Mysteries of the Animal Mind

We all know you can teach a dog to roll over, but can you tell when it is bored and does not want to?
In Mysteries of the Animal Mind (tonight on the Nature of Things, CBC-TV at 8 p.m.), scientists explore how animals think, feel, communicate and empathize.
"Humans have no problem accepting that we think and yet we have denied that possibility for non-human animals seemingly forever," said Dr. James Hare, a professor at the University of Manitoba, in a telephone interview from Winnipeg.
"It justifies continued exploitation of other animals; if they don't think, then the things we do to them are immaterial."
This type of research has been going on since the 1970s. Prior to that, researchers were called fools for suggesting that non-human animals had human-like feelings or thought processes.
One of the ways to determine how smart an animal is, is to do what is called the mirror test.
In tonight's show, researchers place a mirror in front of dolphins, who not only recognize themselves, but also inspect different parts of their own bodies in the mirror.
Mr. Hare refers to a famous study where marks were applied to a chimpanzee’s eyebrow and ear while the animal was under anaesthesia, so the chimp would not be aware of what was being done. What was fascinating was that the chimp did not groom himself any differently until he saw himself in the mirror.
He then focused grooming the areas where the marks had been applied.
"It saw itself and knew it was itself in the mirror," said Mr. Hare. "Self recognition, that ability to distinguish oneself from others is an earmark of very complex cognitive ability."

Mr. Hare believes that the most important thing to a society is effective communication. He has studied Richardson's ground squirrels for years and is fascinated not only by their intelligence, but also by their ability to communicate.  Through his research, Mr. Hare has observed how they warn one another of possible threats, by vocalizing alarm calls. He has conducted experiments to test the concept of reliability.
By tape-recording a variety of individual alarm calls and making some of them reliable (they used a stuffed badger as the predator) and some of them non-reliable (no predator was introduced when the call was signalled), Mr. Hare discovered that the squirrels would react differently based on whether or not the signaller issuing the alarm call was reliable. If the signaller was reliable, the other squirrels would run to their burrow. If the signaller was not reliable (based on previous performance) they would ignore the caller.
What can humans learn by studying animal behaviour?
Mr. Hare acknowledges that it is a challenge for scientists to prove that animals have underlying thought processes and abilities like our own, but believes it is important to study their behaviour.
"It engenders respect for other species," said Mr. Hare. "In order to survive, ourselves, we are going to have to develop – very rapidly – a greater respect for other living things on the planet."
If you miss tonight's broadcast, Mysteries of the Animal World will be shown on CBC Newsworld on Thursday Feb. 2 at 10 p.m.

David Suzuki, host of The Nature of Things