Are We Really The Smartest Creatures On Earth? If So, So What?
More than 40 years ago, my then wife Nigey Lennon and I were on our way home to Echo Park when suddenly she said to stop. I thought it was because she saw a garage sale. Instead it was a woman who had set up a bunch of cages with cocatiels for sale. Some were in the cages and some stood on top of the edge of the cages.
“Oh hell,” I said. “I don’t want birds. They’re messy and they’re…well…bird brained. Stupid.”
Nigey, of course prevailed, and as we approached the birds, I was amazed that as we were looking them over, they were giving us the once over. That unnerved me. And it began the process where I began to realize we share this earth with a lot of creatures who are every bit as sentient as us.
Over the next few years, other birds impinged on my life and took me into their soap opera lives. The bird we bought that day was named Mo. Gurly came next because we walked into a bird store on Melrose Avenue near my old alma mater Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. As we walked around the cage, one rather drab gray bird was intently following us with her eyes and body. She peeped and squawked, obviously saying, “I’m here. Look at me. I want to be with you guys.”
She just had to come home with us. She was an incredible creature, and when she died, I mourned her like I would a human being. We named her Gurly.
Gurly was a pothead. A friend used to leave a red canister with pot on the table sometimes and the moment she spotted it, Gurly would make her way to the canister, and work until she found a way to take the lid off. She didn’t smoke, of course, but she loved to eat the seeds, twigs and leaves. After partaking, she would fly around like she was stoned or at least inebriated. When she got pregnant, and Mo came around to check her out in her eggs, she’d scare him away. She would begin by flapping her wings and squawking, but then she discovered if she rang the bells inside her cage, it would drive Mo away just as bagpipes were first used on the battlefield to vanquish enemies.
One day Mo was left alone with Gurly in the bathroom while the sink was getting filled with hot water. Mo, not being as smart as Gurly, jumped into the water and started flapping and drowning. Gurly began shrieking and hollering until Nigey came in and saved Mo.
I know you could say that Gurly’s brilliance in getting at the pot was only that intelligence all beings have when it comes to finding food. It’s surprising how smart creatures from insects to felines are when their dinner is at stake.
It was inevitable we would move up the ladder of birds. A friend decided I needed an African Grey, particularly one she had found hiding in mourning in a pet store. Nick’s previous human partner had been a motorcyclist, who spoke in a gruff Satan’s Slaves voice. When he died in a collision, Nick went into deep mourning, staying completely silent. The motorcyclist’s family wanted Nick gone. He was left alone in a pet store.
When we first brought Nick home, he said nothing for a couple of weeks. Then one day Nigey walked into the bedroom with a doughnut. Nick said, “Have you got some more cookie?” quite insistently. Nigey quickly realized that the Professor, as we began calling him, could be mollified with a piece of doughnut. We also both learned that when the Professor was asking for a “cookie” you could tell by his tone of voice if he could be satisfied with a cracker, a piece of bread, or a rub of the head. All these things meant “cookie” to Nick. In fact his “I want a cookie,” or “have you got some more cookie,” or just “cookie, cookie” could become quite annoying. One day he was being insistent with me and I was ignoring him.He kept asking for a “cookie,” and becoming all more annoying with each new utterance. Still I kept ignoring him–I was trying to get something read. Then I heard him say, “Come here, bring your Nick a cookie.” I stopped reading. I realized that Nick had just completed a genuine sentence. I later learned that I shouldn’t have been surprised–there was one famous African Grey named Alex who was the subject of experiments at Tulane University. Alex not only had an ability to distinguish letters of the alphabet and names of colors, he could also read their names from cards. Alex also made up pretty good poetry. So when Nick asked me a direct question, I agreed. “Yes, Nick, for that you get a cookie.” And I got up and went to the kitchen to get my Nick a cookie. He had me well trained.
After a while, Nick graduated to standing on top of his cage. One day my dog Rosie, half German Shepherd and Collie and the other half Coyote, who had been born in Griffith Park, came into the room. She saw Nick out of his cage. Rosie lunged at Nickie. Nick spoke up, sounding angry. “Bye, bye,” he repeated, and hissed and carried on, and then bit the dog on her on the tail. After that, Rosie never lunged or said a word against these strange feathery creatures who spoke like people. She even allowed the cocatiels to ride around the house on her, without complaint. Nick’s dominance over Rosie after that was all psychological bluff and bluster, for Rosie would have been quite capable of devouring Nick in a second had she known her own strength.
The larger question of “animal intelligence” has always intrigued me. When I was a youngster in Long Beach, a port town to Los Angeles where the Navy had a lot of facilities, my parents often had Dr. Fitzgibbon over. It was the early ’50s and he was obsessed by his experiments with dolphins. He was working on top secret research for the Navy, and wasn’t supposed to talk about it–but he’d harangue my parents for hours talking about dolphins–about how smart they were, how they might be smarter than homo sapiens.
Homo sapiens have the advantage of the opposable thumb, meaning we can grasp tools, make printing presses and schools and museums and libraries to continue our culture from generation to generation. Dolphins and other beasts have the disadvantage of having to pass on their knowledge only orally.
But, Fitzgibbon noted, the dolphin’s brain had a much larger capacity than ours, processed information much faster than we, and had a more complicated syntax.
Surrounded as I was by my little dinosaurs in the bedroom, I began to contemplate this question of animal intelligence. While the notion that dinosaurs were the ancestor’s of today’s avians had been suspected since the time of Darwin, it wasn’t until the ’80s with the publication of Yale paleontologist Robert Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies that the notion really stuck.
Nigey and I met Bakker, and he told us about the African Grey he used to work with at the Brooklyn Zoo. He said he thought African Grey birds the most intelligent animal on the planet, save ourselves. He thought African Greys were more intelligent than chimpanzees, orangutans, dolphins–the whole lot of them.
Soon, Hammy, a blue-fronted Amazon, joined the flock in our converted porch bedroom. Upon occasion, when Nigey began singing jazzy tunes, Hammy and Nicky would join in–I’m not sure it was great music. It sounded like a combination music school and lunatic asylum. Hammy was a great improviser, in bits and pieces. Her problem was that she hadn’t a long enough memory to be a consistently good musician, but there was music in her soul. Nick, on the other hand, loved to sing the music to the movie “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” and obviously knew the melody, but had a tin ear when she tried to whistle it.
I also came to realize that it wasn’t just parrots who were smart. One wintry day in 1989 in the Sierra, Nigey and I were driving out of the mountains, chased by an evil looking storm. We were driving down the eastern side of the Sierra, not yet having crossed over the Nevada state boundary on our way into California, when we saw a truck driver standing in front of his truck, parked at the side of the road. The driver was looking down at a magpie that he had run over, and its mate, just inches away, was grieving in loud, unmistakable tones that any human being or animal would understand as grief. The driver also looked distraught. Just before we came on this scene, we had been commenting on the flocks of magpies, who despite their grumpy name are beautiful-looking, sleek black birds with vivid white stripes on their wings–close relatives of crows and ravens.
I later read about magpies–it turns out they are like the Irish. They have a wake when one of flock dies. So the lady magpie’s rant against the man who had killed her husband, well it was easy to identify with.
Konrad Lorenz, the author of King Solomon’s Ring, and one of the great early pioneers in studying birds, lived in a village with a cockatoo that was a constant companion. But the bird lived outside of Lorenz’s home, and when Lorenz used to finish his work and then visit various pubs in his village, the cockatoo would go to the different taverns asking if the doc had come in yet.
I discussed this matter of animal intelligence with a friend of mine–Pat Derby, a former movie animal trainer who wrote The Lady and Her Tiger in the ’70s, and then retired to the Sierra to run an elephant sanctuary–she famously provided a home for a couple of the elephants that had been treated badly at the Los Angeles Zoo.
Derby pointed out the obvious, which does not mean it isn’t profound. Elephants are the largest creatures on earth, just as whales are the largest creatures in the sea, she said. Derby notes that both of the animals have been tormented by Homo sapiens.
In the case of elephants, “They have to learn to tolerate a great deal as they adapt and adjust to humans,” she said. “In my opinion, that shows they are so much more intelligent than we thought. They are capable of making the adjustments to things that are totally foreign to their real nature. They manage to survive in situations that sorely test their minds, and from which they sometimes die. Simply put, animals deal with human beings who are control freaks.”
Animals “are so ahead of us. We go to church. We study, we meditate, always trying to seek the truth about ourselves, to discover ourselves, to find inner peace. Elephants just have that inner peace. You just look at them, and wonder, where does it come from?” she said.
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Lionel Rolfe is the author of a number of books available in Amazon’s Kindlestore and in paperback. On Dec. 11 at 7:30 p.m. his book “Literary L.A.” is being feted at a “Lionel Rolfe Author Tribute” at the Warszawa Loft, 1414 Lincoln Boulevard, Santa Monica in an event put on by the Public Works Improvisational Theater.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
