animals do what they do. While not denying the importance of controlled experimental research, Safina urges psychologists to leave the lab and "watch the animals in free-living situations appropriate to their lives." He does not acknowledge the many cognition researchers who are merging field and captive research.

One area that Safina discusses in great detail is theory-of-mind research, which investigates whether nonhuman animals understand what others think, see, and feel. Safina claims that the theory of mind is seen widely in animals. He offers an anecdote about his two dogs making predictions about where to meet up with him when they are separated on a beach as evidence that they have a theory of mind. The anecdote is interesting; it tells us that dogs can behave rationally in novel situations. But it doesn't tell us how dogs are able to solve that problem. Did his dogs think about their human's beliefs and desires, or did they think about their human's typical behavior?

Safina admits that theory-of-mind research is a "pet peeve," and he goes on to demean decades of research by scientists looking for the mechanisms behind all the amazing animal behaviors he describes elsewhere in the book. In his discussion of the 1978 Premack and Woodruff study on chimpanzee theory of mind, he misrepresents the conclusions, suggesting that Sarah the chimpanzee did not solve the problems presented to her. He describes the tasks as demonstrating "an impressive lack of human insight into what could be an appropriate context or meaningful to a chimp." However, Sarah was very good at predicting how humans would solve tasks, such as making an unplugged record player work or lighting a gas heater, because she was living in a human context. The subsequent debate was about how to create a task that could tease apart the possible mechanisms at operation; the scientific consensus about this study is that Sarah could have solved the task using associative processes rather than by thinking about the particular mental states of the actor in the videos. We have animal cognitive psychology for the same reason we have human cognitive psychology: to find out how we work. Just looking at babies, adult humans, elephants, or killer whales will not allow us to answer this how question.

Furthermore, it is in theory-of-mind research that cognitive psychologists and philosophers are spending time in the field. Recent studies of the theory of mind in ravens and chimpanzees used clever tasks that take into account their ways of life, finding evidence that chimpanzees (Karg et al. 2015) and ravens (Bugnyar et al. 2016) understand what others see. In both cases, the experimental design was informed by the natural behaviors of the species, and it was that synthesis of field experience with knowledge of experimental methods that permitted these discoveries. The experiments offer evidence of the theory of mind, but these are not the kinds of data Safina discusses in this book.

Safina likewise dismisses philosophers who work on animal cognition, criticizing the practice of defining terms and "theorizing about theorizing"; he asserts that most philosophers have no data to back up their theories, adding that "such impediments never give philosophers cause for pause." Not only is Safina wrong about philosophers (one of whom was on the raven theory-of-mind team), but examples in which Safina could benefit from philosophy abound. After offering a discussion of the various definitions of self-recognition provided by researchers examining the question of whether animals have a sense of self via a mirror task, he concludes, "Self-recognition means simply that you recognize your self from everything else. That was easy. Let's proceed." And two pages later, he writes, "A creature lacking self-concept would be unable to differentiate itself from anything, so it would assume that the reflected image is itself." Safina does not seem to understand that if I lack the concept of widget, I cannot assume anything about widgets. This bias against philosophy shows up again when Safina's dismissal of Wittgenstein's aphorism "if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand him" is followed in the next chapter with a serious consideration of the point Wittgenstein was making, namely that the way of life of other animals may not map onto the human way of life, which would make translations of concepts quite difficult, if not impossible.

The majority of Beyond Words provides an enjoyable read and a window into the kind of data that do not make it into the journals. Safina's claims about what animals think and feel will not convince those who worry about anthropomorphism or the use of anecdote in science—he might turn to philosophy for help making those arguments. But what he does is beautifully relay stories about the individuals that share the planet with us—and he shows us how close we are to losing them and what a loss that would be.

References cited

2016

Ravens attribute visual access to unseen competitors

Nature Communications

(art. e10506)

2015

The goggles experiment: Can chimpanzees use self-experience to infer what a competitor can see?

Animal Behaviour

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Beyond Words What Animals Think and Feel Chapter Summary

Source: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/7/614/2463307

Betche Lize1971

Beyond Words What Animals Think and Feel Chapter Summary

References cited

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