‘Wanna Nut!’
Media accounts of Irene Pepperberg’s 22-year-long study of an African Grey parrot named Alex are invariably packaged in the most painfully obvious type of humor, with headline references to birdbrains, Dr. Dolittle and the inevitable Polly. Of course, this may suggest that the media’s own “cognitive and communicative abilities” are sadly limited, but the knee-jerk jokes also speak to humanity’s collective sense of unease with the idea that intelligence and, by extension, language itself may not be our own private fiefdom. Indeed, the assumption that “talking” to animals must be a trick, a hoax or a delusion has shaped Pepperberg’s scrupulous, exacting work. She knows as well as anyone that the debate over language studies in nonhuman animals has been as viciously contentious as any in science and that the stakes--involving the survival of other species as well as our own self-definition--could not be higher.
Pepperberg, who has a dry way about her, begins with an offhand allusion to the emotional freight of her subject: “The wish to talk with animals and understand their lives is not a recent phenomenon.” In fact, as she points out, the yearning to communicate with animals is a feature of myths in virtually all cultures. By 1661, myths began their transformation into reality: Samuel Pepys, intrigued by “a great baboone” (probably a chimpanzee) that had recently arrived in London, confided to his diary that “I do believe it already understands much English; and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.” In the early 1700s, one cardinal of Polignac made a generous offer to a chimp--”Speak and I shall baptize thee” (apparently declined), while Rousseau admired the reticence of the species: “It’s no wonder that these animals, when confronted with the prospect of salvation, enslavement or culture, wisely pretend to be mute.” Once Darwin made his calculations about our heritage, such insights inevitably led to research.
All such work, as amateurs and scientists alike quickly learned, was fraught with intellectual peril. In 1904, a Prussian with pedagogical ambitions came to believe that he had taught his horse, Clever Hans, to do simple arithmetic; he wrote sums on a card, and the animal tapped out his astonishingly correct answers with a hoof. Hans even passed tests administered by no less august a body than the Berlin Psychological Institute, but the animal was eventually shown to have learned not math but the subtle, if unwitting, cues of his credulous trainer, whose physical responses (raised eyebrows and the like) to correct answers tipped him off.
Although the sensitivity of the animal was almost as impressive as mathematical ability would have been, the embarrassingly anthropomorphic taint of the Clever Hans affair has lingered over the whole field of cognitive ethology, or animal cognition, and is still sarcastically invoked, particularly by strict Skinnerian behaviorists who have long argued that animals must be seen as organic machines, the behavior of which is instinctively or genetically determined. Thus, 20th century scientists who have grappled with controversial questions regarding animal consciousness have simultaneously courted the rolled eyes and contempt of their peers along with the sensationalist attention of the press. This dilemma was never more dramatically played out than during the infamous ape language studies of the 1970s.
After several attempts to teach spoken language to chimpanzees had failed earlier in the century (because of differences between their vocal tracts and ours), in 1966 Allen and Beatrice Gardner, experimental psychologists at the University of Nevada at Reno, along with a cadre of graduate students, including the now-renowned Roger Fouts, began teaching American Sign Language to a young female chimpanzee they called Washoe. The group raised her much as a human child is raised, using a technique called “cross-fostering,” in an attempt to reproduce the social conditions under which human children learn language.
Around the same time that Jane Goodall’s observations of wild chimps at Gombe were demolishing the long-cherished assumption that only humans use tools, Washoe was accumulating a vocabulary of more than 100 signs and assembling them in sentences, a groundbreaking development that shook the foundations of the Chomskian theory that only humans are capable of using grammar. In the story of his life with Washoe, “Next of Kin,” Fouts describes a visiting professor gazing with awe at Washoe as she sat in a tree, turning the pages of a magazine and signing to herself the names of the objects in its pages. Although her signing frequently centered on requests for favorite foods or activities, she did combined signs in novel and comprehensible ways, once nagging Fouts for a drag on his cigarette: “PLEASE GIVE ME THAT HOT SMOKE.”
When the Gardners moved on, Fouts continued working with Washoe and other chimps at the University of Oklahoma, eventually becoming the animals’ champion, trying to save them from being transferred to biomedical laboratories. The Gardners and Fouts’ work touched off enormous scientific and popular interest in cross-species communication, drawing the attention of Life magazine, PBS’s “Nova” and the Hollywood screenwriter and director Robert Towne, who wanted to make a new version of “Tarzan” using footage of the chimps. Other scientists, using a variety of approaches, began working on related projects with gorillas, orangutans, dolphins and other species. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one of Fouts’ students, went on to work with Kanzi, a bonobo (the so-called pygmy chimpanzee), who has mastered the correct usage of more than 100 symbolic lexigrams at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Georgia.
But much of this work was attacked in 1980 by another ape language researcher, Herbert Terrace, who spent several years overseeing a project in which dozens of graduate students (many not proficient in ASL) attempted to teach a pidgin version of ASL to a young male chimp called Nim Chimpsky. Nim was trained in a Columbia University laboratory rather than in a homelike environment and, lacking long-term relationships with his trainers, turned out to be a less spontaneous signer than Washoe. He produced, as his longest utterance, the repetitive string: “give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” Terrace ultimately concluded that Nim was another Clever Hans, signing in an uncomprehending way merely in order to get rewards. Terrace’s findings were seized on to suggest that all chimps trained in ASL were neither comprehending nor using grammar, and Nim’s failures touched off a backlash against ape language research in which outraged behaviorists and Chomskians led the charge against “chimpology,” as they dismissively called it. As a result, funding for such studies became scarce, and scientific journals began to refuse papers on the subject, no matter how well documented.
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Seen against this background, Pepperberg’s choice of research subject--a year-old African Grey Parrot purchased in a pet store in Chicago in 1977 (so as to ensure that the bird had had “no formal training since hatching”)--seems an inspired and elegant solution to some of the problems that have plagued research with apes, one that sidestepped various political and financial pitfalls: Working with apes is notoriously expensive and, as Fouts has pointed out, raises troubling moral questions. Pepperberg’s decision to work with a parrot also opened up the research to exploring a species whose mimicking abilities have been renowned since the time of Aristotle. It was a counterintuitive solution, going against the “accepted dogma” that such research had to be conducted either with animals closely related to humans (chimps, bonobos) or those with large brains (dolphins, whales). And, just as Goodall’s work tended to complement the ape language studies, so Pepperberg’s was bolstered by studies of wild parrots: Soon after she began her research, it was determined that some parrot species use specific calls “to recognize individuals in a flock” and to alert others to predators.
Whereas the Gardners had used “cross-fostering” to provide Washoe with the kind of highly enriched environment in which children learn language, Pepperberg capitalized on parrots’ socialization skills (they live in large flocks in the wild) and their capacity for competition and jealousy by employing a “model/rival” training technique. Pepperberg or another primary trainer would review with a second person, who acted as “a model for the bird’s responses and a rival for the trainer’s attention,” various labels, numbers or colors for the items that Alex was being taught to identify. This allowed Alex to watch the interaction and to vie for attention in a discussion of such questions as: “What’s this?” “What color?” “What shape?” “How many?” Rather than being routinely rewarded with food treats, Alex was allowed to handle and play with some 30 food items or objects (keys, corks, pieces of wood) that he learned to identify and request. Of course, at times, he interjected his own desires, but he also demonstrated that he could respond, correctly, to such questions as “What color is the three-corner wood?” Tape recordings showed that Alex was often practicing his words overnight.
Pepperberg offers several transcriptions of sessions that capture Alex’s terse conversational manner as well as his ability to understand the proceedings (in the following “peg wood” is the term used for clothes pin, “I” represents Pepperberg, “K” the model/rival and “A” stands for Alex):
K: OK, Alex, let’s start. What’s this? (Holds up clothes pin.)
A: Peg wood.
I (Sits facing wall, observing neither A nor K): That’s “peg wood.”
K: That’s right--here’s the peg wood, Alex. You’re a good boy. (Hands over the clothes pin.)
A: (Takes clothes pin, but drops it immediately): Want cork.
K: OK, here’s cork.
(A plays with the cork for about one minute.)
K: Enough, Alex. Gimme cork (holds out her hand; Alex relinquishes cork). What’s this, what shape? (Holds up a red, triangular piece of wood.)
A: Cor-er wood.
I: I think he said “corner wood.”
K: (Briefly turns away, then reestablishes eye contact with parrot): Alex, what shape? Talk clearly!!
A: Three-corner wood.
I: “Three-corner wood.”
K: You’re right--the shape is three-corner wood. (Hands wood to parrot.) (A takes wood, chews off one of the corners, drops it.)
A: Wanna nut. (K gives him a nut, which he eats.)
K: Look, what’s this? (Holds up a piece of grey rawhide.)
A: Wanna nut.
K: No nuts . . . first tell me, what’s this?
A: Grey hi’.
I: “Grey hide.”
K: Good parrot . . . here’s the grey hide.
A: (Refuses to take the hide): Wanna nut!
As Donald Griffin, the grand old man of animal cognition theory, has put it, Alex has proved that “a parrot can literally mean what he says.” It isn’t possible to do justice to the complexity of Pepperberg’s experiments in a review, but her work with Alex and other parrots has conclusively shown that they can employ labels and numerical concepts, appreciate relative concepts of sameness and difference and seem to understand the notion of “none” or zero.
Pepperberg is cautious about the implications of her data, saying, “Does Alex possess language? No. Is it a complicated two-way communication? Yes.” Nonetheless, she suggests that Alex, over a 20-year period, has even come up with an act of “intentional creativity,” coining a term of his own. Alex has insisted that “apple” should be called “banerry,” possibly a combination of two words in his vocabulary: “banana” and “cherry.” Creative or not, Alex’s abilities are extraordinary, and Pepperberg’s investigation of them makes “The Alex Studies” essential for anyone interested in the wider issues it raises--though it was written for a specialized audience and is packed with tables and references. As with other pioneering works from Darwin’s to E.O. Wilson’s, its influence will be felt throughout the field of animal ethology for years to come.
It’s already being felt in introductions to the subject, such as “Inside the Animal Mind: A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence,” written by George Page, the plummy-voiced host of PBS’ “Nature.” Page’s book is a companion to “Nature’s” recent three-part series on the same topic (which features footage of Pepperberg working with Alex), but it transcends the limitations of such books, which too often amount to illustrated afterthoughts.
Though “groundbreaking” may be hyperbole, Page’s cogent synthesis of decades of complex philosophical, psychological, scientific and ethical debate does readers an inestimable service, laying a clear path through a minefield of terms like “anecdotal cognitivism.” It certainly outshines more heavy-handed surveys such as that of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose “Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think” doesn’t tell us what animals “think” any more than Jeffrey Masson’s popular animal soapers tell us “why dogs lie about love” or whether “elephants weep.” Though Hauser offers an extended lecture, replete with the anecdotes, rhetorical questions and references to films and television shows (even his own dreams!) that some professors employ to engage their captive audiences, Page never condescends, offering an entree to the fascinating, ongoing argument that may ultimately determine whether Homo sapiens is the moral animal he fancies himself to be.
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In 1977, Carl Sagan asked, “How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?” Behind all the ape language studies, indeed, behind all efforts to grapple with the capacities of other species, lie practical questions about man’s use and abuse of other animals, questions that pharmaceutical companies, for one, would just as soon not be asked. Goodall, Fouts and Peter Singer, the Princeton philosopher who put animal rights on our mental map, have been lobbying to move those questions into Congress and the courts by proposing legislation granting personhood to chimpanzees and bonobos, a goal described in “Rattling the Cage,” by animal protection attorney Steven M. Wise. Goodall describes it as “the animals’ Magna Carta.”
The most convincing engine for such activism may lie not in the attention-getting antics of groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, with their protest marches featuring nude celebrities casting off their furs, but in the painstaking scholarship of people like Goodall and Pepperberg, whose work may do more than anything else to inspire outrage over the potential--and very possible--extinction of chimpanzees and many species of endangered parrots. If such intriguing evidence of intelligence and complexity as Alex has shown can’t compel people to save others like him, perhaps nothing can.
As Pepperberg, who is working on computer-modulated interactive environments for pet parrots and other captive birds, writes at the end of her book:
“If the data help us respect the processing abilities of brains that are structured differently from those of humans or are used to better the life of even a single captive parrot, prevent habitat destruction and capture of birds in the wild, or enable researchers to develop better animal models for various human dysfunctions, my work and the work of my students, my colleagues, and, not in the least, my parrots, will not have been in vain.”
Such a reasonable argument stands no chance of making the evening news, but perhaps that’s not where the debate, any longer, belongs.