DO ANIMALS HAVE A CONSCIOUSNESS?
For a long time humans saw themselves as the only species with an understanding of the self. But now we must ask ourselves: What do animals know?
The 10-year-old scrub jay silently spreads its wings and sails over to the stump of a split birch tree. A short while ago a young jay from a neighboring nest hid an acorn here; unfortunately, he allowed himself to be seen by the old hand next door—a rookie mistake. The experienced scrub jay ransacks the depot without hesitation. For an ornithologist, the behavior exhibited up to this point comes as no surprise. It’s what takes place afterward that gives researchers food for thought:
Apparently wary of being robbed in turn, the thief hides his ill-gotten gains only when he’s certain he is not being watched. Such tactical behavior has been observed in other types of scrub jays, and it raises some key questions: Can animals develop an awareness of their behavior? Do they think about themselves, about others, and about the roles they all play in the world?
The reason the question of whether animals can think in a self-aware way has not yet been answered is banal: Having been shaped by a worldview in which animals are seen more as things (after all, they are considered property in the eyes of the law), many bygone researchers hadn’t bothered asking themselves such a question. This only changed when psychologist Gordon Gallup devised the mirror test in 1970 as part of an experiment with chimpanzees. He used red paint to apply two spots to the apes’ faces. Contrary to what was expected by the prevailing opinion at the time, the chimpanzees did not consider their reflection to be that of a conspecific— they looked in the mirror and tried to wipe the red stains off themselves. It proved they recognize themselves as distinct from other chimps and know who they are and what they look like.
The experiment revolutionized the scientific way of looking at the animal world. To this day, passing the mirror test is considered a ticket to enter the exclusive pantheon of creatures that are considered to be conscious.
Many animals have passed the mirror test, including orangutans, dolphins, elephants, pigeons, cleaner wrasse fish, and many of the corvids—the family of birds that includes ravens and the thieving scrub jays.
So let’s continue to focus on those birds that have proved themselves so intelligent in current studies that cognitive biologist Nathan Emery of Queen Mary University of London has referred to them as “feathered apes.” Together with his wife, psychologist Nicola Clayton of the University of Cambridge, the behavioral scientist documented scrub jays’ awareness of the wrongdoing described above, explaining: “Your own theft changes your perspective. We recognize the truth of the saying: It takes a thief to catch a thief.” According to Emery, behavioral awareness undoubtedly corresponds to the qualities of selfreflection and empathy, which were previously attributed only to humans.
Other animals also exhibit a range of behaviors that cannot be traced back to pure instinct. In New Guinea, for instance, the male palm cockatoos have devised a remarkable strategy for recruiting partners. They construct “clubs” out of twigs and seed pods that they use to drum individual solos which they’ve composed themselves on hollow tree trunks. And in another example, several domestic pigs were trained by researchers at the Center for Animal Welfare Science at Purdue University to play video games using
a joystick—a skill that demonstrates the quality of awareness because the animals understood the movement of the cursor on the screen reflects their decisions.
There are scores of studies that reveal comparably intelligent animal behavior. But does the exhibition of intelligence also mean animals have an awareness of the self like humans do? The answer is probably “yes and no.” The examples cited here are firm evidence that there isn’t just one form of consciousness in nature—and this reality also reflects the current state of consciousness research. What’s more, various species have different forms of consciousness at different junctures in their development—and that’s similar to humans, incidentally: Even Homo sapiens only passes the mirror test at the age of 20 months. Furthermore, it takes us two years to recognize one another in photos and a full three years to understand our own shadow. Maybe we should think about the fact that there are quite a few animals that reach this stage much faster than we do.