animal cognition – Page 3 – Pain In The Bud

More Than 400 People Applied To Adopt Foul-Mouthed Parrot

Requirements for adopting Pepper included a sense of humor and experience caring for birds. He’s now found a home with patient caretakers and another mercurial parrot to hang out with.

It’s too bad cats can’t swear.

While kittens don’t often have problems finding homes due to their overwhelming cuteness and antics, it usually takes a sad story to drum up considerable interest when an adult feline is up for adoption.

As the SPCA of Niagara learned, talkative parrots, especially birds who can swear up a storm, have their pick of homes.

In June, a potty-mouthed parrot named Pepper was surrendered to the shelter, and when the SPCA put the call out — specifying they’d prefer someone with experience caring for birds and a sense of humor — the applications kept rolling in, totaling more than 400.

“His famous line is ‘Do you want me to kick your ass?'” a shelter employee said in an interview last month shortly after announcing Pepper was up for adoption.

Shelter staff asked applicants to include photos of their bird enclosures in addition to the usual pre-adoption questions, eventually narrowing the Pepper Sweepstakes down to 10 potential homes.

This past week, Pepper was finally taken to his new abode in Olean, a small city in western New York. The couple who adopted him are not only experienced with birds, they know all about avian vulgarity. They have a parrot named Shelby who apparently “makes Pepper look like a saint.”

As for Pepper, it looks like he’s getting his bearings before heaping abuse on his new caretakers.

“He hasn’t cursed at them yet, but we know it’s coming,” shelter staff wrote in an update.

In recent decades, research has shown birds can be exceptionally intelligent. Crows, for example, use tools, can differentiate between human faces, and remember which humans have wronged them or treated them well.

While many people assumed parrots merely imitate human language, long term behavioral studies show the birds are able to use words in context and invent novel combinations of words. As with other animals, syntax remains elusive.

The most famous example was Alex the African Gray, who was the subject of research by animal cognition expert Dr. Irene Pepperberg. Alex, who died in 2007 at the age of 31, was able to count and could perform simple calculations. He was talkative, conversant and often told his caretakers how he was feeling, what he wanted, and what he thought of the tests they’d give him. (Like a child, Alex would try to get out of exercises he was bored with by asking for water, saying he was tired and wanted a nap, or just flubbing his answers.)

We are not above crude humor here at PITB, and in the past we’ve written about Ruby, our favorite talking parrot. Ruby lives in the UK with her owner, Nick Chapman, and the pair were among the very earliest Youtube stars thanks to videos of Ruby’s shockingly vulgar, extremely British tirades and Chapman’s infectious laugh.

Warning for those who are offended by bad language or are viewing at work: Ruby is known for liberal use of c-bombs-, t-bombs, f-bombs and just about every other linguistic bomb you can think of, in addition to British slang like “bollocks.” If that’s a problem for you, skip this video.

Eric the Legend, a parrot who lives in Australia, is also a favorite on Youtube for his habit of declaring himself “a fookin’ legend!“

We’re glad Pepper has found a home where his idiosyncratic nature will be cherished, and we hope the future will bring videos of Pepper and Shelby going back and forth. Parrots are social animals, after all, and what fun are insults if you’ve got no one to trade them with?

Top image of Pepper courtesy of Niagara SPCA.

Elephants Call Each Other By Name, Study Says

Elephants encode names and other information in low-frequency rumbles that can be heard miles away. For social animals who live in large herds, it’s crucial to be able to address individuals.

Elephants are famously social animals, moving in matriarchal herds that can consist of as many as 70 of their kind.

They also communicate over long distances, emitting rumbles that can be heard miles away.

Because of their social and nomadic existence, it makes sense that elephants would need a way to single out individuals and address each other, and for the first time researchers say they’ve found evidence of Earth’s largest land animals calling each other by name.

“If you’re looking after a large family, you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Hey, Virginia, get over here!’” Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm told the Associated Press.

The research involved field work and analysis using artificial intelligence. To record samples of elephants communicating, teams followed herds with recording equipment. Notably, elephant rumbles include sounds in frequencies lower than the human ear can detect.

large elephants near lake — Credit: Pixabay/Pexels

The team paid close attention when one elephant vocalized and another responded, and recorded who initiated each rumble and who it was meant for.

Although elephants are best known for making loud “trumpeting” sounds, experts say those are more like exclamations while rumbles contain encoded information that African savanna elephants would need to communicate to each other.

“The rumbles themselves are highly structurally variable,” said Mickey Pardo, a biologist from Cornell University and co-author of the study. “There’s quite a lot of variation in their acoustic structure.”

A machine learning algorithm was then used to sort and categorize the large number of audio samples, looking for patterns that are difficult for human minds to detect.

“Elephants are incredibly social, always talking and touching each other — this naming is probably one of the things that underpins their ability to communicate to individuals,” said George Wittemyer, an ecologist at Colorado State University and co-author of the study. “We just cracked open the door a bit to the elephant mind.”

A female elephant with her young offspring in Kenya. Credit: Pixabay/Pexels

Notably, the elephant “names” are identifiers that they created for themselves, and are not the kind of human-bestowed names that cats and dogs respond to. The list of animals who have names for themselves is short, although likely to expand with further study. Dolphins, for instance, identify themselves with unique whistling patterns, and parrots have a similar method, but both species address individuals by imitating their calls. Elephants use their name analogs the way humans do, to directly address each other.

The research has the potential to raise public awareness of elephant intelligence and their plight as they face threats to their continued existence. Like almost all of the Earth’s iconic megafauna, elephants will become extinct if we don’t do a better job protecting them and ending the ivory trade. Every year about 20,000 elephants are slaughtered for their tusks to feed the demand for ivory, especially in China where it’s considered a status symbol, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Yang Feng Glan, known as the”Queen of Ivory,” was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a Tanzanian court in 2019. Yang smuggled some 860 elephant tusks worth $6.5 million from Tanzania to China as the leader of one of the world’s most extensive poaching and ivory smuggling organizations.

During her years operating the smuggling ring, Yang presented herself as a successful businesswoman and ran in elite circles within China, authorities said. Two of her accomplices were also given 15-year sentences for their roles, but since then others have filled the vacuum left by Fang’s conviction, and elephant preserves are constantly under threat from heavily armed poachers.

Foundation Offers $10m For ‘Cracking The Code’ Of Animal Language

Think you can decipher the rhythmic clicks and whistles of dolphins or the grunts and alarm calls of monkeys? A foundation is offering big prizes for progress in communicating with animals.

Looking to prompt renewed efforts at decoding animal communication, a non-profit founded by an investor and a university are offering prizes — including a hefty $10 million — to teams that can figure out what animals are “saying.”

The Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. (Yes, it’s named after that Dr. Dolittle.)

Entrants aren’t asked to come up with a Star Trek-like “universal translator” for animals. Rather, the people behind the Coller Dolittle Challenge want to see methods that allow for two-way communication between humans and individual species.

“We are open to any organism and any modality from acoustic communication in whales to chemical communication in worms,” said Yossi Yovel, a professor at Tel Aviv University and co-chairman of the challenge.

The grand prize is a $10 million grant or $500,000 in cash, chosen by the winner, while the Foundation will offer $100,000 prizes each year for the best entries that make significant progress toward communicating with animals. The yearly prizes will be assessed “for significant contributions to decipher, interface or mimic non-human organism communication.”

While it may seem far-fetched — and there are those who believe humans will never be able to fully understand animal communication in proper context — there have been efforts to communicate with and decode the communications of bats, dolphins, whales and some primate species. Scientists have also pushed the boundaries on understanding group communication, such as the coordination involved in avian murmurations.

orangutan on tree — Orangutans have demonstrated the ability to understand abstract concepts, like using money, rudimentary sign language, and have even deceived humans. One orangutan in the 1960s repeatedly escaped his zoo enclosure by hiding a small strip of metal in his mouth and using it to pick a lock. Credit: Klub Boks/Pexels

The organizers believe artificial intelligence will be the tool that ultimately helps crack the communication barrier, but entrants aren’t required to use AI. The technology is incredibly useful for tasks involving pattern recognition and sorting large amounts of data, both of which are important in this kind of work when researchers are tasked with analyzing thousands of audio samples or hundreds of hours of footage.

Alas, we don’t think the foundation will be interested in the Buddinese language, which boasts 327 different ways of demanding food and features a timekeeping and calendar system based on meals and naps. A short trill followed by a series of staccato meows, for example, means “I expect prompt service at salmon o’clock,” while a truncated meow ending with a scoff is used to indicate displeasure when a human napping substrate tosses too much during sleep.

Still, maybe we’ll dress it up to make it look properly academic and give the challenge a try. Those prizes could buy a lot of Roombas!

The Dividing Line Between Human And Animal Has Been Blurred Again As AI Reveals Startlingly Complex Whale Language

By unlocking the mysteries of how sperm whales communicate and demonstrating their impressive cognitive abilities, researchers hope to get people invested in the fate of these endangered animals.

Sperm whales are chatty.

Their language is markedly different from the deep cetacean moans associated with other whales, taking the form of Morse code-like clicks that boom through the ocean in a decibel range almost twice that of jet engines.

And while we’ve long known animals like monkeys assign specific meaning to short vocalizations varying from alarm calls to affirmations of social rank, sperm whale conversations can endure for an hour or more, with participants exchanging complex strings of clicks that vary depending on context, environment and even which pod family is speaking.

Sperm_whale_Tim_Cole_NMFS_crop — An aerial view of a sperm whale near the ocean surface. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While artificial intelligence has been maligned over the past few years as people grapple with its rapid progress and potential for abuse, it remains the best tool we have for teasing out patterns that our human minds can’t discern, especially from large quantities of data.

With more than 9,000 recordings of sperm whales, Project CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit effort to decode and translate sperm whale communication — had precisely the kind of huge data cache that AI excels at analyzing.

By feeding the recordings into specially trained machine learning algorithms, the research team was able to identify a wealth of new language patterns. While human languages are composed of quantized morphemes — prefixes, suffixes and root words — whale communication is broken down into sequences of clicks and pauses called “codas.”

Like Morse code, codas make a distinction between short clicks and long clicks. Sperm whales also vary the tempo of the clicks, which could represent inflection, “dialects” or concepts completely alien to the human mind.

“Some of what they’re doing might be totally different from our way of communicating and we’re probably never going to be able to fully grasp those differences,” Oregon State postdoctoral marine researcher Taylor Hersh told NPR.

A sperm whale fluke visible above the surface of the ocean. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Researchers believe the “inter-click intervals” — akin to ghost notes in music — may be as significant as the clicks themselves. Importantly, while human ears were able to identify and catalog some of the codas, the machine learning algorithms found many that human analysis missed.

That’s not surprising considering sperm whales — the loudest animals on Earth, capable of generating sounds up to 230 dB — took a much different evolutionary course and, as ocean-dwelling creatures weighing up to 90,000 pounds (40,800 kg) likely have a radically different sensorium compared to humans.

The comparisons to music go further than ghost notes.

“This study shows that coda types are not arbitrary, but rather that they form a newly discovered combinatorial coding system in which the musical concepts of rubato and ornamentation combine with two categorical, context-independent features known as rhythm and tempo, by analogy to musical terminology,” CETI’s team wrote on May 7 while unveiling the most recent study.

Sperm_whale_distribution_(Pacific_equirectangular) — Sperm whale distribution based on human sightings. Sperm whales freely travel the oceans except in cold, ice-packed environs. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

While people have used many abilities to mark the dividing line between humans and animals over the years — including the ability to use tools, experience emotions, and demonstrate self-awareness — human capacity for authentic language with syntax and context-dependent meaning was one of the stalwarts, standing the test of time as new research toppled the other dividers by showing animals do indeed use tools, experience rich emotions and have complex inner mental lives.

With this research, scientists are assembling a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that will make it easier to discern and catalog whale codas.

To be clear, there’s still a lot of work ahead before scientists can prove sperm whale codas are comparable to human definitions of language, but whether they strictly meet that definition may not matter. After all, it’s clear the clicks and pauses of whale codas are imbued with meaning, even if it remains elusive to us for the moment.

Indeed, “sperm whale communication has both contextual and combinatorial structure not previously observed in whale communication,” the team wrote.

Proving sperm whale codas are tantamount to human language isn’t the goal anyway. The team has two overriding priorities — decode the meanings behind the codas, and get the wider public invested in the fate of these endangered animals by showing they’re not so different from us.

“Our results show there is much more complexity than previously believed,” MIT AI lab director Daniela Rus told NPR, “and this is challenging the current state of the art or state of beliefs about the animal world.”

New York Times Ethicist: ‘My Boyfriend Said He’d Save Our Cat but Not a Stranger if Both Were Drowning’

As Charles Darwin pointed out, the difference between humans and animals is one of degree, not kind. That should factor into discussions on the value of animal life.

The headline — ‘My Boyfriend Said He’d Save Our Cat but Not a Stranger if Both Were Drowning’ — comes from the New York Times via its Ethicist column, in which NYU philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah answers questions from readers about moral rights and wrongs.

Here’s the full text of the question:

My boyfriend and I were talking about protecting human life, and he said that he doesn’t believe that human life is necessarily worth more than any other kind of life. For example, he said that if one of our cats were drowning next to a human who was a stranger to us (who was also drowning) and he could save just one, he would choose our cat. Is this morally wrong?

Appiah, in his very first sentence in response, regretfully calls pets “fictive kin” before pointing to a study by an experimental psychologist in which participants were asked whether they’d save their pets or a foreign tourist if both stepped in front of a bus at the same time. Forty percent of respondents picked the pet.

To his credit, Appiah notes the people who chose their pets don’t have “some grave defect of character,” and said the impulse to save a companion pet is “very human,” given all we share with our animals, including “affection, companionship, loyalty, all twined around a whole lot of memories.”

That said, Appiah says human life is more valuable:

“But yes, it’s very wrong. (In states with “duty to rescue” laws, it could be illegal too.) Those human strangers? They had rich emotional lives and they had plans, short-term and long-term, big and small; it’s a good guess that they were also part of other people’s plans, other people’s emotional lives.”

I’m not going to get into the question of whether human or animal life has more value. That’s a mine field, I don’t subscribe to the idea that we should work out hierarchies of life’s value as if we’re ranking favorite ice cream flavors, and it seems to me these “what if?” questions involving oncoming buses or trains don’t have much value in gauging reality.

After all, how many people do you know were forced to make life or death decisions in a millisecond, let alone decisions involving a complex moral and emotional calculus? Appiah seems to agree, while also pointing out that what people say in a questionnaire doesn’t necessarily predict what they’d do in the moment.

Life is life. It’s all valuable, and the survey doesn’t have much use outside the classroom or ethics columns.

Buddy the Handsome Cat — Buddy the Cat: Brains as well as brawn.

However, I do think it’s worth pointing out that much of what Appiah assumes is the difference between human and animal life — particularly rich emotional lives, cognition and value to others — can indeed be attributed to animals.

There’s been a seismic shift in the way most scientists view animal cognition over the past decade, and in many ways the acknowledgement of non-human sentience and potential sapience is long overdue — there are literally thousands of studies confirming animals are conscious, sentient, and possessed of the full range of primary and secondary emotions.

Every time we set new barriers for what distinguishes human from non-human, we’re forced to change the goalposts. When behaviorism was the dominant model, the distinction was internal thought processes. In dismantling behaviorism, Noam Chomsky helped launch the cognitive revolution. Then it was emotion and love, which crumbled with the ugly Harry Harlow studies into maternal deprivation in monkeys. Then it was capacity to reason, tool use, innovation — and every time, we’ve revised our definitions, solid in our conviction that we’re fundamentally different.

In fact, the only thing that’s held up is Charles Darwin’s original observation in 1871 that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.”

In other words, humans aren’t some higher order of being. We are animals. Upjumped animals in some sense, but animals all the same, subject to the same diseases, physical limitations and helplessness in the face of greater forces like nature.

We may live in an age when our planet is blanketed in satellites, scientists are on fusion’s doorstep and each one of us has the entire sum of our species’ knowledge at our fingertips, but it’s shocking how quickly the veneer of civilization can collapse when people are scared, the food runs out, social order breaks down and those primal motivations — the ones we think we’ve out-evolved — drive our actions again. The early days of the COVID pandemic was just a small reminder of that.

We don’t like talking about these uncomfortable truths because they lead to more uncomfortable truths about the billions of non-human minds we share the planet with, and how we treat them.

I can’t claim to be a philosopher, although I minored in the subject over the objections of my advisor. (He should have warned me off journalism!) But when it comes to animal cognition I do have a great teacher, an 11-pound ball of fur who won’t let me forget he’s got his own wants, needs and strong emotions. Doesn’t he deserve consideration too?