Mick Hartley

A New Yorker article on Irene Pepperberg and her late parrot Alex has the usual anecdotes about this genius bird and his communication skills:

At the Bird Expo, she told a story about the time an accountant was working on some tax forms near Alex’s cage, and was more or less ignoring him. Peering down at the visitor, he asked her, “Wanna nut?” No, she said, not looking up. Want some water? No. A banana? No. And so on, through his repertoire of nameable desires. At last, Alex asked, in a tone in which it was hard not to detect a note of impatience, “What do you want?”

Hard for whom not to detect a note of impatience? Clearly it's what Pepperberg wants to believe, but it's a long way from science. The tale of Clever Hans is pertinent:

Around the turn of the century, Wilhelm von Osten, a German schoolmaster, bought a horse, named it Hans, and supposedly taught him arithmetic—addition, subtraction, even fractions and decimals—along with some spoken and written German. When von Osten asked Hans, for example, “What is twelve divided by three?,” Hans tapped his hoof four times. Von Osten gave regular demonstrations of his horse’s astonishing abilities, until a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst pointed out that von Osten was unconsciously cuing the animal with subtle movements of his head and eyes. One lesson to have drawn from this episode was that, although Hans may not have been so clever at arithmetic, he was, in fact, quite clever at reading the body language of humans, a talent that could have warranted further investigation. Another—and this was the one that took—was that anybody studying animal communication had to be extremely careful about accidental cuing.

But the lesson's ignored and the show goes on, as we ponder the lessons for animal intelligence in the mimicry of an African Grey parrot:

In speaking about animal intelligence, Pepperberg has tried to strike a balance between what the ecologist James Gould has called “the unprofitable extremes of blinding skepticism and crippling romanticism.” Pepperberg has published widely in peer-reviewed scientific journals, even as she raises funds for her research with a Web site that sells adorable Alex tote bags, key chains, and mugs.

Still, for many years, Pepperberg felt that she and Alex were, in intellectual terms, out on a limb. In the past decade, though, dozens of studies have buttressed Pepperberg’s claims about avian intelligence. Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, as Pepperberg often observed. Yet Nathan Emery, a cognitive biologist at the University of London, points out that, “in relation to their body size, parrots have brains as big as those of chimpanzees.” Emery has taken to calling certain of the brighter birds the “feathered apes in your garden.” And Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University, argues that avian brains, long regarded as primitive, are not so different from mammalian brains after all. Birds, Jarvis explains, “have a cortical region that developed, in fact, from the same substrate as in humans.” Soon enough, “birdbrain” may no longer be a viable insult.

But why should animal intelligence be measured on a human scale? – on the ability or inablity to speak a language, or perform human cognitive tasks? It's like measuring a dog's athletic skills by limiting it to walking on its two hind legs, to make that all-important human comparison: yes, it's amazing, dogs can walk a bit like us if you train them hard enough, though they'll never be competing in the 100 metres! Drop that urge to compare with us, though – let them run on four legs – and they'll be crossing the finishing line way ahead of us. Animals show the most astonishing range of intelligent behaviours, from migrating, hunting, storing food, communicating (the dance of the bees, for instance) – the list's endless. It's just that speaking, or performing algebraic calculations, aren't generally among those accomplishments, and it's odd that we should concentrate so much on those specifically human skills at the expense of other more natural ones. It's almost as though we're determined – all the while pretending to be celebrating the intelligence of animals – to prove that really, you know, these beast are incredibly dumb.