There’s more going on in animal brains than you might think
American ecologist and author Carl Safina has spent decades observing animals including elephants, wolves and whales in the wild and in domestic settings. He wonders about their ability to think. Can large animals reason somewhat the way humans do? How much do they understand? His book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel is an exploration of the animal mind, a look at the psyche of our pets and their wildlife counterparts.
Our conversation has been edited for length.
Your friend is ignorant about dogs. Dogs are domesticated wolves. Wolves live in nuclear families, a couple of adults and their children, and have deep social bonds. They are full of warmth; they are happy when they see their family members. They greet each other the way our dogs greet us. They wag their tails.
The main difference is wolves have to grow up and take charge of their lives and leave their families and are responsible for their own survival and starting their own families. Our dogs never get to do that. Our dogs are like wolves in arrested development.
Elephants are empathetic, emotional animals.
They are constantly aware of where their family members are. They keep tabs on everybody. Not only are they watchful of their babies but of other family members. If the baby gets into any trouble there is immediate intervention, even by aunts and grandmothers.
They are also magnificently peaceful. If they get to know you, the way they know some researchers, they can be very mellow. They seem like they aren’t paying attention to you, but they are. When I was with a research group, they came right up to the vehicle just to see who the new guy was.
If you play them the recorded voices of tourists, they don’t respond. If you play them recorded voices of herders, they run away. Not only do they underrstand that people are people, they understand there are different types of people.
You tell an anecdote about a raven covered in porcupine quills that begs for human help.
There are a number of stories about animals who understand humans can help them. After I finished the book I began to hear numerous stories of manta rays. In many parts of the world, divers have had a manta ray tied up in fishing lines, and the ray will hover and come over with the unspoken request to get them out of the fishing lines. When the people help the rays by cutting
rstand that people are nd there are different bout a raven covered t begs for human of stories about anihumans can help he book I began to of manta rays. In d, divers have had a hing lines, and the ray ver with the unspoken t of the fishing lines. the rays by cutting the netting off, the manta won’t swim away but will stay nearby and swirl about in circles. You are critical of aquariums. Where I live, in Ontario, it is illegal to buy or breed orcas. But for many people it is the only chance to see whales and dolphins up close.
I’m not sure it is the only chance people have to see them up close. When I was young there was no whale-watching industry; there were no documentaries about whales. Aquariums provided a way for us to see them. But since then we have learned so much about the difficult experience of sea animals living in these aquariums. Whales swim 70 miles a day and they can’t do that when they are kept in a pool.
There are a lot of people going out to see these killer whales just swimming around in the ocean.
Killer whales should not be kept in captivity. They shouldn’t be taken away from their families in the wild. You focus on particular animals. You spend little time on monkeys but look closely at wolves and elephants and whales.
The animals I mainly focus on have a social structure. Their individual identity is defined by their relationship to the others around them. You don’t find that in a lot of animals. You find it in apes and monkeys and some birds but not too many others. We think of wolves negatively because they are predators.
Wolves don’t bother with people . . . They don’t think of us as prey. In fairy tales like Red Riding Hood wolves have been used as characters to express fears of monsters. We cast wolves as ferocious animals that eat people. In reality, they are afraid of human beings and they won’t eat us. Mountain lions kill people. Bears kill people. Dogs kill people and bite. Wolves don’t.