The Unconscious Brilliance of Nature

       Another chapter from If a Lion Could Talk. This chapter is about humans trying to determine once and for all whether animals "think". The issue is that intelligence and the ability to think are not the same! A common example: a dog might jump up at a door handle over and over again and one time the door opens, the dog is free! The dog might do this over and over again, opening the door each time, but that does not mean the dog understands the underlying mechanism that causes this. The dog is not conciously thinking "I can open the door by scratching at the handle." This example reminds me of some of the papers I read about human-animal relationships. The keepers are bringing the animals food, so when an animal sees a keeper approaching, it is excited and goes to meet the keeper....is that because it has learned that keeper=food, or is it pleased to see the keeper for other reasons?
    This chapter talks a lot about learning associations - animals can recognize cause and effect, that does not mean they have a "theory of mind." A theory of mind involves imputing personal intentions, beliefs, and desires to and of others....this is kind of a complicated idea, but here's another example to clarify. The author of the book has a dog that would always try to eat the cat's food. The author would tell the dog off, so it stopped eating the food. Then one day the author was on the phone, and the dog went for the dog food again. The author was busy and couldn't tell off the dog. After that, whenever the author was on the phone, the dog would eat the cat food. So, was the dog thinking "Aha! He is distracted, I'm going to eat the food now!" Or was it simply a learned association - when he's on the phone, eat the food. There is a subtle difference between these two things...unthinking intelligence versus understanding.
     Something interesting caused by learned associations is superstitious behavior in animals. Example - a horse shying at the same place in the road where it was once scared by a bird. Apparently animals are pretty quick at picking up possibly cause and effects or associations. They do something a certain way because they recieve positive attention. Okay, so how does all of this tie into my project? I think it ties into the idea of positive reinforcement training - if a keeper treats an animal in a positive manner afte they do something the keeper wants, the animal is going to be more willing to do that behavior again. I've heard of training like this being used with elephants - keepers trained an elephant to raise it's foot for cleaning - positive reinforcement training causes less stress to the animals and make the keepers job easier. I don't know if the animals are really thinking about things - if they make decisions based on what other animals or humans are thinking. But regardless, using learned associations in the zoo environment seems like a grand idea.