CAN ANIMALS THINK ?

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 October 1932, Page 10

CAN ANIMALS THINK ?

AN UNORTHODOX VIEW. LONDON, September 5. Strong criticism from lovers of animals js likely to be provoked by a paper on how animals behave that was read to the Psychological Section of the British Association at York, today, by Kir R. Knight- . 1 “Most people believe in animal minds,” said Mr Knight. “Everyone tends to think that his horse or his hound, his .cat ,or bis canary, his Pekinese or his parrot, has some degree of character and intelligence. But is this belief one which we can justify? “When the plain man is challenged he usually points to the differentiation which the behaviour of animal? often exhibits. He tells of the cat that will sleep only on one particular cushion, of the dog that looks only to its mistress for swAets, and of the hunter that neighs when it sees a red hunting coat but is entirely unmoved by a lounge suit. And we are asked to agree that in all cases the animal knows.’

“But this line of argument does not lead to animal minds. The fact that a dog or a horse responds differently to different stimuli does not prove that it consciously distinguishes between them or that it has any kind of mental experience.

“Some people see signs of mind in the way animals seem to remember. They refer us to the dog that jumps over its master when he comes home after a holiday and to the vindictive elephant that soused a man who had twenty years before stuck a pin into its trunk. It is perfectly certain that animals acquire and retain bodily habits, but there is no clear evidence that they ever recollect things—that they have memory in any mental sense. '

“Tp..e dog .that jumps over its 1 master may not .consciously recognise him at all. The dog’s previous association with its master has left traces in its

brain and 1 nervous system and these purely physical traces do affect the dog’s present behaviour. But it does not follow that the dog is mentally rcmemb e r i n g anything. CONDITONED REFLEXES. “Another argument for animal minds is based on the fact that animals can be trained. But what do all these experiments on the training of animals show? Merely that aniinals can be; brought to respond in particular ways to particular stimuli. “There is no evidence of mental activity in the fa,ct that an elephant in response to definite signs from its trainer dapc.es .the foxtrot, or in (he fact that a sheep-dog responding to cues, carries out manoeuvres with sheep, ft may all be a matter of con.diti.on.ed reflexes —of altering and adjusting the animals’ inborn ways of behaving. The training can be quite well explained on the hypothesis that animals are nothing more than reflex machines.

“In my own laboratory we experimented on the .training of cats and foijnd abundant evidence of .conditioned reflexes,” bp said. “The .cats’ learning was shown to consist merely in th.e formation of habits. “Reflex, as one of th.e cats came to be called, wag each day shut up in a box \ybicli she cpuLd op.en only bypulling a stirrup attached by a cord to bolt op the fiopr. Whenever she succeeded in getting put gav.e her pijlk. R.eliex .did learn to pull th.e stirrup. Moreover, as cats go, she was exceptionally bright. “Nevertheless, when the stirrup was moved fropi the front, of the box to the back, she fiid not go and' pull it, but stupidly clawed th.e air in the place where it had previously been. In the en,d poor Reflex became such a crea-tpre of habit that even when she was placed beside the milk outside the .open box. she did not touch it till she had needlessly run into the box and i-ulled the stirrup! There was no evidence of intelligence there.

“Professor Holmes gave his monkey, I izzie. a loosely-corked bottle contain'ing peanuts. Lizzie fit once pulled out the cork with her teeth, obeying the ■instinct to bite at new objects, but she never learned' to turn the bottle up-side-down and let the nuts drop out. “Similarly, Peter, the performing chimpanzee, could skate and cycle, thread needles .and untie knots, smoke a cigarette and string beads, but his learning also was a mere habit formation', and even the barber elephant, who has been trained to shave another elephant, holds the mirror in front of his customer’s face th e wrong way round.”