What Do Animals Think and Feel? by Karsten Brensing

Author:Karsten Brensing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Mathematics

Let’s stay with the Ancient Greeks for a bit. Perhaps you will recall the legend of Prometheus. He bamboozled Zeus with a trick and was severely punished for it. The trick was very simple: Prometheus knew that Zeus was a greedy skinflint and always took the largest portion for himself. Accordingly, he divided an animal he had sacrificed into two piles of meat. The smaller pile contained the choicest cuts, while the larger one comprised nothing but the bones, sinews, fat and skin. As anticipated, Zeus took the larger pile, thus showing that he knew set theory. He shared this capacity with most animals, as it is extremely practical to be able to tell what is larger. But when you consider that algebra, analysis, geometry and stochastic (that is, randomly determined) processes are also branches of set theory, you’ll quickly appreciate what significance this basic ability has.

Over and above this, many animals can count, at least up to four. There is a nice article on this topic on Wikipedia,48 so I’ll refrain from listing all the many examples and experiments that go to prove it. But you might still enjoy the following anecdote.49 At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, USA, a dolphin by the name of Kelly displayed some quite incredible behaviour. The dolphins there were trained to collect litter from the pool, and were given a small fish each as a reward. One day, rather than bringing it to the trainer, Kelly chose to hide a little scrap of paper she had found, possibly because she wasn’t particularly hungry. That in itself is a remarkable achievement on the dolphin’s part. Kelly had shown that she possessed a large measure of self-control. (The term used for this in scientific circles is inhibitory control, and in the normal course of events it is only ascribed to humans; we’ll treat this subject further in the section on ‘Theory of mind’; pp. 222–4.) In addition, Kelly displayed an understanding of time and made clear that she also grasped the theory of trade, since ultimately she was treating the scrap of paper like currency, which she could trade in for fish whenever she felt like it. But that wasn’t the end of her creativity. No one had defined how large or small a piece of paper had to be to earn a reward, so Kelly came up with the idea of tearing the piece she had found into several smaller pieces so that she could claim repeated rewards. It seems incredible – but there’s even better to come.

One day, she managed to catch a seagull and brought it to her trainer. He was thrilled and gave her several fish as a reward. So then Kelly hit upon a brilliant idea. Taking one of the fish, she positioned it in such a way that seagulls could easily get at it. Then she lay in wait, and was able to catch the next seagull and trade it in once again for some more fish.

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