Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (25 page)

Among the males, in contrast, power is always up for grabs. It is not conferred on the basis of age or any other trait but has to be fought for and jealously guarded against contenders. Soon after my long stint as chronicler of their social affairs, I put pencil to paper to produce
Chimpanzee Politics
, a popular account of the power struggles that I had witnessed.
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I was risking my nascent academic career by ascribing intelligent social maneuvering to animals, an implication I had been trained to avoid at all cost. That doing well in a group full of rivals, friends, and relatives requires considerable social skill is something we now take for granted, but in those days animal social behavior was rarely thought of as intelligent. Observers would recount a rank reversal between two baboons, for example, in passive terms, as if it happened
to
them rather than was brought about
by
them. They would make no mention of one baboon following the other around, provoking one confrontation after another, flashing his huge canine teeth, and recruiting help from nearby males. It is not that the observers did not notice, but animals were not supposed to have goals and strategies, so the reports remained silent.

Deliberately breaking with this tradition, describing chimps as schmoozing and scheming Machiavellians, my book drew wide attention and enjoyed many translations. The U.S. Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, even put it on the recommended reading list for freshmen congressmen. The account met with far less resistance than I had dreaded, including from fellow primatologists. Obviously, the time was ripe, in 1982, for a more cognitive approach to animal social behavior. Even though I learned about it only after my own book, Donald Griffin’s
Animal Awareness
had come out just a few years before.
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My work was part of a new
Zeitgeist
, and I had a handful of predecessors to lean on. There was Emil Menzel, whose work on chimpanzee cooperation and communication postulated goals and hinted at intelligent solutions, and Hans Kummer, who never ceased to wonder what drove his baboons to act the way they did. Kummer wanted to know, for example, how baboons plan their travel routes, and who decides where to go—those in front or those in the back? He broke down the behavior into recognizable mechanisms, and stressed how social relationships serve as long-term investments. More than anyone before him, Kummer combined classical ethology with questions about social cognition.
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I was also impressed by
In The Shadow of Man
by a young British primatologist.
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By the time I read it, I was familiar enough with chimpanzees to be unsurprised by the specifics of Jane Goodall’s description of life at Gombe Stream in Tanzania. But the tone of her account was truly refreshing. She did not necessarily spell out the cognition of her subjects, but it was impossible to read about Mike—a rising male who impressed his rivals by loudly banging empty kerosene cans together—or the love life and family relations of matriarch Flo, without recognizing a complex psychology. Goodall’s apes had personalities, emotions, and social agendas. She did not unduly humanize them, but she related what they did in unpretentious prose that would have been perfectly normal for a day at the office but was unorthodox with regard to animals. It was a huge improvement over the tendency at the time to drown behavioral descriptions in quotation marks and dense jargon in order to avoid mentalistic implications. Even animal names and genders were often avoided. (Every individual was an “it.”) Goodall’s apes, in contrast, were social agents with names and faces. Rather than being the slaves of their instincts, they acted as the architects of their own destinies. Her approach perfectly fit my own budding understanding of chimpanzee social life.

Yeroen’s allegiance to the young alpha was a case in point. Not that I could resolve how and why he had made his choice, in the same way that it was impossible for Goodall to know if Mike’s career might have been different in the absence of kerosene cans, but both stories implied deliberate tactics. Pinpointing the cognition behind such behavior requires collecting a mass of systematic data as well as performing experiments, such as the strategic computer games that we now know chimps are extraordinarily good at.
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Let me briefly offer two examples of how these issues may be tackled. The first concerns a study at the Burgers’ Zoo itself. Conflicts in the colony rarely remained restricted to the original two contestants, since chimps have a tendency to draw others into the fray. Sometimes ten or more chimps would be running around, threatening and chasing one another, uttering high-pitched screams that could be heard a mile away. Naturally, every contestant tried to get as many allies on his or her side as possible. When I analyzed hundreds of videotaped incidents (a new technique at the time!), I found that the chimpanzees who were losing the battle beseeched their friends by stretching out an open hand to them. They tried to recruit support in order to turn things around. When it came to the friends of their enemies, however, they went out of their way to appease them by putting an arm around them and kissing their face or shoulder. Instead of begging for assistance, they sought to neutralize them.
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To know the friends of your opponents takes experience. It implies that individual A is aware not only of her own relations with B and C but also of the relation between B and C. I dubbed this
triadic awareness
, since it reflects knowledge of the entire ABC triangle. It is the same with us, when we realize who is married to whom, who is a son of whom, or who is the employer of whom. Human society could not function without triadic awareness.
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The second example concerns wild chimpanzees. It is well known that there is no obvious connection between a male’s rank and his size—the biggest, meanest male does not automatically reach the top. A small male with the right friends also has a shot at the alpha position. This is why male chimps put so much effort into alliance formation. In an analysis of years of data collected at Gombe, a relatively small alpha male spent far more time grooming others than did larger males in the same position. Apparently, the more a male’s position depends on support from third parties, the more energy he needs to invest into diplomacy, such as grooming.
⁸
In a study in the Mahale Mountains, not far from Gombe, Toshisada Nishida and his team of Japanese scientists observed an alpha male with an exceptionally long tenure of more than a decade. This male developed a “bribery” system, selectively sharing prized monkey meat with his loyal allies, while denying such favors to his rivals.
⁹

Years after
Chimpanzee Politics
, these studies confirmed the tit-for-tat deal making that I had implied. But even while I was writing my book, supportive data were being gathered. Unknown to me, Nishida had followed an older male at Mahale, named Kalunde, who had moved himself into a key position by playing off younger, competitive males against one another. These young males sought Kalunde’s support, which he handed out rather erratically, making himself indispensable to the advancement of any one of them. Being the dethroned alpha male, Kalunde made a comeback of sorts, but like Yeroen, he didn’t claim the top position for himself. He rather acted as power behind the scenes. The situation was so eerily similar to the saga I had described that I was thrilled, two decades later, to meet Kalunde in person. Toshi, as the late Nishida was known to his friends, invited me for some fieldwork, which I gladly accepted. He was one of the world’s greatest chimpanzee experts, and it was a treat to follow him around through the jungle.

Living in the camp near Lake Tanganyika, one realizes that running water, electricity, toilets, and telephones are greatly overrated. It is entirely possible to survive without them. Every day the goal was to get up early, eat a quick breakfast, and get going before the sun rose. The chimps would have to be found, and the camp had several trackers to assist us. Fortunately, chimps are incredibly noisy, which makes them easy to locate. Chimps do not travel all in a single group but are spread out over separately traveling “parties” of just a few individuals each. In an environment with low visibility, they rely heavily on vocalizations to stay in touch. Following an adult male, for example, you continuously see him stop, cock his head, and listen to others in the distance. You see him decide how to respond, by replying with his own calls, silently moving toward the source (sometimes in such a hurry that you are left struggling through tangled vines), or continue on his merry way as if what he just heard lacked any relevance.

By then Kalunde was the oldest male, only about half the size of a prime adult male. Being around forty, he had shrunk. But despite his advanced age, he was still into political games, frequently accompanying and grooming the beta male until alpha returned from a long period of absence. Alpha had traveled to the fringes of the community territory, escorting a sexually receptive female. High-ranking males may go for weeks on end “on safari” with a female, as it is known, in order to avoid competition. I knew about alpha’s unexpected return only because Toshi told me in the evening, but I had noticed great agitation in the males that I had been following the whole day. They were restless, running up and down the hills, totally exhausting me. Alpha’s characteristic hooting and drumming on empty trees had announced his return, making everyone hypernervous. In the following days, it was fascinating to see Kalunde switching camps. One moment he would be grooming the returning alpha; the next he’d be hanging out with the beta male, as if trying to decide which side he should be on. He offered the perfect illustration of a tactic that Toshi had dubbed “allegiance fickleness.”
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You can imagine that we had much to talk about, especially comparing wild versus zoo chimps. Obviously, there are major differences, but it is not as simple as some people think, especially those who wonder why one would study captive animals at all. The goals of both types of research are quite different, and we need both. Fieldwork is essential to understanding the natural social life of any animal. For anyone who wants to know how and why their typical behavior evolved, there is no substitute for observing them in their natural habitat. I have visited many field sites, from capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica and woolly spider monkeys in Brazil to orangutans in Sumatra, baboons in Kenya, and Tibetan macaques in China. I find it very informative to see the ecology of wild primates and to hear from colleagues what sort of issues they are fascinated by. Fieldwork is nowadays very systematic and scientific. The days of a few scribbled observations in a notebook are gone. Data collection is continuous and systematic, typed into handheld digital devices, and complemented with fecal and urine samples that allow DNA analysis and hormone assays. All this hard, sweaty work has enormously advanced our understanding of wild animal societies.

Yet in order to get at behavioral details and the cognition behind them, we need more than fieldwork. No one would try to measure a child’s intelligence by watching him run around in the schoolyard with his friends. Mere observation doesn’t offer much of a peek into the child’s mind. Instead, we bring the child into a room and present him with a coloring task or a computer game, let her stack wooden blocks, ask questions, and so on. This is how we measure human cognition, and it is also the best way to determine how smart apes are. Fieldwork offers hints and suggestions but rarely allows firm conclusions. One may encounter wild chimpanzees who crack nuts with stones, for example, but it is impossible to know how they discovered this technique or how they learn it from one another. For this, we need carefully controlled experiments on naïve chimpanzees who receive nuts and stones for the first time.

Captive apes under enlightened conditions (such as a sizable group in a spacious outdoor area) have the added advantage of providing a close-up look at naturalistic behavior that one can’t get in the field. Here apes can be watched and videotaped much more fully than is possible in the forest, where primates often disappear into the undergrowth or canopy as soon as things get interesting. Fieldworkers are often left to reconstruct events based on fragmented observations. To do so is an art, and they are very good at it, but it falls short of the behavioral detail routinely collected in captivity. If one studies facial expressions, for example, zoomed-in high-definition videos that can be slowed down are essential, which require well-lit conditions rarely encountered in the field.

No wonder the study of social behavior and cognition has fostered integration between captive and fieldwork. The two represent different pieces of the same puzzle. Ideally, we use evidence from both sources to support cognitive theories. Observations in the field have often inspired experiments in the lab. Conversely, observations in captivity—such as the discovery that chimpanzees reconcile after fights—have stimulated observations in the field on the same phenomenon. If, on the other hand, experimental outcomes clash with what is known about a species’s behavior in the wild, it may be time to try a new approach.
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With regard to the question of animal culture, in particular, captive and fieldwork are now often combined. Naturalists document geographic variation in the behavior of a given species, suggesting a local origin and transmission. But they often cannot rule out alternative accounts (such as genetic variation between populations), which is why we need experiments to determine if habits can spread by one individual watching another. Is the species capable of imitation? If so, this greatly strengthens the case for cultural learning in the field. Nowadays we move back and forth all the time between both sources of evidence.

But all these interesting developments happened long after my observations at Burgers’ Zoo. Following Kummer’s example, my goal at the time was to spell out what social mechanisms may underlie observed behavior. Apart from triadic awareness, I spoke of divide-and-rule strategies, policing by dominant males, reciprocal deal making, deception, reconciliation after fights, consolation of distressed parties, and so on. I developed such a long list of proposals that I devoted the rest of my career to fleshing them out, at first through detailed observations, but later also experimentally. Proposals take so much less time to make than their verification! The latter can be very instructive, though. One can set up experiments, for example, in which one individual can do another one favors, as we did with our capuchin monkeys, but then add a condition in which the partner can do favors in return. This allows favors to travel in both directions between two parties. We found that monkeys become noticeably more generous if favors can be done mutually than if only one of them has the opportunity.
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I love this kind of manipulation, since it allows far more solid conclusions about reciprocity than any observational account. Observations never quite clinch the deal the way experiments can.
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