A review of Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, by Virginia Morell

Crown, 2013

304 pages

One fateful day in March 1838, a twenty-nine-year-old Charles Darwin met a female named Jenny. Observing her in her exhibit in the London Zoological Garden, Darwin noted that Jenny, a young orangutan recently acquired by the zoo, “kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child” when a keeper teased her with an apple. Having never met an ape face to face before, Darwin wrote furiously and excitedly in his notebooks, speculating on the thoughts and feelings of Jenny the orangutan over multiple visits. “Let man visit Ouranoutang in domestication,” Darwin wrote, “hear its expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken (to); as if it understands every word said—see its affection—to those it knew—see its passion & rage, sulkiness, & very actions of despair.” Darwin found such instances enough to convince him that animals (the “higher” ones, at least) are intelligent, that they can feel pain, jealousy, happiness, and boredom.

But Darwin had been criticized for using stories like Jenny’s as scientific evidence. They are anthropomorphic, other scientists said; they bestow non-human animals with human emotions that we cannot prove they feel. This anti-animal-mind mindset ruled psychological science for decades, and its grasp is still felt today.

In the book Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, published in 2013, author Virginia Morell wonders at scientists’ continuing struggle to accept and explain the inner workings of animals. Like Darwin, Morell begins by exploring her personal catalog of “thinking-animal experiences” in contemplating the intelligence and emotions of animals. In the introduction, she recounts stories of her collie, who showed imagination by creating her own fetching game with a pinecone and a hill. She chronicles her encounters with chimpanzees in the Gombe with Jane Goodall, including witnessing an act of patent deception executed by one young chimp in order to sneak a banana unbeknownst to a more dominant chimp.

“Why did scientists struggle to explain—or simply deny—what seemed so obvious to me?” Morell asks. Where does the biological basis of cognitive abilities lie, she wonders, and how do we know? How are scientists studying how and what animals think and feel?

To investigate the current state of animal mind studies, Virginia Morell travelled the world to observe scientists observing animals. Her investigation draws from her work as a science writer for Science since 1990, and as a contributor to such publications as National Geographic, Slate, Smithsonian, and Discover. She also draws from her three other books that cover topics relating to nature and wildlife, including Ancestral Passions, a biography of the Leakey family and their foundational discoveries for anthropology, and Wildlife Wars, the story of Richard Leakey’s quest to save the African elephant, which Morell co-authored with Leakey.

Through personal anecdotes and a brief historical review of the development of ideas on animal cognition from Aristotle to today, Morell introduces the quandary of studying another species’ mind, and the bifurcated nature of human beliefs on the subject. To dog and other pet owners like Morell, there is no question that their beloved companions have unique personalities, and feel pain, happiness, and love. In my personal experience as a pet owner, I’ll never forget how mournfully my family’s pet dachshund would wail each time I rolled out my suitcase for a trip. Or the gleeful tail-wagging and licks I would receive upon my return. But scientists require more than personal anecdotes as proof of animal cognition

To get to the bottom of animal mind in Animal Wise, Morell goes on a journey through the labs and minds of scientists, who study creatures from ants to elephants to chimps. She ponders the brains of ants with University of Bristol professor Nigel Franks, who refers to ants as “people” and shows us that ants can act as teachers, instructing other ants on how to reach new locations, even at their own expense. She considers the minds of fish, speaking with Victoria Braithwaite, a fish biologist at Pennsylvania State University, who has found that fish have the pain receptor cells and nerve fibers in their lips and elsewhere that may indicate an ability to feel pain and suffering when pierced by a hook. She witnesses Alex the African gray parrot use language intelligently by answering novel questions about unfamiliar objects with Irene Pepperberg, a scientist who began studying bird brains at a time when no one believed they even had brains. Along the way, Morell shamelessly espouses Darwin’s brand of open-minded inquiry, curiosity, and cautious but undeniable sympathy towards other species.

Morell states outright that “animals have minds. They have brains, and use them, as we do: for experiencing the world, for thinking and feeling, and for solving the problems of life every creature faces. Like us, they have personalities, moods, and emotions; they laugh and they play.” Though the book reads most like a first-person narrative of Morell’s own emotions and impressions as she explores labs, zoos and field sites, her visits with the impassioned scientists provide persuasive evidence to back up the stories throughout, with each new research project raising even more questions. Do animals think? Then, do animals talk, and do they listen? How do they interact and communicate with each other, and with us?

In the chapter “The Laughter of Rats,” Morell writes about Jaak Panksepp, an emeritus professor at Bowling Green State University who “by his own reckoning…has tickled more rats than anyone else in the world.” Panksepp seeks to understand the function of play, and shows that rats do laugh and express some enjoyment in tickling. Although skeptical of rat playfulness, after viewing rats running around the lab for a while, Morell soon realizes that “their joyful chirps were ricocheting all around us…it was like being in a foreign country when all the locals break into big guffaws at someone’s joke or quip, and you—not speaking the language—can only look on, a passive spectator.”

The journey leads us through a study with an “animal-mind detective” of how elephants respond to deaths of family members, to dolphins recognizing themselves in mirrors, to gorillas using touch-screen monitors. Morell guides readers through the scientists’ busy labs and complex science with lyrical and detailed descriptions, a keen awareness of her own thoughts on the matter, and a healthy dose of humor, capturing the scientists’ character, struggles and successes, and passion for their work.

As a collection of stories recounting a handful of scientists’ work in the field of animal cognition, the book could almostread like the criticized notebook of anecdotes carried by Darwin. Overall, though, Morell strikes a happy balance between science and story—backing up her stories with a fair amount of background knowledge and modern biological and psychological facts. For the animal lover untrained in cognitive psychology or animal behavior, this book could be an especially fascinating and enlightening read. To those more educated in the area, parts may seem a tad tedious—but familiarity with the material is largely offset by refreshingly colorful and elegant writing.

Morell achieves an easy, light read while still furnishing the reader with the tang of satisfaction that they have both learned and felt something from her book. Although she has a clear opinion on the matter of animal emotion, the scientists’ research—and the sheer difficulty of entering the mind of an animal—stand on their own. Appropriately for a book and a field full of questions, the book ends with more: “What do the minds of animals tell us about ourselves?” she asks. And, if we accept that they are like us, she wonders, “will our relationship with them change?” It’s clear that, for Morell, the study of animal mind is more than an academic pursuit to understand another species; it is a quest to understand ourselves, and our true relationship with other life on earth.