If I could speak with the animals

If a Lion Could Talk by Stephen Budiansky Weidenfeld & Nicolson 219pp, £20 in UK

If a Lion Could Talk by Stephen Budiansky Weidenfeld & Nicolson 219pp, £20 in UK

When I finish this review on the computer and file it away to a folder on the screen, the changing sound of the disc drive produces a stir from beneath the desk. By the time I click in the floppy to make a back-up, Meg is on her four feet and wagging her tail beside me. It used to be reaching for hat and stick that alerted a dog to an outing, but times change.

Stephen Budiansky, an American science writer with a special corner in animal behaviour, is concerned to set us straight about the consciousness and cognitive processes of our companions on the planet. In particular, he takes up the cudgels against undue anthropomorphism, New Age mystification and researchers who en courage too facile a hope about talking with dolphins and chimpanzees, never mind the dog (whose barks, it appears, are a multi-purpose assertion quite unburdened by any intrinsic acoustic meaning).

Our compulsive anthropomorphism, he says, can get in the way of proper study of the things that animals are naturally good at, and of respect for kinds of intelligence that have no use for words.

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Much of his book deals in laboratory experiments - for, as Budiansky quotes approvingly, the plural of anecdotes is not data. Experiments in animal behaviour and psychology are necessarily complex: there are so many ways of introducing human bias, unconscious cues and wishful interpretation. As with a string of overvalued anecdotes, one can sometimes have too many experiments in a chapter, but thinking about thinking was never likely to be easy.

Some measure of anthropomorphism is an occupational hazard in observations and tests of animal intelligence. When apes, monkeys, dolphins, even pigeons seem to understand a sequence of words or symbols (usually for reward) it can be tempting to credit them with a knowledge of language and meaning, when what they are using are the short-cuts of rote learning and the simpler forms of animal common sense. Budiansky prefers the explanations that stick closest to what the animal sees, hears and learns from experience: cognition, he says, is not language.

Some chimpanzees have used mirrors to investigate marks on their faces, but an awareness of self does not generally enter into animal consciousness, nor do they realise that others have thoughts; what concerns them is behaviour. There's an intriguing chapter on the evolution of human consciousness as a device for keeping one step ahead of one's neighbour in a naturally scheming and competitive species. In the process, some evolutionary psychologists suggest, God can be just another person to bargain with to maximise our self-interests.

Animals have no such problems, at least not in the abstract. We never do get to learn from this book what a lion would say if it could talk, and are left, instead, to speculate on the experience of unconscious and non-verbal thoughts and immediate, instinctive action. Some believers in animal rights may balk at the suggestion that pain is not the same as suffering, when one has no means of worrying or feeling hard-done-by. But Budiansky resists any valuation of animals which suggests that they share in our thoughts and feelings and thus deserve the same kinds of consideration. Their right is to exist, species by species, and to exercise a different, still wonderful, intelligence.