Animals may not think like us, but that doesn’t mean they’re not smart

“When researching animal intelligence, we still think too much from the human point of view,” argues philosopher Bas van Woerkum-Rooker. “For example, just as humans use visual information to remember routes, rats use smells to remember routes. Those are both intelligent approaches to remembering one’s way.” The philosopher developed a method to study animal intelligence without this bias. He will defend his Ph.D. thesis at Radboud University on 20 November.

“We often think that humans are smarter than animals, but animals are smart in a different way,” the researcher explains. “Scientists studying animal behavior still too often unfairly label animals as ‘less intelligent’ than us. I don’t find that kind of comparison particularly interesting.”

For example: A dog goes to sit by the window every day just before its owner comes home from work. So maybe the dog knows roughly what time it is, researchers think. But as it turns out, the owner’s scent still lingers in the house, but slowly diminishes during the day. When the scent concentration drops below a certain level, the dog knows that the owner is almost coming home.

Van Woerkum-Rooker states, “You can then conclude that this dog is not as smart as you thought, but in doing so, you are comparing animal intelligence with human intelligence. Whereas: a dog’s sense of time is simply linked to smell. That too is intelligence.”

According to the philosopher, we could learn much more about animal cognition if we conducted our research differently. He has therefore devised a theory that allows researchers to better understand animal intelligence.

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During his Ph.D., Van Woerkum-Rooker looked, among other things, at research by comparative psychologists on crow species. The research in question focused on jays, which hide nuts and grubs when food is scarce. They are then able to remember where they hid the food. When the jays come back to collect the food from a week ago, they go back to the nuts, but not the grubs, because they know that grubs are no longer edible after three days.

The researchers assumed that jays have a kind of “episodic memory“: the ability to remember what, where, and when something happened, the way we remember a moment from our summer holidays, for example. They studied this by having jays do tests in a controlled environment. For example, they checked whether the jays still knew that there was no point in digging up the grubs, if, for example, there was no daylight or no rotting smell: possible indications of the passage of time. The jays nevertheless continued to ignore the grubs.

But this does not necessarily mean they have episodic memory, like humans, says Van Woerkum-Rooker. “There are other factors that can affect their knowledge, such as the smell of a researcher coming in every day. You can never rule out all explanations. And you shouldn’t want to: The idea that perception and intelligence are separate is faulty.

“Animals can always obtain sensory information that helps them know what to do, such as certain sound frequencies that we cannot perceive. And human episodic memory is also much more strongly linked to our perception than we tend to think.”

Ant and elephant

The philosopher developed a new method for scientists in which the starting point is not human abilities, but the animal’s senses. “This requires you to first know what an animal can perceive in a given environment,” he explains. “This includes noise levels or electromagnetic radiation that we cannot hear, see or feel ourselves. Then you start subtracting and adding these variables, rather than eliminating them altogether. In a laboratory, you can clearly not mimic everything that is present in the natural environment, so you have to study animals in the wild as well.”

This makes research slightly more complicated, Van Woerkum-Rooker admits, but it also gives more insight into animal intelligence. All animal species—including humans—evolve to develop solutions to problems they encounter. Many people think that elephants are smarter than ants, for example, because they have the ability to comfort each other. We often see comforting as a sign of intelligence because we recognize it in ourselves. But the digging work of ants can also be seen as intelligent.

“Asking what precisely ‘intelligence’ is, is actually a dead end,” says the researcher. “We would be better off asking: what makes this behavior possible? How do the animals’ senses and the information they get from the environment contribute to their behavior? That way, we can understand the cleverness of animals without using humans as a starting point.”