Animal Consciousness | Scientific Controversies

[Music] this is really incredible to see this I love this it means so much to us that you come out I'm so excited to have our guests tonight I want to introduce our first guest Fran's de Waal he is a male primate and it's really such an honor to have frontier he's one of the world's most influential paradigm changing primatologists of our time a professor from Emory University and the director of living links the Center for Advanced Study of ape and human evolution at Yerkes National Lab is that correct did I get that right an author of many books including most recently Mama's last hug and France and Diana will both be signing books afterwards and I'm also delighted to introduce to you Anna Reese who is one of the world's most influential researchers in dolphin intelligence and a friend and a professor at Hunter College and in the Graduate School at CUNY yeah schools yeah and diana is also the author of dolphin in the mirror and an activist for animal rights and we'll touch on all of these things actually before we go on fronts tell me about this picture tell me what was about this picture I had it much longer which was much longer at some point we were all hippies we're going back there it was called little rose and the story on Rose was that we be taught and not a female to him to raise her on the bubble which was the first case chips our tool user so raising a chimp on the bottle is no big deal for them so she adopted Rose and raised on the bottle and Diana this picture of you that was me with a really bad perm yeah this was one of my first encounters with a dolphin this is Delphi and can I tell a quick story yeah so this is the time out story I was working with this dolphin actually this was Circe this is a picture of Delphi but I was working with a young dolphin named Circe and I in exchange for me doing research with her I had to feed her I had to teach her to eat fish that was not alive and swimming it was had been frozen and defrosted and it was about that wide and her head was about that wide so what I did was I cut the fish into three sections heads middles and tails and she would readily eat the heads she would eat the middle sections spit out every tail and I figured maybe it's the fin on the tail that was bothering her so I cut the fins and she ate them readily now I was in the process of training her to stay with me when I fed her so I would put my hands in the water and that meant stay with me until the feed is over and if she didn't do that and she swam away the only way I could communicate because we didn't have a shared code was to give her a timeout which meant me backing away for about about ten feet and standing there and looking at her and then I would come back so I delayed her from eating and I broke the social contact so let me get back to the story so now I'm feeding her and one day by mistake I threw her an uncut tail and she looked up at me spit it out and made a beeline to the opposite side of the pool and took a horse and took a vertical position and just stared at me yeah and I thought that she's still pissed probably yeah and and I thought is this possible she's giving me a timeout does she'd understand this but that's an anecdote so what do you do as a scientist with an anecdote and I was new I was just getting my PhD but I made it into an experiment so then I waited a couple of days and I was feeding her regularly all properly cut tails she ate every tail never did anything like that again and then I purposely several days later gave her an uncut tail and she went and did the same thing went across the pool and stared at me and the other three occasions I did it it happened that became the unplanned chapter in my doctoral dissertation I think they like that better than any of the other ones so that was my first in close encounter okay I'm gonna tell you right now we've got to do an animal consciousness - there's no way we're gonna we have so much stuff and I love that so many people brought their dogs we're not going near dogs today I'm so sorry those of you who wrote me Oh finally I'm going to understand my cat you're not gonna understand your cat I'm telling you right now like don't be disappointed I strongly of us who have dogs and cats and share our lives with other species cannot conceive of them as being anything other than conscious but this was not the world right that we grew up and I mean Descartes I love that there's a thousand people here for a conversation that opens with take heart take heart called them automata right felt that they were just totally mechanistic and can you Franz tell us a little bit about this attitude and where it came from and why it was so pervasive and prevalent and entrenched well it's it's strange because in Darwin's times which is the 19th century we we could freely talk about emotions in animals and Darwin talked about a wrote a whole book about it that's the only book of him that completely disappeared from view for one whole century because the scientists who came after him couldn't stand it and so we was not the cars the car we shouldn't blame everything on the cars it was Kiner skeena was the one who had no understanding of there's so many blame yeah yeah we have someone to blame so Skinner and his behaviorists they basically for a whole century they told us you cannot talk about the inner life of animals that's why they were called behaviorist because they said you only can look at behavior only see the outside never talk about the inside and that taboo when I was a student was still very strong and even though it came from the u.s. it came from American scientists it had spread to Europe also and we were not be not to talk about emotions not upon talk about consciousness none of that and that started to break I would say in the in the 80s and the 90s and it broke in psychology a little bit earlier because about humans you could also not talk about emotions emotions in humans are also taboo and that ended sort of in the 1960s so we lived through a long time where you as a student you were taught so for example if I talked about reconciliation in chimpanzees they said why don't you call it post-conflict contact or if I talked about laughing if you tickle a chimpanzee they laugh you know and they make laughing sounds like type sounds why don't you call it vocalized panting and so they had all these terms that we should use to avoid the connection with human behavior well tell me for instance about this image which is from your book I believe and what is the classic story about chimpanzees in terms of evolutionary aggression that they're striving for anything just to dominate just to win just to survive just to perpetrate genes yeah so that was in the 70s that that everything that humans and animals did was considered selfish and competitive and was related to warfare which after the World War Two was sort of a logical topic of course but everything was related to a quest of behavior and violence and as soon as you pointed out the nice side of animals or humans you were wrong so so for example if you say people kill each other and you say they're acting like animals that was perfectly fine if you say people love each other and they help each other just like animals do that you would be a romantic so everything positive that humans do is is our own invention everything bad that we do it comes from biology that's basically the view that we had and and the self is gene and that kind of stories didn't help because it contributed to that view well so in this picture you have an alpha male and I know you described him has looking stressed from being antagonized by a younger male and how do I know you're not just projecting emotions on this face well from one picture you can maybe not tell that but this is this this male is named Saco officially named Socrates I always felt up as a bit pompous for a chimpanzee but his name is taco and he was a perfect alpha male very good alpha male but he had another male in the group who was always challenging him every day and every day he had to prove himself and that's I took that picture of his face after one of these outbursts where he had to deal with that now I'm curious here's a picture of the chimps laughing yeah as you described I'm curious what why you feel the emotional dimension is relevant to the conversation of consciousness I mean we're talking about the difference between instinct being mechanistic just reactive like chemicals responding in a dish why is emotion relevant consciousness comes in when you talk about feelings so emotions are expressed in the body in your blood pressure and your voice in your face and in your heart and your brain emotions are always bodily expressed and we can measure them of course very objectively and animals is no problem to measure emotions the feeling part what animals feel is really hard to tell and what humans feel I would say is the same thing people will tell me I'm happy and then a month later divorced and I'm worried about their happiness you know so I don't trust humans and and I'm so glad I'm working with animals who can tell who cannot tell the kind of nonsense but feelings are much harder to know and so when you talk about consciousness that's where the feelings come in because comes the feelings are basically when you become conscious of your emotions and not all emotions reach that point you have a lot of emotions probably that you're not aware of some of them reach to the surface and then they become feelings and you can talk about them mmm-hmm now these are chimps consoling each other and I want to talk about reconciliation because that is such an important part of of your work I mean reconciliation is a very abstract concept so we look at chimps as though they're only warring for dominance and there there are pretty tough species and yet tell me about this picture that you took here these are two male chimps who had just a fight and the fight ended up in the trees and one of them holds out his hand and begs the other one for contact and then about a second after the picture they come together and they kissed and embraced each other so reconciliation I first discovered it in chimpanzees when I was a student and people said well people did not doubt it necessarily but they said well that's chimps chimps maybe do these things because they're very human-like but my animals will never do it now we know dolphins is another example elephants wolves we know that basically all social mammals have reconciliations after fights it's really not a big deal anymore but at the time it was considered some sort of romantic vision we now look at it basically as very utilitarian in the sense if you have a social system and you have occasional conflicts in the system you need to have ways to bring down the tensions and repair the relationships so we now look at it is very very logical that it exists see you see reconciliation and dolphins yeah you do and when they are when their spouts usually you'll see one coming up to the other and they'll do Peck rubs there all sorts of different ways you know but it's interesting just to follow up on what Franz was saying it's interesting because when Darwin was talking about the continuity in terms of physical evolution there was this you know most scientists wouldn't think there was any continuity and cognitive evolution but someone like Donald Griffin wrote a very small book that made a huge impact in 1976 called the question of animal consciousness the question of animal awareness and it really changed the course of a lot of studies suddenly was became okay des as these questions do animals think and if so how do they think so getting to this idea of the brains are made of the same building blocks so Donald Griffin he wrote that little book and it was sort of revolutionary because it was very anti behaviorist but the word emotional cures only one time in the head he was he was still shy about I think it's interesting the role that the emotions are playing and this is particularly in sort of social intelligence like here is a female chimp kissing the alpha male who was she had a conflict with right moments before and this is very human-like are you ever concerned that we over project the comparison with human beings that were always searching for sort of connections and I did notice actually the credit in that picture of you is Jasmine Morris his one of the great naturalist sand great writer of the naked ape the naked ape yeah the naked ape is the only science book that is in the top books the top hundreds of best-selling books like the wonderful that like the Bible and Gone with the Wind and I'm afraid the Bible he's right in there so yeah Desmond Morris them yeah he had a great sense of humor that's why the quite a book was so successful he would say people worried that they're so proud of their brain they have such a big brain but do you know that they have the biggest penis also nice segue to dolphins speaking of penises speaking of penises well speaking of emotions and expressiveness I mean Diana you study the species that we definitely are projecting on that face right some human anthropomorphism they don't actually have flexible faces no I mean it's interesting that we project on that face there couldn't be more different than we are they have very little much movement in their face but you know when you start land people if you look at them you'll say oh they all look alike you know they can't tell dolphins from one another when you work with them I've worked with them for 40 years they have as many differences in their faces as you guys do just like if you have a dog you know your German Shepherd from another German Shepherd its familiarity really lets you know who they are but they do actually have expressions the way they hold their mouths but their eyes look like their body tension and Franz I'm sure you do this with the chimps we start reading their body language and they're reading our body language right back so you have these wonderful videos can you describe this to me so this is a little two and a half year old dolphin at the National Aquarium named Bailey do you see what she's doing she's creating her own objects of play by blowing air out of her blowhole and creating rings but she blows it out of her blowhole and she's kicking it with her tail she actually knows the physical properties she understands the physics of how to manipulate air in water she can not only do that she can blow it directly out of her blowhole we published on this many years ago this is a variation and she came up with us she did this for over 45 minutes she was two and a half years old that speaks to this oh this was the first this was my first bad video but this is a dolphin blowing a bubble ring she blows the second one it catches up and she swims through it she's basically like a smoker who's trying to quit right and this I mean it was remarkable but we know animals play and there's good reason to play it gives you time to practice out test the contingencies but this was the first case we had with an animal creating their own object to play from something they produced from their own body and they would actually check it out if they were poorly formed they would SWAT it with their tails and blow another one yeah I'm the only one allowed to show a picture of my dog tonight Franz you have this great line if only humans had expressive ears okay here's another picture of my dog let's look at that that's a cute so it is interesting that we project so much on expressive faces but we're actually lacking some expressiveness as well like we don't have those wonderful ears why did that fall away the thing was that that for years everyone said that obviously humans had the most muscles in their face we had thousands of muscles they would say because we have to express all these shades of emotions and animals far less and so they have fewer muscles there was the standard line and then five years ago some scientists analyzed postmortem the faces of chimpanzees and found exactly the same number of muscles in their face as in the human face and I always feel that humans are also open the estimating the ears for example if you have horses or dogs or cats the ears are extremely expressive and so we only look at that part of the face of course because we ignored the ears which are so expressive well that's hard to ignore what about other species I know you both have worked together in fact on elephants and the expressiveness do you find them facially expressive or I I think Franz in your book you coded somebody is saying oh my god elephants are such drama queens yeah but elephants yeah yeah they have the trunk can they have the ears and they have the tail and they have all the sounds that they produce so elephants are extremely expressive animal and and actually humans for some reason I don't know why humans to relate very closely to them body language of the elephant when the Romans like 2,000 years ago had all these parties where lions would kill soldiers and soldiers would kill soldiers and they had all sorts of wild animals killing the only thing that didn't work was elephants they had brought in some elephants from Asia and they were gonna kill the elephants and the public objected to it and I think it's because the elephants were distressed and people relate to the body of the elephants for some reason much more than the body of almost any other animal I don't know what what it is but they're not really predators uh-huh and I mean it do you think that that has something to do with it like we we don't me to theorize on the spot here but we often have animals that we cohabitate with very closely are predators yeah yeah like cats and dogs there's something other else though and when you're in the presence of an elephant there's a real sense of being there I don't know you know I don't know if you've experienced that too Franz you there's something in the expressiveness of the I just there's it's hard to put your to say what it is I feel that way when I'm with dolphins as well it's like there's somebody in there and there is somebody in there and I think we recognize that these are big social animals in a scientific taboo to talk like that yeah and I mean for many decades that must have been a serious taboo to talk like that so what do you think's changed doesn't there's a lot of scientists who would not talk they would not talk about depressants are you ever going to work again is what I'm asking so you know that that used to be taboo and and I think many students are still trained not to talk about these things not never to mention that and just produce the graphs that relate to behavior so there is of course a younger generation now of of scientist who is opening up to the black box of the behaviorists as talking about the emotions and the consciousness and the thinking of animals so we have a new generation of scientist who is open to that but it used to be totally taboo yeah so tell me about this video of elephant cooperation I mean both of you can speak to this I'm sure tell me what's going on here yeah this is based on a very old study in at Yerkes primate center with chimpanzees which is called a cooperative pooling paradigm that was developed where two animals can pull at a item together and they can only bring it if they come together and so here you have an elephant who is waiting now for his partner because if he pulls alone at the rope that is in front of him he's not gonna get anything because hope will disconnect so he has to wait for his partner so he knows to wait yes this may take a while I'm not sure he's gonna time and he puts his foot on the rope I think this is the the video where one of them had learned that you didn't need to pull if you put your foot on the rope and keep the rope in place the other one can do all the pulling for you yeah yeah that's what's happening here I believe you called this elephant freeloading I believe a freeloading yeah look at that the other one brings it in and he just stands there that's smart and this was not we had not planted this was a study but just Plotnik in Thailand we had we had not planned them doing this but yet obviously smart smart asses and money and Diana this one you were saying you were telling me that elephants were failing certain tests where they were being expected to use tools but it was because they were being given the wrong kinds of tools for them yeah there were some animal show what we call insightful problem-solving where they solve a problem without any apparent trial and error this is Khandala a young male at figuring out how to get this hanging tree limb with baited with all sorts of tasty fruit there and previous studies that had tried to test these animals just gave them six on the ground to see if they would use that to reach things out of reach and they failed these tests so some scientists concluded maybe they had a savant like brain they had great spatial memory but they couldn't solve these kinds of problems and we thought we'll wait a minute what if you give them other ways of solving it so we gave them sticks this was done at Smithsonian's National Zoo we gave them six we gave them things that they could stand on to get to it and a few other objects and khandala did never touch the stick if that's what we gave him he would have failed but the first time he did it you know he was watching he was looking up and the first time he solved the problem he took a a block a big and rolled it right under that brows got right up on it and solved the problem so again a lot of the problems I think are with us and how we think to design a project if we think about it from the app yeah thanks if we think about it from the animals point of view it's a whole different story and by the way once he learned how to use this he generalized this he would he would search for that block and he'd use it to pick flowers from a tree he could never reach it was quite interesting he also stacked blocks too this is another cooperation study from Yerkes Francis's 1937 it yes so this this is the original cooperative pooling study because Robert Jerky's was interested in in cognition these are two chimps young chimps who are bringing in a heavy box that is too heavy for one of them so they have to work together and they spit on it the food on the box and so they [Music] they're bringing it in the cooperation though is what's stunning is that there's a synchronicity they understand synchronized so much like the counting what they do now is I love this like silent picture yeah there should be a piano in 37 so they feed one of them they have now fit one of the two chimpanzees so that one is not motivated anymore and the other one is still highly motivated a little bit of a DeeDee going on like hey attention but he does it right so why does he do it why does the film well that's the interesting part is that the the chimp on the right has if the chimp on the right has a full understanding that he needs the partner yeah and the chimp on the Left has a friend like this so look at the end here look at the very end so they get the food no the one on the right takes basically everything yeah we have friends like that too yes so what this what this shows is that they probably have reciprocity maybe there's a lot of studies on reciprocity is that I do you a favor you do me a favor and and so in this case there's one chimp who is not motivated but still willing to work for the other so reciprocity is part of the social structure but again I mean how do we know that that isn't just instinct and mechanistic response and why are we interpreting that as something other yes we can test that the reciprocity in chimps at least I don't know for other animals in Sims it's based on memory so we can demonstrate that in experiments they remember a favor that has been done so it cannot be pure instinct there's a memory in there a memory of a previous event that they need to remember who did what for me so yeah instinct is a term that we barely use anymore and and that the reason is that there's almost nothing in animal behavior that is purely genetic there's always an environmental or a learning component in it so we we usually don't use the term instinct' anymore so they remember the person who did them the favor even if they were a little distracted who helped them get the food and they will later reciprocate as well they will reciprocate and they reciprocate especially actually if it is someone who normally doesn't do them favors so let's say you be your friends that we always do each other favors then I barely remember because I know for you France but yeah but if we're not friends and you and you do me a big favor yeah I will remember that yeah tell me about mama since mama is the subject of your most recent book which was just published in March is that right yeah yeah mama died in two years ago and she died at the age of 59 she was the alpha female of the RM zoo colony for 40 years she was a very central important figure and I know that people always talk in terms of dominance and they say the males are dominant over the females in chimpanzees yes the males are physically dominant over the females but she was a very powerful figure and she was at the core of the group and basically I always felt that that group was run by the oldest male and the oldest female and he was the oldest female so he as he is mr. Tata Monique who couldn't stand me mama mama loved me I had very good relationship with her but her daughter never understood because I would visit the zoo and mama would recognize me from far away and her daughter never got how mama knew me and why she knew me and why she liked me and she would then always go around look to pick up a rock somewhere and then she would she had very good aim and I have caught I have caught rocks in the air like this that she would throw at me so mama was the alpha female she was very central figure in that group just to give you one story of how she was is that we once had a young alpha male who was a bit too rough and he was chased by the whole group into a little tree and set in the top of the tree screaming even though he was the alpha male and each time he wanted to come down the whole group chased him back up after about 20 minutes of that mama walked up she was very slow she walked up and she climbed very slowly towards him and she touched him and she kissed him and she brought him back down and from that moment on everyone accepted him back down so that's a bit how central her figure figure she was in the group and so when she died and she had an encounter with my professor young for Hoff who the video of it yeah shall we play that yeah yeah [Music] [Applause] for someone to go into the habitat yeah we never go in visited Dylan's chamber she was dying at that point and she he went in there I think young was nervous normal expression can be also have a pleasant or friendly just like in humans the smile is more friendly but we also have nervous grins of course and so yeah we have that same spectrum mm-hmm and so this is mama around that time this is mama when she was 15 now why did you choose her as a central character for the book I was sort of surprised this video has been seen by 200 million people and that people were moved by the video I can fully understand and I was very moved by the video but people also surprised there so we got a lot of reactions of people who said that was so surprising that there's gestures and facial expressions were and her probably also her emotions were so human-like and I thought well for 50 years we have been telling everyone that chimpanzees are our closest relatives so why are people surprised that they have the same sort of emotions that we do and so that's why I took that as the story because they have the same sort of facial expressions and I don't think there's any human Oshin that we don't find in a chimpanzee people claim all these things of course all the time they say we have six basic emotions that we share with animals know we have we have fifty emotions that we share with animals I think and so that restriction that the psychologists usually put in I don't agree with now you touched upon this already the concept of male dominance not that I have a particular issue with that or anything challenged to some extent because what do we really mean by male dominance in the pack is physical dominance yeah and he repeatedly discussed how mama was the diplomat when mama said went right and she negotiated all the deals between other animals in the pack and she could make or break the fate of any of the males in the pack as you described bringing the alpha male back down and bringing him into the fold so our our notions that were continually reflecting back on human beings about male dominance projections and it depends on what you look at I usually make a distinction between dominance and power power would be the influence you have on group processes and and in terms of power there's lots of females so I have tons of power so I never understood the physical dominance is clear there's of course another close April ative of us the bonobo where the females are also physically dominant but in the chimpanzee the males are usually physically dominant and I always find it a very strange argument I'm from a family of six boys and we are all like two feet taller than my mom and my mom was the boss my mom had an army of seven men basically in the home that she ran and so I always am surprised when people don't recognize female dominance for what it is sometimes now in dolphin's female dominance is more typical yeah there they live in matriarchal societies as do elephants they're very similar in fact so the females will raise young and the males that are born will leave that matriarchal group about four years of age go up with other males so that females are quite dominant and when even with within when you watch them together it's it's not like a structured social hierarchy either I mean they're dominant females but it's very mobile sort of social yeah and the males are more solitary no the males are in solitary at all they just form age and sex related groups so you'll see these male groups made up of males about the same age but they mix and mingle they live in what we call a fission fusion Society chimpanzees are this way elephants are this way there's several species where they come together in groups then they break it apart and form other groups but they maintain these really long lasting friendships no we really are talking all about social animals and and I think this is one of the most remarkable videos I've ever seen which is what she described is the fairness test so can you describe this as the monkey on the Left gives the rock and gets a piece of cucumber that's a low-level reward the one on the right gives us a rock for the same same job guess it gets a grape and the one on the left looks at that the greatest is ten times better for capuchin monkeys than cucumber so you will see the second time he gets the cucumber now the one on the right is working for grapes till he tests the rock yeah it's good Joe gets a cucumber he is pissed off so the one on the right is the one is the 1% basically and so we did we did a lot of fairness studies the capuchin monkeys have a very egocentric sense of fairness in the sense that the monkey gets the grape is not worried about it as you see the one who gets the grape is perfectly fine and in chimpanzees they go they get much closer to humans and chimpanzees the one who gets the grape may refuse the grape until the other one also gets a grape and so the the chimpanzees we have tested out with what is called the ultimatum game and they show a full-blown version of the sense of fairness and all of us feel that at the moment is the of course Bernie Sanders theme is is the fairness in society I think it in equal what is it inequity in the in society is a very big theme at the moment and I feel we underestimate how deep the emotions go you see the emotions of this monkey how deep the emotions go to relate to that issue it's not just an economic issue or a mathematics issue or some superficial social sciences issue it affects us very deeply these inequities and that's what this experiment shows do you see things like this in the oceans well you know you wouldn't necessarily be able to track it that easily because it's hard to watch dolphins like this but in an aquarium where I one of the early observations we made I was telling France about this earlier we I watched a trainer feed a female and a male together and the female was just getting more fish for doing the same thing this wasn't an experiment they were just doing a feed and the male was watching and the next time the trainer put his hand to feed the male this measly one fish he bit him so see you see this the the knowledge that somebody's getting a better achievement there was an awareness so we want to do a study on inequity but we have to find a way to make sure nobody gets hurt well this has been done with dogs you asked about dogs and everyone can do this at home you have to find the task that the dog doesn't like so if you throw a tennis ball that's a task they like so much that you that the rewards don't really matter that much so in in Vienna they did an experiment with dogs where they would have them give the paw which is not something they like so the dogs would give the paw and if you have two dogs and you don't provide them at all they will do it 25 times in a row if you start rewarding one of them and they did not even miss me today that was pieces of bread if you reward one of them and not the other the other one after five or six times gives up and doesn't want to do it anymore so the inequity aversion is also present didn't one of your colleagues protest that fairness was invented during the Renaissance yeah during the French Revolution I mean these are arguments for instance that Steven Pinker is making that the fairness and things are social constructs and cultural celebrating civilization but basically what you're revealing is that these are ancient biological and Diana I think you wanted to throw in there but what did you want to throw in there sorry so sir fairness was not invented during the French Revolution all right fairness was not invented during the French Revolution yeah that's the idea of some philosophers especially country and philosophers they think that we we arrive at morality by reasoning and logic so for example recently Paul bloom wrote against empathy that we could we could have an empathic society just based on reason that's all country in philosophy and yes they think that a bunch of old guys in Paris decide that fairness is a good thing and then we adopt it in society and that's how it spreads all these things are much deeper and much older than we think and I don't think humans invent new things humans modify things and so human culture is very important in modifying human nature but there's there's no new emotions that we create with our culture yeah I mean I think we're seeing the roots of this in other species and I think that's what's so exciting right now you know I think I just wanna go back to something else when we talk when you were talking about the emotional brain and I think there's there's a good consensus that other animals do share these varieties of emotions and that it's perhaps that secondary kind of processing of the emotions where you're thinking about what's going on so again that relates back to fairness and how we think about fairness the way an animal may perceive fairness it's not clear if it's exactly the way we perceive it but we see evidence for similar behaviors so bonobos which are pictured here are interesting precisely in this conversation because people often revert to the chimpanzee right and the standard story oh the aggressive chimpanzee and the the flooring and the warfare but bonobos are as related to us as chimps is that right yeah exactly equally close to us evolutionarily yeah genetically yeah they they're more empathic they're more peaceful they're female-dominated they have no warfare so it's warfare so chimp in a meeting when they group in the meat in the wild they may kill each other the males and bonobos is it basically it's very soon a picnic they they hang out together and they they groom each other and they have sex with each other they have a lot of sex they have a lot of sex dolphins have a lot of sex - yeah don't forget that in there don't share that the interesting thing about the bonobos is that the anthropologist hated bonobos so so we have two close relatives or equally close to Earth chimp and bonobo but the anthropologists have have built a story of human evolution which is which is based on conquest we have killed an eye on the tiles we have killed here's to repeat the scenes we have we have eradicated everyone else and now we dominate the world and that's the word that they use they use the domination of the human species and Jim spittin that picture because teams are hostile to neighbors and kill them on occasion and so on and bonobos are just too sexy they're too peaceful the two female dominated they don't know what to do is the variable gender indiscriminate no you see it in their books in their books they say the burner was very charming species wonderful species but let's forget about the bonobo but they just don't they cannot handle them yeah wasn't it you reminded me of this quote was it Mark Twain who said humans are the only animals who blush and need to yeah yeah so they're not ashamed of their behavior let's talk about the mirror test Diana tell me about this study and I think this is where you in France collaborate uh yeah this is an elephant at the Bronx Zoo named happy and Franz and I did this study we did a study before this with dolphins which we can talk about too but this is happy in front of a jumbo-sized mirror if we had a build of four by an eight foot by eight foot mirror and after we did the study with the dolphins we thought that elephants would be a really good species to test they had lots of similar characteristics so we tested three animals at the Bronx Zoo happy Maxine and Patty we're not responsible for those names and what we did in these tests the way you run them because you people say well how do you know an animal knows it's themself in a mirror and by the way that's it's not trivial you know when we think about looking at ourselves in a mirror you think yeah it's easy we recognize ourselves but we don't until we're about 18 to 24 months of age because it takes some brainpower to figure out that first of all you have to figure out that your body movements you have to have proprioception you have to be able to track your movements and be aware of how you're moving and notice that that guy or that one in the mirror is doing the same thing and then you got to figure out really how to interpret that so here's another here's an image of Pepsi this is we've done we did a study with happy at the Bronx Zoo this is Pepsi that Josh Plotnik and Franz and I worked together with some other people being marked and once you show them the mirror they learn the contingencies of mirror use they figure out that it's themselves they show behavior that we call self directed they look at their eyes they look at the insides of their mouths then we mark them once we see evidence that they know it's themselves so Pepsi's marked on one part of her head that you can see with a visible mark the other side is marked with an invisible mark so she could if she just smells the mark she'd smelled it on either side and we predicted if they passed the mark test they'll just stir the mark so this is a lovely example it looks like what we got at the Bronx Zoo and we've gone in with so we had Bronx Zoo elephant Pepsi and two elephants at Smithsonian she's looking in her mouth now this is an animal that recognizes himself I should say in this case in a mirror so tell me why so this is a new layer right it's not just social consciousness I mean I don't know if primates passed this test and so this is self-awareness that's a whole other level and like you said human children can't pass that until a certain age yeah and just to be clear about this so if you're the we have a dog here that is aware of itself or be bumping into walls and into you most animals must have some level of awareness of them their bodies and where they are in space and other animals this is a very specific tasks where it's an it's a visual task and it asks can that animal recognize an external representation of themselves and beyond that will they seek out the mirror will they use the mirror to view themselves so in other words will they use the mirror as a tool to view themselves it's a step beyond that and that's really rare so we have it it was shown in great apes not in monkey species with one exception that was pretty it was a bit different this is a dolphin just that one of the first days a young dolphin looking at itself in a mirror this is Foster it's a one-way mirror pardon me it's a one-way mirror this so yes this is a one-way mirror we're looking through in filming and the dolphin just sees the mirror and we can film through at the camera this was within the first he the first minute what was so cool about this is this was again first day and they get more and more interested in it but he's testing the contingencies we call it contingency testing you can see a lot of repetitive behaviors what's fascinating is that when you test kids when you look at Apes when you look at dolphins and elephants they show these things the same types of behaviors this is Bailey at the National Aquarium she is seven months here and she's playfully spinning in a mirror she's looking at herself spinning in a mirror no how do you know she recognizes herself because we've done tests so this was filmed later so what we do is we do videos we look at how they first react behaviorally when they're first exposed and then they move through these stages dolphins and animals that have never had mere exposure may think it's a social and another one of their own species and shows social behavior that's kind of stage one the next stage that some animals that go on to pass the mark test the mirror test show what we call contingency testing when they're kind of doing very weird and repetitive behaviors in front of the mirror and then they start showing a third stage which we call self-directed where they actually look at parts of their bodies that they can't see without the mirror and they do behaviors like looking in their mouths looking in their eyes then once we see that that's evidence we go on to do a mark test we mark them on different parts and in the case of a dolphin where they can't touch we've said would they race to the mirror and orient that part of their body that's been marked within the first ten seconds with an elephant they can touch it with chimps they can touch em so they do it also the Apes do it spontaneously I think the Dolphins also yeah so if I come to my chimps in Georgia is a big sunglasses on they will use my sunglasses as a mirror and they will open their mouths to look inside their mouths the females turn around to look at their behinds which they find a very important male doesn't do that the male's never turn around it they look at the females behinds not that their own behinds so yeah they spontaneously seek out these opportunities and monkeys never do that so at the apes do the monkeys I have one more little cute please say here so Dolph male dolphins that we tested actually looked at parts of their body like their genitals in the mirror we had a map the mirrors the area in front of the mirror so we knew if they were positioned a certain way we also did an earlier study where the males were not copulating at all males show so homosexual behavior it's almost social behavior actually but we see this and when the mirror was in they just kept on watching themselves in the mirror while they were doing intromission attempts and as soon as the mirror is out they were never in that area doing it that was pretty interesting now communication is an interesting aspect Diana you've you've done a lot in the area of dolphin communication and tell me about the quicks and the decoding of their communications yeah so these are wild dolphins these are dolphins in Bimini one of our field sites we study them in Bimini and Belize and dolphins have a wide variety of sounds they use they definitely communicate we have not we don't have that magic decoder ring to figure out what they're saying and I don't think anybody's cracked the code currently I'm working with my colleagues at Rockefeller University Marcelo Magnus Coe who's there and his students at our lab and we're trying to decode so we follow dolphins we use hydrophone no one's been able to crack this language but it's it's very intricate is it a language do we know it's a language we don't know it's they use a rich repertoire of whistles you can hear some of them we have sounds on this we did and let's see this next one yeah but you'll hear sounds here here we're using drones we started using drones that sound up on this too if I stop talking tell them that that's click whistles can you hear them so these are dolphins in Belize and you're hearing clicks and they're all echolocation they use sonar where they send out beams of sound they get reflected it goes back and it tells them about invite that parts of their environment so it's really like seeing with sound and what they use this again rich repertoire of whistles and that's where we think a lot of the communication social communication occurs but it could also be in the clicks we really don't know for sure but what we found is in other studies that are we do in our lab that are more experimental we've given them underwater keyboards we're now doing a four by eight foot touch screen with dolphins like a d-pad and we and you got to limit their screen time what you got a limit their screen time yeah it's we do live in it and but what's interesting about it is we gave them artificial sounds and they started mimicking them right away and we don't withhold food from them so they started showing spontaneous vocal learning and they were associating certain sounds with certain objects and then they started using them in ways that we see with very young children when they're first acquiring language we are not claiming language but it's very similar and this is what we're looking at now Franz can you claim having seen any very compelling evidence of language in primates well language is symbolic communication I'm not sure that dolphins have symbolic and I'm not sure that the Apes have it but but people try to teach it of course there's many attempts where they have tried to teach symbolic communication to the Apes like Koko and Kenzie and Wash U and they all have names that we all know I'm sort of pessimistic about it in the sense that initially in the 50s and 60s these studies took off and everyone was extremely impressed which was great because we humans we judge animal intelligence by the things that we are good at such such as tool use and language so it was great to stimulate the field but we also ran very soon in the limitations because basically when a chimpanzee uses sign language or say they're not saying much more than what they can say in the normal communication they say I want a banana or their I want to run with you or they have very simple wishes that they express that way and then you never get to a philosophical conversation with them which is which of us but people were hoping they were hoping we can understand them better when they tell us our their feelings or something like that that never happened so it was always rather limited as some of these efforts were also flawed in terms of designs some of them were better some we're poor so we had for example Coco the gorilla who would explain on YouTube that he was worried about climate change I don't think that's very likely I think that's probably humans who are inducing her to make certain gestures so I'm bit suspicious of some of these efforts I think that you know with with the studies that have been done with sign languages and some of the other studies Irene Pepperberg worked with an African Grey parrot for years and shown real breakthroughs in the capabilities for vocal learning and the animals can learn referential communication I think some of the things from so that you're saying about the limits may have a lot to do with the problems of the codes and our limitations and what we can teach it's hard to teach abstract things I think and I think it's easy if you can say oh I want to teach a code for getting a bowl or getting a ring or getting something but when you say how do we get into those kinds of things that we talk about as humans so a lot of these lip they may be thinking about things but how do we find out so yeah this I love this in the middle of like a Saturday night Sunday morning I'm writing scientists around the world and they're like yeah sure we'll give you our research so I love the you know the the sort of sharing character the scientists this was from Fabrice NOLA about Wales and it's similar clicking behavior to the Dolphins and these are sperm whales Diana these are sperm whales and sperm whales use flicks but they use them in different ways so so scientists are now discovering and they have for a while they produce sperm whales produced Coda's which are click patterns which we think are used for social communication but again we haven't decoded the meaning then they use clicks that are more regular like echolocation clicks that have been associated with diving deep and they increase as they're they're feeding on the bottom so we're pretty sure that's involved with prey capture but now there's some thought that perhaps some of these clicks and the Coda's can also produce can give animals information about identity and even location and/or activity so they're the loudest animals on the planet apparently and it's bone shattering I've heard that the echolocation is so extreme they can literally see inside your body from the echolocation so they really are reverberating off of your bones I mean the divers described it as alarming well they could be eyed when dolphins use echolocation they do get sort of as sonar image is what we think but what we feel I mean I've been in the water with dolphins and you'll feel it it yeah yeah it doesn't hurt but you really it's quite strong this is another wonderful this is so impressive that Roger Hanlon shared with me and his lab spot the octopus spot the octopus find Waldo it's really quite amazing it's not at all altered that's completely what they do now this is running it backwards and what happens with the octopus I should have be talking because Diana's more expert than I am is they have a decentralized brain so what's stunning is that more of their neurons are in their arms and so their arms have some kind of autonomy it is just a study came out last week as income do we have to see that again on the autonomy in the autonomy of the arms because they have an enormous amount of neurons outside of the brain so yes they have I think 600 million in the brain which is already very big sized brain but they have tons of them and arms that are spread and they have chromatophores in the body also millions of them that pick up these colours of the of the ocean and their skin is thinking well kin is thinking about it more than the it's not a centralized brain like they're making this decisions all the time to camouflage yeah they have like 9 they've nine brains they have the eight arms and then they have neurons and then in the in the brain itself the body so it's distributed now there are actually four layers that are producing cut these different color patterns it's fascinating I can't name all the layers but the top layer and the arms are the chromatophores and they're actually muscles that either dilator constrict and these the pigments open or close but they only have three pigments and there's a next layer that has many more pigments and that's more neural II mediated and then they can actually have they actually have muscles that create bumps in all sorts of textures so these guys can not only match their color around them but the texture and the forms but guess what their eyes in their eyes they're colorblind so there's so what do you mean by carbon so a little bit to how we look at animal intelligence it does we have always focused on language and tool used and the tool studies are also very old but animals do lots of things that we cannot do so for example you've released an insect in this room and you release a path and the path is capable of catching the insect which is a very complex task you ask any engineer to design a radar system for an airplane is very complicated the path can do that we are not impressed because we don't do the kind of stuff so we're not impressed necessarily but there's been another person necessarily by the path Allen fast yeah impressed but but science traditionally has not looked for these capacities and so the first time this happens was with the honeybee dance the waggle dance of the honeybee which which we are all very impressed by at the time but it was sort of all forgotten and then we started focusing on the language that's also Irene Pepperberg studies on the parrots and we and we focused so closely on what we are good at that we forgot about all these extra capacities that exist but there's tons of them well this was also very interesting because this species branched off from mammalian species a very long time ago so it right I mean you've described as Diana as non terrestrial intelligence and it's utterly different than the intelligence that evolved in mammals and almost unrecognisable as Franz as saying to us I mean this interesting this is this is an intelligent creature that's so alien from us I mean they have copper-based blood they can shoot ink out they can do all sorts of they have great predatory defenses I mean they're very vulnerable i boned up on this species anybody get this pun they're there in vertebrates today and it's um you know they're remarkable when you think about them I think when we think about the Dolphins - they're non terrestrial intelligences not extraterrestrial they're aquatic and dolphins and these animals have adapted to living in a totally aquatic environment it's clearly though all brains to some extent originated in aquatic environments and so while this was not on our branch right this is in to some extent we bring that evolutionary history with us onto land and it's just very fascinating that evolution tried different experiments with with neurons essentially in the growth of neurons this is my daughter and her eight-foot boa which we carried on metro-north in a pillow case to the horror of many passengers you were wondering what that was in the pillowcase so I show this also look at the delight on her face at the end it's really very wait for it wait for it I don't really think my eight foot boa fluffy is that conscious so what are we really talking about with consciousness we've sort of talked about emotion we've dismissed instinct we see that's not really valid anymore we have this sort of chemical responses and light responses of things like the cephalopods what do we really mean by saying an animal is conscious I mean fronds in your book you actually don't really get to it until the final chapter yeah yeah the consciousness is a term that was partly invented to set humans apart I think and that's why it's so ill defined so so it doesn't have a good definition and no one tells us how to measure it and then they say well only humans have consciousness and then if I don't know how to measure it I have no idea what they mean but if you bring it down to the most basic level consciousness would also be that you experience social has to do with sentience you experience feelings you experience the environment and an in that sense a snake or a fish clearly has some level of consciousness so they do experiments for example on crabs one experiment that was done you put crabs in the tank and you you shine a bright light on them they go into hiding you shock them into certain in certain places where they hide you shock them and very soon they learn to avoid these places which is proof that they have a pain experience now pain was one of these issues fish had no pain arthropods had no pain even human babies had no pain at some point you could do whatever you wanted with a human baby maybe not killing it but otherwise you could do basically everything so pain experiments on babies yeah believing that they could prove that they did not feel pain I know it's it's kind of shocking it's shocking and it's because they don't talk as soon as you can talk and say well that was very painful we believe that you have pain but the snake of course can not do that but but clearly all animals certainly animals with brains they have pain sensations so that level of consciousness is definitely there yeah and I think historically we've connected thinking or thought with language it's because if we can express it we can say yes it exists and that's been one of the big problems but I feel sorry she was just scolding my dog for offering itself as food okay to the new boa I mean what if consciousness is more widespread in the animal world than we thought what if our whole starting point has been wrong thinking we're the only conscious creatures what's that what if that's the norm and it's just distributed you know in different quantities or different degrees well this is exactly I mean I think the subtext of a lot of this conversation which is where we really need to get to which is what are we doing to animals you know and and what is our responsibility towards animals and I know Diana that you are very involved with the film The Cove which is a devastating film about the slaughter of dolphins and and so what is our responsibility to animals whether they're conscious or not do we really need to justify our behavior by arguing they feel no pain they have no consciousness their automata yeah it's a big issue I'm actually involved in animal welfare science more than animal rights I think there's a little bit of a difference and we share a lot of the same concerns but I think in the animal welfare approach we try to apply what we know about animals to better keep their care and making policy decisions I think that in if you take most people and say do you want me to cause pain and suffering to this animal they probably would say no that's in a perfect world but if it's a matter of eating a hamburger in front of you that looks really good and saying I'm never gonna kill another cow to get it how many people are going to give that up right now there's a movement to not do factory farming of the octopus because of cognitive work that's been done by several people those people who've done the work are pushing not to do this kind of factory farming and factory farming has terrible effects on animals from salmon to other creatures but it's what we we're doing as a species so that we can get some kind of food so will we give things up in the name of better welfare for these animals and I think that's the question Franz I know that you've talked about this also at the end of your book you didn't advocate for vegetarianism or you know extreme reactions but I'd love to hear your opinion on this because I know that your concern is about also animal welfare yeah for me the issue is how we treat animals is not so much whether we eat them or not but how we treat them and my solution to the problem would be transparency I feel there's a lot of stuff going on with animals that we never get to see in in for example the agricultural industry so what I would want to see is that we we have transparency in the sense that if you buy a piece of meat in the supermarket you can have a scan bar and you can see videos and photos of actually how this animal this specific animal by an independent agency not by the farmer how that animal is kept and then you can make informed decisions do I still want to eat that animal yes or no I think we probably need to go down to 50 percent of what we eat in terms of meat to improve the conditions and and hopefully in 15 years 20 years we will have all these alternatives coming up which are already coming up at this point so that maybe at some point we can do away with the whole operation because it's it's also ecologically a disaster all this intensive farming that's going on yes are there other animals that show interspecies love or just quite a bit of evidence for its it's mostly anecdotal of animals helping each other so for example in the situations we have sometimes let's say a humpback whale who helps seal against an orca that kind of a human swimmer against sharks or that kind of stories definitely exist no one is doing experiments on that is that because it's gonna be very tough to do an experiment like that but yeah we have a lot of evidence that these things may happen do you know what do you make of human beings affection for animals that we like to live with them is that strike you as odd I'm probably the worst person to ask because I was always a big animal lover when I can't be objective about this no I mean I think when you think about our dogs I mean we've selected dogs to sort of look cute to us you know and there's a recent paper that came out about all these muscles around dog eyes that are more expressive than what we find in wolf's eyes I mean we've chosen these animals that appeal to us but I think you know we have very more emotional creatures and I think when we see other animals around us that appeal to us we respond but not everybody loves other not everybody loves animals everyone in this room does well you guys are an exception thank you but there are many people that have fears of animals I know people they're terrified Birds they don't want to be near a dog often it comes from an early childhood experience I really want to have a chance to open this up to questions I'm quite sure that the audience has a lot of questions of their own and I'm also aware of how warm it is out there but right before we open up for questions please join me in thanking our guests [Applause] there should be a mic running around the room if you have a mic feel free to speak we can hardly see you so if you have a mic launch your question I the back here okay if that was loud Jenna I just want to springboard off your question about interspecies love has there been any experiments done an interspecies cooperation so that experiment you showed with the the box where could you have one elephant and one chimp that have to pull together I mean we do it right we have interspecies cooperation well there's all this there are lots of examples of symbiotic relationship and cooperation between dolphins and fishermen and multiple areas in the world where fishermen have learned that if they throw out their fishing nets the Dolphins will hurd the fish in and then they'll share the catch with them so that's that happens in several parts of the world and didn't Coco speaking of Coco the lowland gorilla took in a cat's Coco had a fondness for cats right and started to take care of them always good for the cats or know one of the cats run in the street and yeah okay okay another does anyone else have a mic got there yes I think it's easy to argue that the complexity of the human mind has accomplished some amazing things in our history sending humans to the moon reasoning relativity but I would argue that a majority of humans can't for five minutes calm their mind to be still fresh five minutes straight that's something that hasn't been accomplished a majority of people but I think it's like for lack of a better word trending but would you argue that the more complex the mind the easier it is or the harder it is to actually accomplish this and have you actually observed this in animal the social animals that you observed and how would you even conduct that experiment are you asking if the animals meditate yes okay I can't accomplish that state of being free of detached from stimulus and create stillness of the mind it's hard to say that there's always these people who take a picture of a squirrel in a tree looking at the sunset and they say there he's philosophizing or something I never know what to do with that because I'm not sure this squirrel is doing that so what goes on in their mind at resting state so to speak there's quite a bit of evidence that they dream but whether they focus on a certain problem in the head or no problem at all in the head we have no way of knowing maybe neuroscience one day is going to solve some of these issues because of course we can look for equivalence easy to say when humans think of this or that their brain activity is like this and then see if we can find that in other species but for the moment we don't have answers to this I think you also talked about the evolutionary advantage of being stupid that the brain is exhausting energetically and an interventionist in some sense in terms of survival instinct the brain is a fairly expensive or it's a very expensive organ uses a lot of energy also our brain and and our brain is three times bigger than a chimp brain it doesn't have any new parts though that people sometimes forget that there's there's no part in the human brain that you don't find in a monkey brain so we have basically a big monkey brain that's what we have and and it doesn't do probably it does it does more but it doesn't do different things it does more of the same I think sorry someone has I heard someone starting with the question yes I actually have two one is did the bonobos pass the mirror test and the other is what happened in the group when Mama died oh that's a great question you actually have amazing stories about their responses to death yeah so let's forget about the first part I may get to that but then what but the zoo did at the time that mama died is is something that zoos do now more and more fortunately is they opened up all the doors so that the rest of the colony is twenty five chimps had access to the body of mama which which which they do now in in certain zoos with certain species because we have more and more evidence of the strong response to the deaths of somebody and in the Arnim colony the male's showed little interest the male's initially tried to drag her around her body around and jumped on it and stuff like that which looked like reanimation attempts a bit like what we do in hospital sometimes reanimation and and it has been known from the field also that that there are sometimes very rough reactions to the body which is probably to see whether it's really the immobile the females were much more careful but the females also had their tests of the body like lifting up an arm and seeing a drop or listening to the mouse probably listening for breathing the females were much more protective of the body and and much more much more interested in the body of momma and we're very affected by it and usually what happens in chimpanzee colonies is that the chimps go completely silent which is an unusual condition for them and they sometimes don't eat for days and so they're very affected by the death of somebody and I always feel that the Apes for sure they have a very good understanding of death of others whether they know of themselves people always ask that do they have a sense of mortality whether they know that they themselves are gonna die we don't know so for example mama inter in her encounter with young from hope it's not clear that for her it was a farewell it's not clear that she knew that she was not gonna last so that is an uncertainty that we have certainly understand the deaths of somebody else that it's an irreversible condition yes if you have a mic get that mic moving how important or ingrained is remorse when discussing consciousness especially for predatory species remorse so you mean like when the lion kills the zebra exactly is there remorse I don't know how we would test that or how we would know that I don't know of any studies they've looked at that do you well for predators I would be surprised if there's remorse but for social relationships in primate groups yes so for example bonobos have this peculiar system where most of the reconciliations that we see are done by the dominant party so in most species it's done either equally between the two or the support and it does much more than the dominant in bonobos is almost always the ones who have been aggressive who reconcile afterwards it's an act of kindness and remorse it that looks fairly often like remorse so you may have let's say a male who attacks a female he bites her ten minutes later he comes back to her he picks up the foot or the toe even that he has bitten because he knows exactly where he has bitten he picks it up and he starts to inspect it and he will spend half an hour cleaning it and licking it and so on and and that always gives to me the impression that he regrets what he has done but between predators and prey I would be surprised if there is that kind of reaction let's take a couple more questions and then we all need to cool off there's obvious ethical and moral issues with factory farming the meat industry but a lot of these studies are conducted in zoos and is that in and of itself distressing to an animal like I find a zoo a very upsetting place to go like is a dolphin in an aquarium aware that it's enclosed in an aquarium is a chimp in a zoo aware that it's like kind of in jail yeah these are really hard questions so I think one of the things in zoos right now for so there are a lot of different kinds of zoos I mean there's oohs that are pretty horrible and there's some zoos that are doing really good work in terms of conservation and animal welfare I think that it's hard to know if an animal is happy in a zoo this idea about with emotions that we talked about and I think they're there right now it's a big issue I know at the National Aquarium where I was doing some work we decided that we no longer felt comfortable keeping dolphins in an aquarium it's been a long discussion with a lot of people and we're building the first dolphin sanctuary that was announced several years ago yeah and I I think it was a pretty courageous move on this on the with the CEO making that decision it's not a trivial thing to find a sanctuary believe it or not we have to find a place where the where the waters clean where they're not going to be hit by hurricanes that's no easy thing this day evade an age but I think the mentality of people in zoos has changed and there's a I used to be on the animal welfare committee of this adam ACA the americans do an aquarium association and it was vets and scientists and we used to talk about how big does an enclosure have to be for an animal of the size and often we'd say we have no idea you know so I think what's making some of the changes that are happening now is that there's a real rethinking in a lot of zoos that maybe they shouldn't be keeping elephants in captivity there are changes in thought not in all zoos but I think things are changing I I it's it's an area that I think has to change over the next we might be in the real cusp of where that was accepted and it's no longer accepted and we're living through that very dramatic change and there's a huge difference in animal observation and animal experimentation and Franz I know you also have opinions on this so yeah for chimpanzees it there's a big change because chimpanzees the chimpanzees I worked with at the Yerkes primate Center are all captive born because your case exists over 300 years so I'm not sure that they can compare their conditions with wild conditions they have no idea what it is but it is true that NIH the National Institutes of Health has decided I think it's four years ago that sympathies cannot be used for biomedical studies anymore and so they are not funding it anymore which basically even though they're not forbidding the use of chimpanzees it basically means that biomedical studies on teams have completely been phased out and I'm on the board of Chimp Haven already for twenty years or so Chimp Haven is the big sanctuary where we receive all extra laboratory chimps and release them on very large islands in Louisiana and so that has been going on for quite a while and now we are at the point that basically all invasive studies on chimpanzees have stopped now I've never been involved in invasive studies but of course I work I work with chimpanzees in captivity but even that work even the cognitive work that we do where we test them on computer screens or social behavior tests even that is largely disappearing so basically the knowledge we now have about the cognition of the chimpanzee actually at least the experimental knowledge comes from work that probably won't be repeated any more and then in the field the situation is really bad and in the field for the Apes the situation is very poor I don't know if you've heard that orangutangs for example in Indonesia and Borneo a hundred thousand orangutangs have disappeared in the last 20 years which is half the population of orangutangs in Borneo and so in the wild the situation is really poor so if you ask me for example do you want to be an orangutan in Borneo or do you want to be an orangutan the National Zoo I'm not sure I probably would prefer to be an orangutan International Zoo where I have veterinary care and food and I'm not shocked by the farmers so just who's you can look at the zoos as terrible places but the good zoos do good work and and there's a lot of species in tremendous trouble at the moment and I'm not saying that zoos are ideal settings for them but the zoo's helped with the the efforts to for example to protect orangutans in the wild and so it's it's a balancing act really look at it yeah I agree with France I worked at the Wildlife Conservation Society for many years and the they have a Congo exhibit for gorillas that many scientists who are out in the field working with the gorillas in the field say they wish they could bring their animals there because it's a safer Haven and there there is a remarkable they get remarkable care there so again I think it's really important not to group all zoos together there's some really great ones and there's some really horrible ones and as Franz was saying if the wild unfortunately is not the panacea if you're a dolphin out there or a whale your environment is getting really polluted if you're a dolphin you're likely gonna get killed if you're in the waters around Japan or a whale and then obviously we have to raise consciousness of again about getting global protection for these animals period it is a painful but ideal place for us to thank our guests for the conversation [Applause] Thank You Diana thank you from [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Pioneer Works

Views: 16,211

Keywords: zoology, evolutionary biology, the cove, science sandbox, sci con, scientific controversies, janna levin, pioneer works, Frans de Waal, Diana Reiss, primatologist, Capuchin Monkeys, ethologist, Chimpanzee Politics, chimpanzees, Animal Consciousness, animal awareness, animal consciousness philosophy, are animals self-aware, animal behavior, mama's last hug, frans de waal interview, diana reiss interview, diana reiss dolphins, The Dolphin in the Mirror, dolphins consciousness

Id: iR7wFPikuns

Length: 85min 11sec (5111 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020