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APRIL 26, 2016
INKY THE OCTOPUS AND THE UPSIDES OF
ANTHROPOMORPHISM
BY RACHEL RIEDERER
Inky the octopus, which recently escaped from the
National Aquarium of New Zealand.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NATIONAL AQUARIUM OF NEW
ZEALAND,
octopus named
hauled his basketball-sized body out of the tank
he shared with a companion at the National
Aquarium of New Zealand, heaved himself across the floor, and squeezed his gelatinous
‘mantle into a narrow drain leading to the Pacific Ocean. It was an escape story fit for a
Pixar film, and the Internet responded with corresponding glee. One Twitter user hailed
Inky as “the world’s greatest hero,” while another warned that
“we're about to be slaves to our new great leader, #Inky.” Comparisons to El Chapo and
“The Shawshank Redemption” were made. At Vice’s Motherboard, one writer even
E arlier this month, under the cover of night, an
nt
created a work of Inky fan fiction, imagining the cephalopod free but heartbroken at
being separated from his tank mate, Blotchy. “He felt the joy of'a mollusc reborn,” the
story goes, imagining the moment when Blotchy escapes to mect Inky in the ocean.
“They would live out their days in briny bliss free from the tank that bound them!”
Part of the fan of the Inky story, like that of the Pizza Rat or
the escaping llama duo before him, is indulging in a bit of knowing anthropomorphizing:
animals, they're just like us! In the case of octopuses, this pleasure is especially
pronounced, because the creatures’ great intelligence comes packaged in bodies so vastly
different from our own, How is it that an eight-tentacled sea alien can open jars and
recognize faces? Octopuses have been observed moving around the ocean floor carrying
cracked coconut shells, which they close around themselves as portable armor. They
exhibit sophisticated play behavior, blowing objects around in the water or even fiddling
with Legos.
Attributing human-like behaviors to animals is often thought of as unscientific, but in a
new book on animal behavior, “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals
Are2,” the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal argues that it is not, in fact,
anthropomorphizing but its opposite—an unwillingness to recognize the human-like
traits of animals, or what he terms “anthropodenial”—that has too often characterized
our attitudes toward other species. Analyzing decades of animal-cognition research, heshows that, with the exception of full-fledged language, animals have been shown to
exhibit many of the key behaviors that were thought to distinguish humans from
animals: the ability to consider the past and the future, to demonstrate empathy and self
awareness, and to anticipate the motives of others. Crows can recognize human faces and
even hold grudges against the biologists who capture and tag them; orcas use highly
codrdinated synchronized swimming to push seals off ice floes and into the water; a sea
lion at a Santa Cruz lab learned to associate symbols, like a fledgling math student,
figuring out that if A goes with B, and B goes with C, then A and C belong together as
well. Animals, in other words, are far smarter than we've been giving them credit for.
Anthropodenial, in de Waal’s view, is a relatively modern phenomenon. In medieval and
carly modern Europe, the animal mind was considered sophisticated enough that errant
dogs, pigs, and other domesticated animals could be put on trial for crimes. In one
famous case, in fifteenth-century France, a sow and several piglets were charged with
killing a child; the piglets were acquitted, but their mother was sentenced to death and
hanged. As recently as the nineteenth century, many naturalists sought out the
connections between human and animal intelligence. “The difference in mind between
man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind,” one
Victorian-era naturalist wrote. And this was no pig-prosecuting crackpot; it was Charles
Darwin.
The advent of behaviorism, in the twentieth century, with its Pavlovian emphasis on
conditioning through reward and punishment, shifted public views of animal intelligence.
“Tove the history of my field,” de Waal writes in his book’s prologue, but, for most of the
twentieth century, “the two dominant schools of thought viewed animals as either
stimulus
response machines or robots endowed with useful instincts.” Anyone who
thought about animals having internal lives was dismissed as “anthropomorphic,
romantic, or unscientific.” It is perhaps no accident that this shift occurred during the
same century that saw humans blazing through animal habitats at unprecedented rates,
polluting the land and water, and developing farming methods remarkable in their
cruelty and efficiency. Thinking of animals as insentient automatons may make it easier
to stomach breeding chickens so breast-heavy that they can't stand up, or keeping social
animals, such as orcas, isolated in tiny corrals.
Happily, de Waal believes that we are starting to emerge from this dark period and
learning to think of animal intelligence on a continuum with that of humans. “The times
are changing,” he writes. “Everyone must have noticed the avalanche of knowledge
emerging over the last few decades, diffused over the Internet. Almost every week there
is a new finding regarding sophisticated animal cognition.” The most effective tests of
animal intelligence, he argues, are designed according to a species’ particular traits and
skills. Squirrels may fail at memory tasks that are important to humans, but, whereas we
need apps to help us find our misplaced cell phones, they can remember where they've
hidden tiny caches of nuts. In her 2015 book “The Soul of an Octopus,” the naturalist SyMontgomery points out that if an octopus were to measure human intelligence, it might
test us on the number of color patterns we can produce on the skin of our (pathetically
few) appendages. Secing us flunk the test, it might conclude that we are pretty stupid.
In the course of her investigations, Montgomery spent years visiting the octopuses of the
New England Aquarium and learned to scuba dive so that she could observe their
cousins in the wild. In the process, she became positively smitten. She writes of being
dazzled by the animals’ strength and strange beauty; she wants to commune with them,
longs for them to recognize her when she visits their tanks, and lets them “taste” her skin
with their chemoreceptive suckers. The octopuses she meets and learns about have
personalities—they are shy or playful, cantankerous or sneaky.’ They crave attention; they
play with toys; their skin, when petted, “relaxes into a caress.” One was discovered to be
creeping out of his tank in the night to hunt and eat the flounder in a nearby tank, only
to return home by morning. At times, Montgomery seems far out in her identification
with the creatures: “If I have a soul—and I think I do—an octopus has a soul too,” she
writes. But, like de Waal, she’s more concerned about the consequences of
anthropodenial. “It’s easy to project our own feelings onto animals—and that’s a
mistake,” she told me, “but it’s a worse mistake to think that we are up on some kind of
pedestal and that animals car‘t also think, feel, and know.”
(One can remain agnostic on the question of cephalopod souls and still feel awed by the
wherewithal involved in Inky’s jailbreak. De Waal, who directs the Yerkes National
Primate Research Center, at Emory University, told me that he remains “a bit skeptical”
of the story's happy ending. Tes not uncommon for an octopus to escape from its tank.
But to figure out how to make it to a drain leading to the ocean? “That would be
wonderfully intelligent, if he knew what he was doing,” he said. He wonders if perhaps
aquarium spin-doctors are being overly optimistic in assuming that Inky made it back to
the ocean. But he is aware of the power of viral stories like Inky’s to fuel appreciation of
animal intelligence. More than a decade ago, he and his team ran an experiment to test
whether capuchin monkeys can experience envy. When the researchers rewarded their
subjects with either cucumbers (a well-liked monkey food) or grapes (an even better one),
the animals given cucumbers shricked and raged at seeing their peers get the superior
treat. The study was published in Nafure in 2003, presenting the team’s carefully collected
and compiled data. But what really convinced people of the findings was a video of the
monkey subjects, produced ten years later. “It's just a one-minute clip, but it shows the
emotions, and the body language, and people are much more convinced by the emotions
than by the actual data,” de Waal said. Just one of the oddities of our particular kind of
animal mind.
Watch: Tens of thousands of feral and stray cats roam the streets of New York.Rachel Riederer is an editor at Guernica.