BRAINS IN ANIMALS

Evening Star, Issue 21706, 28 April 1934, Page 25

BRAINS IN ANIMALS

AN OTTER'S INTELLIGENCE The cleverest animal I have known was Madamq Moses, my pet otter, says Frances Pitt, in ‘ John o’ London’s Weekly.’ Madame had brains! That she was, though slow to make friends, most deeply affectionate has little to do with the question of cleverness, unless her standoffishness be takep as evidence of keen intelligence. It was six months before she would accept a strange young dog-otter as a comrade; unknown humans she avoided, or bit if they attempted familiarity, but she would let me do anything I liked to her and never resented the roughest of handling. She would follow me anywhere so long as it was away from home, blit she got so bored shut up in her enclosure that she would dp.anything to avoid going back to it. When she intended to get out. she did, though it might take her days to dig a hole beneath the fence (corrugated tin sunk eighteen inches into the ground and strengthened with concrete) or find a new way of climbing over the top. She then hurried off to amuse herself on a woodland stream half a mile away, for she knew where the best fun was to be bad, having an extensive knowledge of the countryside and its sporting possibilities. Any place where she had once found a frog was examined at each subsequent visit, and in one instance after a space of six months. In the matter of Madame Moses’s memory I devised a test. First I took a card, attached a long string to it, and, placing a piece of bread and butter on it, put the whole on the top of the 6ft high fence. I showed Madame that a tug at the string would bring the card tumbling down and provide her with a tit-bit. She was very fond of this bread and butter, though margarine she spat out at once. She instantly grasped my arrangement, and each time she saw the string hanging trotted up to it, took the end in her teeth, and pulled down the card. 1 have never seen any dog show such immediate comprehension.

After Madame had had some practice I put the thing away for two years and three months. She did not see it between August 6, 1928, and October 12, 1930. On this last day I took the apparatus, and, while she was out of sight, arranged it as of old upon the fence. _ “ Moses came ashore, dropped the stick she had retrieved, and, ignoring me, walked to the dangling string, took it in her mouth, and gave it a smart tug, which brought the card and its bread and butter tumbling down. She lost no time in eating the latter. Her behaviour showed instant recognition of the card and recollection that it would carry a dainty.” In the surprising actions of many brilliant dogs we have the human brain aiding the canine, as in the example of the sheepdog, whose underfed performance is not only the result of long training and perfect obedience in consequence thereof, but is carried out entirely in response to his master’s signals.

In .making estimates of animal intelligence the personal factor must never be forgotten, for there is as wide variation between individuals of the socalled lower creatures as there is in the human species. Some, so to speak, are fools and others geniuses; but there is one class that Nature rigorously eliminates —namely, the idiotic and mentally deficient. It is only among mankind- and in the ranks of his domestic animals that individuals of poor mental equipment can survive. The fox, the rabbit, the hawk, or hedgerow bird, that is not up to the average in cunning, quickness to take alarm, swiftness in flight, or just general smartness, will not long survive. Fools are swiftly eliminated. Among domestic animals it is different, and compared with wild ones many of our tame beasts and birds arc distinctly silly, for they no longer depend on their wits.

I have known dogs, beautiful specimens of their breed, which were truly idiotic. A spaniel of perfect appearance, according to show bench standards, was no better than a mental degenerate. In fact, the dog, like his master, will afford examples varying from high intelligence to none at all. But I did not set out to discuss the brains of dogs and men, but to consider which is the most truly intelligent animal. Tire elephant has a high reputation for sagacity, and apart from the gi'eat apes is probably as sensible as any. I saw one revenge- itself with admirable promptitude on two men who, to tease it, bad been holding up a bun and then withdrawing the bun when it tried to grasp the proffered treat. The elephant turned to the water tap in its stall, from which flowed a trickle of water, and filled its trunk. When at last it had done this it swung around and sprayed the water over its tormentors. They decamped in a hurry.

Then there is the rat, which is an extraordinarily clever creature; but it is among the great apes that we find evidence of intelligence approaching that of man. By the way, in writing of the animal mind I always try to avoid the use of those much-abused words “ reason ” and “ instinct.” So much controversy has surged around them, such different meanings have been attached to them that it is safer to refer to inherited response and purposeful action when it is clear that the animal’s behaviour is not dictated by the nervous mechanism handed out to it by its forbears.

Experiments in animal behaviour carried out with the intention of eliciting the intelligence of the subject are often unfair. A cat shut up in a cage is too annoyed and worried to attend to the fastening of the door, even if it was within the scope of her understanding, yet tin’s same cat when focussing her attention on mouse or bird is able to grasp the situation at once. Tint we have wandered from the point of this article, which was not the intelligence of animals in general, but which one was the cleverest. This brings us back to the great apes, whose attributes have never been better set forth than in Kohler’s classical work on the psychology of the chimpanzee, ‘ The Mentality of Apes.’ He kept a number of chimpanzees and studied their characters, personalities, and behaviour with thoroughness, devising most ingenious tests of their understanding. He found considerable differences between them, “ Grandee ” became expert at placing boxes one on top of the other to erect a tower and reach fruit tied to the roof of the enclosure, but “ Konsul ” never built. All the chimpanzees used sticks as instruments for knocking down fruit, poking the poultry outside their pen, etc., but it was “ Sultan ’’ who found out how to lengthen a too short stick, poking a thin rod within the hollow end of a bamboo and making a stick ol twice (lie length. Having discovered how to do this, Ije always resorted to it when he wanted a long stick. But for details of the conduct of these monkeys the reader must be referred to Kohler’s fascinating account, which

leaves little doubt how high the chimpanzee must be ranked on the scale of intelligence, or of what a human type is its understanding. A great deal of our difficulty in estimating the cleverness of animals lies in the remoteness of their minds from the human. How can we fathom what takes place in the mind of a bird, even if it be a member of the aviam intelligentsia, the “Corvidae”? I admit that when my tame raven “ Jully ’ takes me unexpectedly in the rear and administers a punishing peck with her great beak in the calf of my leg I credit her with an impish, devilish glee akin to that which animates a small bov when lie plays a similar practical joke. Nevertheless, there is nothing more difficult than the attempt to understand the cerebral processes of a bird, or, for the matter of that, of any animal; but the fact that we always find the animals we know well so surprisingly clever convinces me that we commonly under-estimate the intelligence of birds and beasts.