animal cognition – Pain In The Bud

Jane Goodall Forever Changed Our Understanding Of Animals

Goodall spent the better part of seven decades with the chimpanzees of Tanzania. Her discoveries were so profound, they forced the scientific community to reevaluate what separates humanity from other animals.

As I’m sure most of you have heard, Jane Goodall passed away Wednesday of natural causes. She was 91.

Goodall’s work was revolutionary and her career was extraordinary. It’s difficult to imagine now, but when Goodall first pitched camp in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in July of 1960, the scientific community knew virtually nothing about great apes.

Goodall wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms. Being female and photogenic were the first two strikes against her in the eyes of the establishment.

She was self-taught, didn’t have a degree (she later earned a doctorate at Cambridge), and perhaps her biggest “sins” involved empathy and an attitude more buttoned-up scientists saw as anthropomorphizing the animals.

Goodall with a Gombe chimpanzee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Goodall gave the chimps names (a no-no at the time among scientists), carefully observed and recorded their family trees, worked out the obtuse — to human eyes– social hierarchy of primate troops, and witnessed behavior that no one had ever seen before.

She saw friendship, love and loyalty among the chimpanzees, witnessed a bitter war between the Gombe troop and a splinter group, followed families over generations, and saw one chimp die of a broken heart after his mother passed away. (I recommend Goodall’s 1990 book, Through A Window: Thirty Years With The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and the 2002 follow-up, My Life With Chimpanzees, for anyone who wants to read more.)

Her first major contribution, in October of 1960, not only fundamentally challenged our assumptions about animals, it forced us to change the way we regard our own species.

Goodall, observing the chimpanzees from a distance despite the rain that day, watched as a male she named David Graybeard repeatedly dipped blades of grass into the Earth. Curious, Goodall approached the site after Graybeard left, grabbed a few blades of grass and imitated what she’d seen the chimp doing.

She was astonished when she pulled the grass out and the strands were covered in termites. David Graybeard had been eating. He was using a tool to eat!

Goodall at Gombe in the early 1970s. The primatologist secured unprecedented access to the chimpanzees by gaining their trust. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The discovery was huge because scientists believed tool use was, at the time, limited to mankind. We build and use tools, animals don’t, the thinking went.

When Goodall reported her findings to her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, his prompt response indicated the gravity of her discovery: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Goodall never stopped working with the chimpanzees of Gombe, and today her formerly humble camp has become a permanent compound where researchers — all inspired by Goodall’s story — continue to study our genetic relatives.

But in her later years, Goodall became known for her activism just as much as her work as a scientist. She traveled constantly, engaging audiences on the subjects of animal conservation, respect for nature and understanding our place in the natural order. It’s a job that has become more necessary than ever as relentless human expansion, habitat fragmentation and human behavior push thousands of species toward extinction.

We lost Frans de Waal, the famous primatologist, in 2024. Now we’ve lost Goodall, and Sir David Attenborough is less than six months shy of his 100th birthday. We’re going to need people to pick up where they left off, and the job is much more difficult than it looks, requiring expertise, charisma and the ability to connect with audiences who know little about the subject matter.

But that’s a problem for another time. For now, let’s remember Jane and appreciate all she’s done over the span of an incredible life and career.

‘The Great Pet Awakening’: Theologians Say Bonding With Animals Can Be A ‘Religious Experience’

A new story from CNN examines how friendship with animals can enhance our spiritual lives.

If you ask Bud, I’m sure he’d agree that merely having the privilege of being friends with him is akin to a transcendental experience.

“Yes, human, by stroking my fur, you are brushing up against the divine!” he’d probably say. “Now make a proper offering, and don’t skimp out on me. I want the good snacks!”

The massive ego of my cat aside, some theologians and spiritualists say we’re in the midst of a “Great Pet Awakening,” with more people than ever welcoming animals into their homes, treating them like family, and coming to profound realizations by bonding with them.

Our pets can help us come to grips with our own mortality, amplify our own spiritual lives and even help us heal, they say. Some of it’s nebulous, including a Pew poll that found most Americans believe pets are imbued with some sort of vague supernatural energy, and some of it’s tangible, like studies that have found cat purring has a calming effect on people as well as cats.

If you’re interested in reading more, CNN’s story on the “awakening” quotes a Canadian theologian and author, a Buddhist, and, tragically, a “psychic medium.” In true grief vampire style, the latter says “pet psychics” can offer people “a chance to hear personalized messages from their pets in the Great Beyond.”

“Now leave the snack, bow, and retreat until I call for you again. That’s a good human.”

I don’t like thinking about a time when Bud will be gone, but when that day comes, if I encounter a “pet psychic” who tells me Bud sends his love and appreciation from the afterlife, it’ll reinforce my dim view of self-proclaimed mediums. If, however, the “psychic” tells me that Bud is still miffed about the times dinner was late, or he’s annoyed that I’ve adopted another cat who has inherited his toys, I’ll change my tune!

In any case, I think there’s one hugely important thing the CNN story does not touch on. It focuses on the way pets benefit people, but perhaps the most profound gift our animals give us — if we’re open to it — is a new appreciation for them, and what a miracle they are.

It’s 2025, but surprisingly, there are lots of people who are still stuck in a pre-cognitive revolution mindset, viewing animals as little more than biological automatons. They deny animal cognition, emotions and agency, as if B.F. Skinner and behaviorism remain the credible model. To do that, you’d have to ignore more than sixty years’ worth of research proving our furry friends have their own rich internal lives, their own thoughts and feelings.

That, to me, is one of the great things about cats. If I was a merely adequate servant, the Budster would take the free meals, the shelter and the warm bed, and ignore me until he wants something. Instead, he’s rarely more than three feet from me, he spends much of his day sitting on me or in direct physical contact, he can’t abide any barrier between us, and he expresses his love by marching up to me, purring up a storm, and rubbing his head against my face.

He chooses to do that, and it tells me that for all the boneheaded mistakes I’ve made, I must be doing a pretty decent job. He’s not my property, he’s my Buddy.

Another Tech Company Wants To Translate Meows And Barks Using AI: Can It Work?

Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.

A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.

Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.

More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.

Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.

In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.

It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.

No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.

“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”

Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.

Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.

This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.

Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.

Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.

Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.

“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon

An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.

In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.

The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”

The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)

We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”

If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.

Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.

Does The Budster Love Me?

“Love is a strong word, human. I prefer ‘tolerate.’ On days when you anticipate my snack cravings before I verbalize them, you could maybe say I’m fond of you.”

Newsweek has an interesting interview with a cat behaviorist on the subject of whether cats love their humans.

Chantal Howard, a certified cat trainer with Feline Focus Training in Ottawa, told the magazine there are nine primary behaviors that indicate — or confirm — a house tiger loves his or her person. Most of these won’t be new to PITB readers, who are of course among the most cat-savvy people out there and have magnificent taste in cat blogs, but it’s still a handy way to ascertain how your feline overlord feels about you.

So how does Buddy do according to this checklist? Let’s see:

Headbutting: ✅ His Lordship is quite fond of headbutting me and favors me with dozens of headbutts throughout the day, ensuring his pheromones remain on me. You know, in case some other cat somehow comes wandering in and there’s a dispute about which furball owns me.
Kneading: ✅ Considering the fact that I’ve had to toss quite a few t-shirts because of claw rips, I’d say that’s a yes. At least he doesn’t knead my face anymore, as he liked to do when he was a kitten and would take his perch on my shoulder, nuzzle up to my neck and make biscuits against my beard.
Purring: ✅ Nine times out of 10, Buddy’s purr is inaudible, but it’s there. It’s a bit odd that such a talkative, loud cat barely makes a buzz. He likes to lay on my chest and purr up a storm while I rub his head and tell him he’s got admirers all over the world.
Chirping: ✅ Yes! In fact, chirps and trills make up a significant part of the Buddinese language. While meows can be positive, negative or demanding (“I can see the bottom of my bowl! This is an outrage, human!”), trills and chirps are always happy sounds.
Nipping: ✅ Unfortunately, yes.
Licking: ✅ He grooms my hair and my beard, and when I shave he licks my face, which is pretty gross.
Bringing Gifts: ❌ Negative. Then again, what kind of gifts can he bring me when he’s an indoor cat and doesn’t fully understand the concept of hunting?
Exposing Belly: ❌ Does he expose his belly? Yes. Does he feel comfortable enough to snooze in my lap with his belly exposed? Of course. Does he want me to give him belly rubs? No, he emphatically does not. The primordial pouch is not to be touched!
Tail Position: ✅ One of the most awesome things is the fact that Bud’s tail goes immediately into happy mode when I say “Hi, Bud!”, when I hold my hand out for a headbutt, and when I talk to him in general. His tail quivers with excitement when we play with the laser pointer or his favorite toy, and when he catches the first whiff of catnip.

So that’s 7 of 9, or 7 of 8 if we count gifts as N/A due to Bud’s hilarious ineptitude when it comes to even grasping the concept of hunting.

Bud has been known to throw up from excitement when I return from vacation, he often naps by the door when I go out, he talks to me constantly, and he’s rarely more than three or four feet away from me at any given time. All those things, plus our strong bond, have proven to me that he does love me, but it’s also nice to confirm it with a behaviorist’s criteria.

How does your cat perform on the checklist? Don’t forget to share your results in the comments.

Bud’s A Smart Little Dude, According To A Cat IQ Test

Is your cat a genius or not the sharpest claw on the paw? The University of Maine’s Cat Lab wants your help as researchers seek to measure feline intelligence.

Buddy apparently has brawn and brains, according to a “cat IQ test” by researchers at the University of Maine.

The test is a survey designed by the people who work at the university’s Cat Lab, and it aims to employ some of the same techniques used to measure the intelligence of young children and dogs.

The test asks questions about memory, how closely felines read nonverbal cues from their humans, how attuned they are to human emotions, whether they’ve learned tricks, and whether they’ve improvised solutions to obstacles they’ve encountered.

I gave each question serious thought and tried to eliminate my own bias to the best of my ability.

“This is your brain on catnip. Any questions?”

For example, there’s absolutely no question Buddy is extremely communicative, curious, bold and friendly. He’s also figured out things on his own, like how to open doors and how to best manipulate me for as much food as possible. I’ll never forget watching with fascination when, as a kitten, he figured out how to wedge his body against the frame of my bedroom door with his feet while using his front paws to turn the handle.

On the other hand, he’s a hilariously inept hunter, he’s done some spectacularly dumb things, and he went through a whole phase in which he “boxed” the cat in the mirror before figuring out it was a reflection of himself.

I can still hear the “THWAP THWAP THWAP!” of his little kitty paws against the glass and his accompanying trills as he did battle with himself. To be fair, that was also in kittenhood, and he eventually figured out there was no other cat.

As I’ve detailed in this blog previously, Bud also seems to possess the precision of an atomic clock when it comes to meal times, and if I so much as shift in my chair as meal time approaches, he springs up and trills at me like “Are we going to the kitchen? Come on, dude, it’s Food O’clock! I want turkey, beef or tuna!”

According to the survey, Buddy has an IQ of 64 on a max-70 scale, good enough for the “Felix Forecaster” tier and just below “The McGonagall Mastermind.”

It’s probably for the best that he’s not in that very top tier anyway. We’re talking about a cat intelligent enough to understand I hate the sound of the flap on his litter box squeaking on its hinges, and has subsequently weaponized it to get me out of bed. If he gets any smarter, I’ll probably wake up to a machine that slaps me every time I hit the snooze button.

You can take the survey on behalf of your own cat(s) here. Don’t forget to share your results!