Reading their minds

摘要

In "Beyond words", Carl Safina, of Stony Brook University, New York, hears about an alpha wolf that attacked and disabled a challenger in Yellowstone National Park, but then refused to kill it. The event sets him thinking about Nelson Mandela, magnanimity and the prestige of leaders who spare, rather than kill their rivals. In Amboseli National Park in Kenya he watches a female elephant faking oestrus in order to attract the company of males. He turns to considering the minds of animals: "It takes a lot of thinking", he writes, "to fake one's sexual state because you like the attention." The subtitle of "Beyond Words" is "What Animals Think and Feel" and not long ago, the very idea of animals as rational beings would have been dismissed as sentimental and wrong. In the earliest surviving zoological book, Aristotle said animals belong to a lower order than people because they lack reason. His opinion influenced Western attitudes for centuries. The medieval church thought animals had been put on Earth solely for human use. For much of the 20th century, behavioural scientists argued that whether animals had minds or not was irrelevant since minds were impossible to study and observable behaviour was the only thing that mattered.