The Weekend Australian

September 11, 2004

REVIEW; Books; Pg. B12

Bark, with some bite

BY: James Jeffrey

    A psychologist argues that romanticising animals, even dolphins, is not good

for them -- or for us

   Do Animals Think?

   By Clive D.L. Wynne, Princeton University Press, 262pp, $48.95

   WRITING about animals in a manner that's anything other than favourable can

be a tricky proposition, as I was reminded last year when a reader thoughtfully

called for my demise. I'd penned a column about Australia's appalling roadkill

problem, foolishly thinking irony would be the best approach.

    Well. The response to the piece -- mainly musings about how roadkill tours

would be a brilliant new facet to the tourism diamond -- was frank and robust.

This was especially the case with a wildlife protection group in Victoria that,

equipped with an appreciation of irony the way Saturn is equipped with ice-cream

parlours, suggested the best course of action would be my immediate death.

    It was with all this in mind that I thought psychology professor Clive Wynne

was displaying gonads of reasonable heft by provocatively naming his book Do

Animals Think?. The simple act of framing it as a question -- leaving open the

possibility that the answer might be no -- has surely left him open to a fatwa

or at least some severe disgruntlement.

    The short version of Wynne's answer is yes, but beasts do it differently.

For all the similarities, the differences are far greater but "things don't have

to be like us to be important to us". His approach is the polar opposite to

writers such as Jeffrey Masson, who want to emphasise the similarities and

reduce the sense of otherness in the hope that it will make humans less inclined

to harm animals (wishful thinking in light of what humans are willing to do to

each other).

    Wynne gets busy laying a boot into all the fudging, fantasy and dodgy

research through the years that have morphed into accepted knowledge, whether it

's theories about consciousness in animals, self-awareness tests involving

mirrors and apes or studies into the communication abilities of dolphins. He

argues that while animals' abilities are perfectly suited to their environments

and the sorts of lives they lead, humans have tended to leap over facts in their

enthusiasm to bridge the gap, crediting animals with a complexity of skills they

don't possess and, in some cases, romanticising them. Dolphins are just one

example that clearly sticks in Wynne's craw. He says we've done them a

disservice by virtually canonising the species and thinking of them as carefree

hobbits of the sea, whereas in reality -- as magnificent as they are -- they can

be bastards to each other and the males are happy to indulge in gang rape.

    But Do Animals Think? isn't simply an exercise in debunking or a rant

against anthropomorphisers -- it's also a plea to humans to admire other species

on their own terms. Great chunks of the book are almost a hymn to the

astonishing abilities possessed by many animals and the utter alienness of the

sensory universes they inhabit. Wynne doesn't bother trying to rein in his

enthusiasm, whether he's writing about bees or bats.

    (Not everyone feels the same way. Auberon Waugh is quoted here, railing in a

fit of cantankerous ignorance in a letter to a newspaper against attempts to

stop endangered bat species in Britain from reaching the full stop of

extinction. "I do not suppose that there are more than a couple of hundred

people who could give a hoot if every bat in the kingdom dropped down dead.

    "I, for one, would rejoice. ... Like horseflies, they have absolutely

nothing to recommend them. They are dirty, smelly and frightening." The bats are

at least safe from Waugh's attentions now.)

    Every chapter yields a treasure trove of startling facts. Did you know that

the sonar squeaks of bats are as loud as a jet aircraft landing, and it's only

the fact that their frequency is too high for our eardrums that save the night

from being a total cacophany?

    Do Animals Think? is also liberally stuffed with a cast of intriguing and/or

bewildering humans, such as the 18th-century Italian bishop whose pioneering

research with bats involved blinding them with hot pokers, and Prussian

chimpanzee researcher Wolfgang Kohler who, during his stint with captive apes in

the Canary Islands during World War I, helped out the German military machine

with his observations of Allied shipping.

    Even cartoonist Gary Larson -- loved by zoologists of all stripes -- gets

something of a backhanded guernsey. "Quite where his sharp insights into the

limitations of animal communications come from is a mystery to me," writes Wynne.

    He occasionally stumbles (the section on the ability of animals to suffer

brought on a coughing fit) and sometimes comes across as a slightly tetchy and

impatient teacher. ("Of course we can't consider plants conscious. If you don't

agree that plants can't be conscious, then your concept of what it means to be

conscious is just so different from mine that there is little point our

continuing to discuss thematter.")

    But it would be a hardened dogmatist indeed who failed to be at least a

little swept up by Wynne's voracious, omnivorous curiosity. His book should at

the very least serve as fuel for a debate rather than a fatwa.