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Avian Consciousness
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11813 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1994 |
1,472 Words |
| Author
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Audrey Foote
Audrey Foote is a writer and reviewer who lives in Washington,
D.C. |
THE HUMAN NATURE OF BIRDS
A Scientific Discovery with Startling Implications
Theodore Xenophon Barber
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993
240 pp., $19.95
Why are birds so attractive to most of us? Some reasons are obvious: They are beautiful, and they sing sweetly. They are also nest builders, domestic as we are, and often monogamous, as we try to be. Ornithologists have noted other appealing qualities: With their remarkable vision, birds share our sensory and spatial world. Some species have intricate migration patterns, perform elaborate courtship dances and displays, and show ingenuity and even aesthetic sense in constructing nests and bowers.
A major difference between our biologic classes, avian and mammalian, makes birds fascinating to us: They can fly and thus know a grace and freedom we can never attain. Finally, almost too obvious to mention, as our contact with wildlife dwindles, birds are still here, everywhere, to be effortlessly observed and enjoyed. Ornamental and euphonious, they are rarely dangerous, destructive, or even dependent. But one virtue no one has ever claimed for them is intelligence. Until recently.
As almost everyone who reads a newspaper or watches TV must be aware, in the last decade there has been a revolution in attitudes toward animals in this country, in parts of western Europe, and elsewhere. Basically, there are two major forces in this great change. The humane wing rejects the classic Descartian assumption that animals are simply automatons without feelings, instead asserting that animals have senses and emotions and thus do suffer, and that we therefore should treat them far better than we do. The scientific wing is more cautious by training and deals with a more difficult and controversial area: the brain itself rather than nerves.
But these biologists are now challenging the long dominant behaviorist-positivist ideas of Watson and Skinner, which insisted that animals are governed only by instinct or conditioning. These scientists, known as cognitive ethologists, propose that animals may well be capable of cognition and consciousness, that animals think, and that we therefore need to revise our ideas about them.
Cognitive ethology
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