In Amboseli National Park, in Kenya, the British ethologist Karen McComb studied elephant reactions to different human ethnic groups. The cattle-herding Maasai sometimes spear elephants in order to show their virility or to gain access to grazing grounds and water holes. Understandably, elephants flee the Maasai, who approach them in their characteristic red ochre robes, but they don’t avoid other people on foot.5 How do they recognize the Maasai? Instead of focusing on their color vision, McComb explored what is perhaps the elephant’s keenest sense: sound. She contrasted the Maasai with the Kamba people, who live in the same area but rarely interfere with elephants. From a concealed loudspeaker, McComb played human voices saying a single phrase in the language of either the Maasai or the Kamba: “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming.” It is hard to imagine that the precise words mattered, but the investigators compared the elephants’ reaction to the voices of adult men, adult women, and boys.
Herds retreated and “bunched” together (forming a tight circle with calves in the middle) more often after playbacks of Maasai than of Kamba voices. Maasai male voices triggered more defensive reactions than those of Maasai women and boys. Even after the natural voices were acoustically transformed so as to make male voices sound more female, and vice versa, the outcome remained the same. The elephants were especially vigilant upon hearing the resynthesized voices of Maasai men. This was surprising because the pitch of these voices had now the opposite gender’s qualities. Possibly the elephants identified gender by other characteristics, such as the fact that female voices tend to be more melodious and “breathy” than those of males.6
Experience played a role, because herds led by older matriarchs were more discriminating. The same difference was found in another study in which lion roaring was played from a speaker. Older matriarchs would charge the speaker, which is quite different from their hasty retreat from Maasai voices.7 Aggressive mobbing of men carrying spears is unlikely to pay off, yet driving off lions is something elephants are good at. Despite their size, these animals face other dangers, including very small ones, such as stinging bees. Elephants are vulnerable to stings around the eyes and up their trunks, and young elephants lack a thick enough skin to protect themselves against a mass attack. Elephants give deep rumbles as an alarm to both humans and bees, but the two sounds must differ because playbacks induce quite different responses. Upon hearing the bee-rumble from a speaker, for example, elephants flee with head-shaking movements that would knock insects away, a reaction not shown to the human-rumble.8
In short, elephants make sophisticated distinctions regarding potential enemies to the point that they classify our own species based on language, age, and gender. How they do so is not entirely clear, but studies like these are beginning to scratch the surface of one of the most enigmatic minds on the planet.
The Magpie in the Mirror
The ability to recognize oneself in the mirror is often viewed in absolute terms. According to Gallup, the pioneer of this field, a species either passes the mirror mark test and is self-aware, or it doesn’t and isn’t.9 Very few species do. For the longest time, only humans and the great apes passed, and not even all those. Gorillas used to flunk the mark test, leading to theories about why the poor things might have lost their self-awareness.10
Evolutionary science, however, is uncomfortable with black-and-white distinctions. It is hard to imagine that among any set of related species, some are self-aware whereas others, for lack of a better term, remain unaware. Every animal needs to set its body apart from its surroundings and to have a sense of agency (awareness that it controls its own actions).11 You wouldn’t want to be a monkey up in a tree without awareness of how your own body will impact a lower branch on which you intend to land. And you wouldn’t want to engage in rough-and-tumble play with a fellow monkey, with all your combined arms, legs, and tails intertwined, while stupidly gnawing on your own foot or tail! Monkeys never make this mistake and gnaw exclusively on their partner’s foot or tail in such a tangle. They have a well-developed body ownership and self-other distinction.
In fact, experiments on the sense of agency show that species without mirror self-recognition are very well capable of distinguishing their own actions from those produced by others. Tested in front of a computer screen, they have no trouble telling the difference between a cursor that they themselves control with a joystick and a cursor that moves by itself.12 Self-agency is part of every action that an animal—any animal—undertakes. In addition, some species may possess their own unusual kind of self-recognition, such as bats and dolphins that pick out the echoes of their own vocalizations from among the sounds made by others.
Cognitive psychology doesn’t like absolute differences either, but for a different reason. The problem with the mirror test was that it introduced the wrong absolute difference. Instead of sharply dividing humans from all other animals—which, as we have seen, is a staple of the field—Gallup’s mirror test moved the Rubicon slightly to annex a few more species. Lumping humans in with the apes so as to elevate the Hominoids, as a group, to a different mental level than the rest of the animal kingdom, didn’t go over well. It diluted humanity’s special status. Still today, claims about self-awareness outside our own species cause consternation, and debates about mirror responses turn acrimonious. Moreover, many specialists have felt the need to conduct mirror tests on the animals in their care, usually with disappointing results. These debates have led me to the sarcastic conclusion that mirror self-recognition is considered a big deal only by scientists working on the handful of species capable of it, whereas all others poo-poo the phenomenon.
Since I study animals that both do and don’t recognize themselves in the mirror, and have a high opinion of them all, I feel torn. I do think that spontaneous self-recognition means something. It may signal a stronger self-identity, such as is also reflected in perspective taking and targeted helping. These capacities are most marked in animals that pass the mirror test as well as in children who have reached the age, around two, when they do. This is also the age when they can’t stop referring to themselves, as in “Mama, look at me!” Their sharpened self-other distinction is said to help them adopt another’s viewpoint.13 Still, I can’t believe that a sense of self is absent either in other species or in younger children. Rather obviously, animals that fail to link their mirror image to their own body vary greatly in what they understand. Small songbirds and fighting fish, for example, never get over their mirror image and keep courting or attacking it. During the spring, when they are most territorial, tits and bluebirds will respond this way to the sideview mirror of a car and stop their hostilities only when the car drives off. This is absolutely not what monkeys do, nor many other animals. We would not be able to have mirrors in our homes if cats and dogs reacted the same way. These animals may not recognize themselves, but they are also not totally baffled by the mirror, at least not for long. They learn to ignore their reflection.