aloha!
fine feathered friends,
recent discussion has me mulling over vegan
guilt and its source. compassion? or fear? or neither? maybe a little
mixture of both. a good source of vegan guilt for those of you on the hunt:
_the_secret_life_of_plants_ by peter tompkins & christopher bird. for
instincto guilt: the only book i borrowed from my step-dad before he took my
mom off to the ivory coast, _the_human_nature_of_birds_. it establishes avian
intelligence to my satisfaction, and briefly covers cetaceans, fish, ants, &
bees. i may still type some of those later sections for y'all at a later date,
but i accidentally found a web site through altavista while searching for "koko
gorilla". i've pasted the url and what you'll find there below. enjoy! (have
mercy on your hard drives....)
http://www.envirolink.org/arrs/psyeta/hia/vol8/barber.html
Scientific Evidence that Birds are Aware,
Intelligent, and Astonishingly Like
Humans: Implications and Future Research
Directions
THEODORE XENOPHON BARBER
The author presents highlights from his recent book which documents that
birds are aware, intelligent, and shockingly like humans in numerous ways
including their unique personalities, their comprehension of concepts, and their
flexible behavior. It also refers to the significance of avian intelligence for
humanity's relations with birds (and all animals.) A new paradigm and new approaches
are proposed in animal studies.
KEY WORD INDEX:
birds, animal welfare, animal behavior, behavior patterns
About the Author
Editor's Note
I recently read The Human Nature of Birds: A Scientific Discovery with
Startling
Implications by noted research psychologist T.X. Barber. The book had a
powerful impact. It
delightfully changed the way I perceive and understand birds and other animals.
It also
confirmed my belief that conventional comparative animal studies would enhance
their
effectiveness by using what I call "Scientific Anthropomorphism," the educated
use of
comparing humans with similar species.
After completing a thirty year career as a research scientist in one area of
psychology, I turned my
full attention to another research area--the behavior and psychology of animals
with a primary focus
on birds. Then, for six years I carefully observed birds as I read and
continually thought about
several hundred books and thousands of articles on avian capabilities that have
been published since
the 1960's in the relevant journals of comparative psychology, ethology,
ornithology, and avian
biology. As I analyzed this vast literature, I came to the shocking realization
that, in many
well-conducted investigations, birds had demonstrated awareness and
intelligence, and had also
shown they have individual, unique personalities which at times remarkably
resemble people. I also
realized, with horror, that researchers have been intimidated from clearly
stating what their data
show because the data directly contradict the "scientific" commandment against
anthropomorphism--"Thou Shalt Not See Animals as Resembling Humans!" I
synthesized the
research demonstrating unexpected avian capabilities in detail in a recent book
(Pepperberg, 1986).
In this brief paper I will present a few illustrative examples from the
voluminous data which lead to a
new perception of the secret life of birds. Here are three examples.
ALEX COMMUNICATES
The most thoroughly studied bird, a male African gray parrot named Alex, has
lived virtually all of his
17 years semi-free in Dr. Irene Pepperberg's (Pepperberg, 1986) research
laboratories, first at
Purdue and Northwestern Universities and now at the University of Arizona. He
proficiently uses
more than 100 English words correctly to refer to all objects in his laboratory
environment that play
a role in his life including his fifteen special foods, his gym, the shower,
the experimenter's shoulder,
and more than one hundred other things. He at times refuses the experimenter's
request ("No!") and
may tell the experimenter what to do ("Go away," "Go pick up the cup," "Come
here".) He also
requests particular information ("What's this?" What's here?" "You tell me."
"What color?"). After
Alex had learned to use the numbers one through six and had learned a triangle
is "three-cornered"
and a square is "four-
cornered," he spontaneously and creatively called a football "two-corner" and a
pentagon
"five-corner." In formal, tightly controlled experiments Alex is shown many
objects in various
combinations, and he answers correctly an astonishing number of questions
regarding these objects,
such as "What object is blue?" "What shape is {the object which is} wood?" "How
many {are}
wool?" And, "What color is the key? . . . truck? . . . block? . . . wool? . . .
wood? . . .
box? . . . cup? . . . chalk?" Since Alex never knows what questions he will be
asked next, he must
be able to carefully attend to and understand each question, and he must be
ready at all times to
answer questions regarding anything he has ever learned. Additional data
summarized in The
Human Nature of Birds, leave no doubt that Alex and other birds speak
meaningfully, understand
what is said to them, and are far more intelligent, far more like humans than
modern humans
imagine. People who lived close to nature in the past, and scattered native or
tribal people living
today, were, or are, aware that birds and other animals are much like people,
(Suzuki and
Knudtson, 1992).
PIGEONS CONCEPTUALIZE
Psychologists at Harvard (Herrnstein and Loveland, 1964), have established that
laboratory pigeons
can use concepts in ways that have been considered uniquely human. Employing
Skinnerian
techniques to assess the pigeons' ability to discriminate between different
photographic slides
projected on a screen, the researchers found that pigeons include under the
concept of "human" both
male and female humans of every race, culture, color, chronological age, and
size. The pigeons also
identify the back of a human head, a human hand or foot, and other parts of the
human anatomy as
"human," and they recognize a particular human under various "disguises" such
as when the person is
nude, or wears strange clothes, or is a tiny face in a large group photograph.
Even more surprising,
the pigeons had the concept of "man-made objects" (such as streets and
buildings), "natural objects"
(such as forests and fields), and they even distinguished esoteric objects,
such as equilateral triangles
from other kinds of triangles.
Also, psychologists at Brown University (Blough, 1982) demonstrated that
laboratory pigeons can
learn to recognize each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet. Initially,
the birds made the same
kinds of mistakes as elementary school children--confusing C and G, and W and
V.
NAVIGATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Investigators (Griffin, 1974) were shocked to discover that migrating and
homing birds find their way
to their destinations by intelligently observing and integrating a variety of
subtle informational cues in
nature which may include the apparent movement of the sun, the stars, visual
landmarks, the earth's
magnetic field, infrasounds, subtle orders, wind direction, and cloud
movements. Also surprising was
the discovery that birds of the same species use different sources of
information to navigate to the
same destination and the same bird may use one informational source at one time
and switch to
another source at another time.
The evidence for the awareness and intelligence of birds provided by "hard"
data (from experimental
or laboratory studies) is corroborated by naturalistic investigations,
especially when the investigators
formed personal bonds or had friendly relations with birds. Here are two
examples.
HUMAN-OWL FRIENDS
Bernd Heinrich, a professor of zoology at the University of Vermont, rescued a
fallen nestling horned
owl, whom he found buried in the snow following a late-spring snowstorm. He
nursed the young owl
back to health and guided him to the point where the owl could survive on his
own. During three
summers, the male owl spent part of his time in Professor Heinrich's log cabin
and most of his time in
the surrounding woods. A close relationship with intimate play, enjoyment and
subtle verbal and
nonverbal communication developed between Heinrich and this rescued owl in
spite of the
consensus among ornithologists that great horned owls are "fierce, defiant, and
untamable, even
when young" (Heinrich, 1987).
Professor Heinrich's field notes contain many entries directly contradicting
accepted notions of what
is possible in human-avian interactions. For instance:
"Bubo {the owl} wakes me at 4:34 a.m. by drumming on the window beside my ear.
He joins me
for breakfast, sharing some of my pancake . . . He hops onto the back of my
chair, making his
friendly grunts while I caress his head, and he nibbles {affectionately} on my
fingers endlessly."
(Heinrich, 1987)
"He plays rough, and so do I, but eventually he tires of it and lies down on my
arms. Looking at the
clock I see that we have played for one and a half hours. It seemed shorter
than that . . . When I
come back to the cabin he now always comes down from his sleeping perch to play
. . . Bubo
comes to me and hops onto my leg. For a half hour we nuzzle, tickle, and
caress." (Heinrich, 1987)
"It is the many varied soft and hushed sounds that Bubo makes that I find most
fascinating. I hear
them only when I am next to him; they are his private sounds, reserved for
intimacies... It is these
intimate details that bond friendship and promote empathy and understanding,
and you learn such
things from wild animals by living with them." (Heinrich, 1987)
Bubo's "friendly grunts" and "soft hushed, private sounds reserved for
intimacies" are examples of a
variety of great horned owl communications discovered in Professor Heinrich's
naturalistic
investigation--communications of which ornithologists have been unaware. For
instance, Heinrich
discovered that Bubo had many different kinds of calls which had different
nuances, each tinged with
meaning.
Heinrich's experiences and discoveries, presented in detail in his book,
indicate that official scientific
data gathering techniques may be inadequate and misleading when compared to
data compiled in the
course of a close relationship with a bird.
BEFRIENDING MANY WILD BIRDS
Len Howard, a musicologist, conducted an 11 year study of bird music (Howard,
1956) from a
cottage in the English countryside. She provided food, water, and nest boxes to
attract wild birds.
She approached them with "an open, calm, respectful attitude." When Ms. Howard
began her
investigation of bird song she did not believe birds were really intelligent;
thus, she was surprised to
discover they consistently acted intelligently once they had overcome their
natural fear of her. She
was even more surprised when she realized birds living in and around her open
cottage were distinct
individuals who she could easily recognize and with whom she could form close
friendships.
By treating birds with respect and using food to attract them into her home,
Howard became
intimately acquainted with numerous individual birds and was able to observe
many birds over their
entire lifetimes. Among the things she discovered are: * behaviors that had
been viewed as
stereotyped and rigid such as mating and parenting are actually variable,
flexible, and individualistic,
* birds of the same species can be distinguished because, like humans, they
each have distinct
movements, postures, emotions, behaviors, and personalities, and
* birds of the same species, sex and age, considered by ornithologists to be
exactly alike, actually
differ widely in intelligence, ways of behaving, and social skills. For
instance, Howard found although
female great tits are not know to sing, a particular female great tit was a
better singer than all of the
male great tits observed during the 11 year project. Furthermore, this
particular female did
everything else well. Following 11 years of close observation and intimate
personal acquaintance
with the entire lives of many birds, Howard concluded that birds are not at all
what people think they
are; instead, they are much like ordinary people with emotions, feelings,
thoughts, and personality.
For example, I had a companion parakeet who had a daily relationship with a
goldfish in a bowl. He
would peek at one side of the bowl and the fish would come to that side of the
bowl getting as close
to the parakeet as possible--sometimes the parakeet would hang over the water
and the fish would
come to the surface. When the fish died (and a new one did not help), the
parakeet showed
depression with typical human symptoms of inactivity, quietness, loss of
interest in others and his
environment, and lack of appetite.
FLEXIBILITY AND INSTINCT
Other kinds of research data, summarized in The Human Nature of Birds, also
lead to the
conclusion that our avian neighbors are much more like humans than scientists
had dared to imagine.
For instance, individual birds have acted flexibly (changed their behavior
intelligently) in choosing
their mates, in building their nest, in protecting and teaching their young, in
defending a territory, and
in other activities that were assumed to be stereotyped or instinctual. Also,
birds have been reliably
observed to make and use tools, to communicate with their flockmates via body
language, calls, and
songs, to create musical compositions which are as aesthetically pleasing as
those composed by
human musicians, to play with joy, to mate erotically, to show parental
concerns, and to form true
friendships with birds of their own and other species and also with humans and
other animals.
Furthermore, recent data which are not yet widely known regarding human
instincts surprisingly
show behaviors that characterize humans (such as walking bipedal, talking,
laughing, and using hands
and fingers skillfully) are as instinctual as typical avian behaviors (such as
flying, nest building, and
migrating) and that both birds and humans implement their instinctual
propensities in essentially the
same flexible and intelligent way (Barber, 1993 & 1994).
OTHER ANIMALS
After synthesizing the avian research, I ask, in the book, Is consciousness and
intelligence limited
only to humans and birds? I then survey the research on a representative series
of animals (apes,
cetaceans, fish, and hymenoptera) and I arrive at an astonishing conclusion:
all thoroughly studied
animals, including not only apes and dolphins but also ants and bees, have
demonstrated totally
unexpected basic awareness and practical intelligence. These amazing
discoveries range from the
female gorilla, Koko, who uses more than 500 English words (in the hand-sign
language of the deaf)
to hold meaningful and interesting conversations with people (Patterson, 1979),
to ants that flexibly
carry out activities that humans mistakenly believe are uniquely human
including communicating
symbolically, building bridges and tunnels, farming (and even using
fertilizer), caring for aphids like
cattle which they "milk" to obtain a sugary liquid, and literally carrying out
warfare, slave raids, and
even wrestling tournaments (Wheeler, 1910).
In a series of ground-breaking books, Donald R. Griffin, (1976) had previously
surveyed the
research with animals (primates, birds, cetaceans, hymenoptera) and had arrived
at a similar
conclusion, albeit much more tentatively; he concluded that "suggestive
evidence makes it at least
plausible that simple forms of conscious thinking may be quite widespread"
(Griffin, 1992). In fact,
the conclusion that animals think, at least in a simple cause-effect way, was
deducible from a
philosophical analysis of causality (by David Hume and Immanuel Kant): our
ability to infer causes
for events is absolutely necessary for our survival and is a priori [innate or
instinctual]; and, animals
must also have this ability to infer simple cause-effect relations ("if this,
then that"), to think at least in
a simple way, because they too need it to survive.
IMPLICATIONS
Implications for Humanity
The implications are tremendous. If, as the evidence indicates, animals are
aware, and birds have
human-like intelligence, emotions, and personalities, then... modern humans
have been fundamentally
wrong about the nature of basic reality. Since they have been mistaken about
their closest and most
common wild neighbors, the birds, they need to reassess and reevaluate their
presumed
understanding of reality and their relationship to everything around them,
beginning with birds and
extending out to all animals and all of nature.
As the willfulness and awareness of birds and other animals penetrate to the
consciousness of
forthcoming generations, modern human cultural institutions, including science,
philosophy, and
religion, will change drastically. No longer will official science attribute
intelligence only to humans;
on the contrary, the next generation of scientists will be increasingly
cognizant of the mindfulness and
purposefulness of other living beings. No longer will philosophers philosophize
with total disregard to
the planet's non-human animals, no longer will religions focus only on God and
people while ignoring
all other creatures. As people realize the true extent of awareness in animals,
a new respect and
reverence will enter into their relationships with the rest of the natural
world.
Implications for Research
Although it may require one or more generations for humankind to understand the
deep implications
of animal awareness, the emerging understanding should impact more quickly on
research with
animals. The dominant behavioristic-reductionistic-positivistic paradigm in
animal research distorts
our understanding of animals. The implicit assumptions that underlie the
paradigm make it extremely
difficult for investigators to report without equivocation that their animal
subjects behaved in ways
modern humans believe are characteristic only of humans. While urging and
stimulating researchers
to look with an open mind at the possibility of conscious thought in animals,
Griffin also emphasized
under the dominant paradigm in animal research, students learn it is
unscientific to ask what an animal
feels or thinks. Researchers fear ridicule and excommunication from the
scientific community if they
interpret data as indicating conscious thought in animals, naturalists hesitate
to write publicly about
the mentality of the animals they study, and editors of scientific journals are
quick to reject papers
that do not adhere to the accepted paradigm.
The power of the dominant paradigm, for instance, its potency in blocking
mention of the
human-avian similarities, is overwhelming. As Thomas Kuhn and others (Kuhn,
1962) have taught
us, the dominant paradigm defines what is normal and acceptable, what is out of
bounds and is to be
ignored, how the data are to be analyzed and interpreted, and even what
questions can be asked
and what kinds of answers are acceptable. Paradigms are based on explicit and
implicit
assumptions. For instance, the dominant paradigm implicitly assumes that
animals are not like
humans. The new paradigm will discard this null hypothesis and look freely at
all possibilities,
including the possibility that animals are much like humans. Of course, the new
paradigm will also
discard the anti-anthropomorphic commandment which unscientifically,
dogmatically restricts what
scientists are permitted to perceive, think, and publish.
RESEARCH METHODS:
THE NEW RESEARCH PARADIGM
Let us now glance at a few of the research methods and procedures that will
come to the fore with
the new paradigm.
Like Professor Bernd Heinrich, researchers will more often be in the role of
participant observers.
They will form relationships with the animals they study. They will, of course,
refer to each animal by
a personal name. They will discontinue confining animals and treating them as
prisoners. When birds
are subjects in laboratory experiments, Alex will serve as a model--each bird
will be treated at least
as well as Alex.
Researchers will view their animal subjects as partners in research. They will
recognize the "tight"
laboratory experiment that is supposed to eliminate extraneous stimuli, is
itself a highly negative,
impactful stimulus, resulting in artificial and distorted data. They will
recognize the animals in these
experimental situations are typically fearful and depressed, and that the
animals' negative feelings
distort the results. Reports based on careful observations of individual
animals, which the dominant
paradigm now tends to belittle as anecdotal and anthropomorphic, will be
accepted without
hesitation as useful data for understanding animals.
Under the new paradigm, researchers will be free to look at previously
unconsidered psychological
dimensions of individual animals. For instance, they will look at the effects
of the animals' early life
experiences and developmental histories on their preferred learning styles,
their individual
personalities, their musical, artistic, and communicative abilities, and so
forth.
More important, the intelligent awareness and unique personalities of
individual birds can be directly
perceived by researchers and by every other interested person who follows the
procedures that
have been used previously by individuals who succeeded in befriending birds.
These procedures,
which I describe more fully in the book, include feeding wild birds while
approaching them in ways
to minimize their fear of humans, and forming bonds with baby birds who have
been gently hand fed.
However, to perceive the human-like nature of birds (and other animals) one has
to really know the
animal. Franz de Waal, who has vividly demonstrated the human-like
characteristics of chimpanzees
in his book Chimpanzee Politics, points out, "Everyone can look, but actually
perceiving is
something that has to be learnt. This is a constantly recurring problem when
new students arrive. For
the first few weeks they `see' nothing at all. When I explain to them at the
end of an aggressive
incident in the colony that [male chimpanzee A] rushed up to [female chimpanzee
B] and slapped
her, whereupon [B and her female friend, chimpanzee C] joined forces and
pursued [A], who sought
refuge with [his strong male ally, chimpanzee D], they look at me as if I am
mad . . . It is necessary
to be completely familiar with the many individuals, their respective
friendships and rivalries, all their
gestures, characteristic sounds, facial expressions and other kinds of
behavior. Only then do the wild
scenes we see actually begin to make sense," (De Waal, F., 1982). The same kind
of . . . subtle
knowledge of an individual bird's friendships, rivalries, body
gestures, characteristic sounds, and facial expressions are necessary . . .
before researchers truly see
"the human nature" hidden in birds and the basic awareness and intelligence
that can be perceived in
animals.
Until researchers begin to personally see the human-like qualities of animals,
animal rights advocates
(including Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) will be fighting
a no-win, endless war.
How researchers treat animals depends in the final analysis on how they
perceive them. If they see
animals as resembling unconscious, instinctual robots, they will not be
concerned if their subjects
experience confinement, social isolation, and stimulus deprivation or are
fearful, depressed,
unnatural, or blocked from expressing their potentials. However, when
researchers personally
perceive their animals actually have the essential characteristics of modern
humans (wrongly)
attributed only to humans (feelings, emotions, awareness, mentality), they will
ipso facto treat their
animals humanely and ethically. They will be concerned and assure the animals
maintain good health,
use their muscles and body appropriately, not be afraid or depressed, and be as
natural as possible
in their surroundings and in their interactions with others.
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Theodore Xenophon Barber
Ph.D.
Research Institute for
Interdisciplinary Science
Ashland, Massachusetts
Dr. Barber lived his early life in two very different places. He grew up
partly in Samothrace,
Greece, a mountainous island with two thousand people of whom nearly a third
were his close or
distance kin. The way of life in Samothrace was markedly different from Martins
Ferry, Ohio, where
he spent the other part of his early years. In Greece he lived near four
illiterate grandparents who
appreciated their mountain water, sheep's milk, eggs, barley bread, their
donkeys, and olive trees. In
Ohio he lived in the midst of a polluted factory town with few trees and barely
any animals. These
two sides of his life influenced his later careers as a researcher.
For more than thirty years he was one of the two or three most active and
noted researchers
working in the specialized area known as "the psychology and psychophysiology
of hypnosis." He
completed his work in this area after he had published four books and more than
180 journal articles
on the topic. His career as a major researcher in hypnosis is now history. The
recent authoritative
history that thoroughly covers research in the area (A. Gauld, A History of
Hypnotism, Cambridge
University Press, 1992) concludes that "Barber has had a stronger influence on
both conceptual and
methodological aspects of contemporary hypnotism than any other worker" and
entitles its final
chapter "Barber and Beyond" with subsections on "The Barber Revolution" and
"Barber: The
Post-Revolutionary Phase."
After completing work in one research area he turned to another interest that
went all the way back
to his early life in Samothrace, Greece. His close-to-nature life there allowed
him to be open to the
possibility that animals, including birds, are intelligent, aware, and mindful.
He began intensive
research in comparative psychology by reading, analyzing, and synthesizing the
myriads of studies on
bird behavior that have been conducted since the 1960s. Over a period of six
years, he realized that
(a) the research data show birds are conscious and intelligent, (b) this fact
is revolutionary for
(modern) humans' understanding of reality and their place in nature, and (c)
researchers in avian
behavior are blocked from clearly stating what the research data demonstrate by
the common belief
that birds are not intelligent and by the commandment against anthropomorphism.
The book, The Human Nature of Birds, was then begun and the highlights of the
rest of the story are summarized in the above article.
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