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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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| Copies of this journal are no longer available for sale, but our other two journals, Society & Animals and the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, are available and subscriptions are quite affordable. They can be ordered online via our secure order page. |