One day we humans may meet an intelligent being from another world. Hollywood tells us this stranger will come flying down in a spaceship, and will look a bit like us. But maybe it won’t be like that. Maybe it will be like this. —Ryan Reynolds, in The Whale
Shooter, the resident elk at the Pocatello Zoo in Idaho, is huge—standing six-feet tall without taking into account his massive antlers, and ten-feet tall if you do. As you can imagine, he attracts a lot of attention, and one day a few zoo staffers watched as he acted strangely. He repeatedly dipped his entire head into his water trough, a decidedly uncharacteristic elk behavior. He did not seem to be just taking a drink. Then, things got even more curious. Pulling his head from the water, Shooter now dipped his front hooves into the trough and seemed to be rooting around. After a minute or so, he withdrew his hooves and dunked his head again. When his head emerged this time, he had a tiny dripping marmot in his mouth. He carefully released the marmot on the ground and nudged him with one hoof until—recovered from his near drowning—he scampered away.
What was going on? Did Shooter rescue a drowning marmot? That’s what one of the zookeepers, Dr. Joy Fox, thinks. She believes Shooter sensed that the little rodent was in distress and decided to help. But on his first try, his antlers prevented him from reaching the marmot. So, Dr. Fox suggests, Shooter used his hooves to nudge the marmot away from the edge of the trough, then dunked his head again and rescued the marmot.
Such behavior suggests that Shooter may have displayed two capacities not usually attributed to animals: the ability to problem solve and empathy. It’s clear that Shooter figured out how to get the marmot out of the trough, though no one knows why. Perhaps he just didn’t like rodents in his drinking water or maybe he was trying to help the marmot. Throughout history, most scientists and philosophers would have denied the possibility of altruistic behavior in an elk, especially toward another species. But today, scientists are not only willing to concede that animals have intelligence and emotions, they are also going out and finding the evidence to prove it.
Scientists have shown us that many animals have rich emotional lives: rats laugh when tickled, magpies appear to mourn as they cover their fallen friends with greenery, female humpback whales travel thousands of miles for annual reunions with their gal pals, young chimps play make-believe and pretend that sticks are babies, capuchin monkeys express indignation when treated unfairly, dogs comfort other species in distress, and elk may be altruistic.
Researchers are also amassing astonishing evidence for animal cognition. In fact, many scientists no longer question whether animals think; now they are asking how animals think. Just as importantly, they are increasingly recognizing that human bias can get in the way of how science evaluates animals’ cognitive abilities. In his book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, primatologist Frans de Waal suggests: “Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.”
Discoveries about animal intelligence are revealing nothing short of de Waal’s “magic wells.” Dung beetles take mental snapshots of the Milky Way and use these celestial maps to navigate. Bears and chickens can count, whales compose songs that rhyme, and ants appear to recognize themselves in mirrors. When apes who can “talk” using signs or lexigrams don’t know the word for something, they occasionally invent their own terms, some of which are startlingly creative metaphors, such as calling ketchup “tomato toothpaste.” Prairie dogs have a complex vocabulary, with calls that function as parts of speech. Using specific yips and barks, they can communicate information as detailed as, “Watch out for the small human in the blue shirt!”
The examples of animal hearts and minds you will find on this website and in my book, Inside Animal Hearts and Minds might sound like the stuff of storybooks, not science. But it is science. And it is proving what Charles Darwin suggested more than a century ago: the differences between humans and other animals are “of degree and not of kind.”
There is a continual outpouring of astonishing discoveries about animals, almost on a weekly basis. The evidence for their capacity to feel a wide range of emotions and act with insight and intelligence is paradigm-shifting—radically changing the way we view animals, the world, and our place in it. The great American naturalist Henry Beston described animals as “other nations” that are “living by voices we shall never hear.” Beston probably never imagined that scientists would one day give voice to these other nations, but that is exactly what they have begun to do. My mission for my book and this website is to help those voices be heard, with the hope that as we learn more about the hearts and minds of animals, we will more readily recognize them as kindred spirits and treat them—and the environments that sustain them—more compassionately. —Belinda Recio
(Excerpted and adapted from Inside Animal Hearts and Minds.)
About the Author & Founder of this Site
Belinda Recio is a recipient of the Humane Society’s Award for Innovation in the Study of Animals and Society, and a contributing editor for Organic Spa Magazine, where she writes the “State of the Ark” column on animals. She has developed science curricula for educational television, museums, and publishers; and has authored books on a variety of subjects, ranging from animals and nature to sacred arts and symbolism. In addition to writing about animals, Belinda runs True North Gallery, where she exhibits art that connects people with animals and nature.
