Wild Minds What Animals Really Think : A Museum Exhibit at the New York Hall of Science, December 2011

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1 This article was downloaded by: [Dr Kenneth Shapiro] On: 09 June 2015, At: 10:40 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Wild Minds What Animals Really Think : A Museum Exhibit at the New York Hall of Science, December 2011 Alexandra Horowitz a a Barnard College Published online: 28 Jun To cite this article: Alexandra Horowitz (2012) Wild Minds What Animals Really Think : A Museum Exhibit at the New York Hall of Science, December 2011, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, 15:3, , DOI: / To link to this article: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content ) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

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3 JOURNAL OF APPLIED ANIMAL WELFARE SCIENCE, 15: , 2012 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: print/ online DOI: / Wild Minds What Animals Really Think : A Museum Exhibit at the New York Hall of Science, December 2011 Of the sciences, behavioral science might seem to be one of the most publicfriendly. Although it may boggle the mind to try to imagine a world created of invisible, interwoven strings or even to understand how the earth exerts a force on our bodies, it is not hard to understand what the behavioral scientist is doing. After all, when people interact with one other, they are constantly reading behavior to gauge reactions, emotions, and understanding. So it might seem straightforward to develop a museum exhibit of research into the study of the behavior and cognition of nonhuman animals. As a visit to the exhibit Wild Minds What Animals Really Think made clear, however, it is far from simple. Wild Minds is a National Science Foundation-funded project developed in collaboration with the New York Hall of Science and is scheduled to travel from New York to other science centers and zoos over the next two years. The exhibit s design was informed by eminent scientists in the fields of animal behavior and cognition. It is geared to engage families with young children. So I packed up my family and young child and headed to Queens. The exhibit is a modest-size array of stations featuring play-on-demand video and, occasionally, an interactive component. Each station highlights an interesting nonhuman animal ability; most give the results of single experiments or behavior ambassador examples, let s call them, after the display animals in zoos who are taken to stand in for the whole species. They range from the lyrebird s incredible mimicry of the sounds of his environment, from the calls of other species to the shutter of a tourist s camera, to the New Caledonian crow s toolmaking solution to the problem of a desirable bit of meat stuck in a deep tube, to chimpanzees in captivity providing an incredible demonstration of eidetic memory for the location of numbers briefly flashed on a computer screen. The exhibit is a veritable Best in Show of animals abilities. 294

4 REVIEW SECTION 295 Even for someone already familiar with all of these examples, the displayed animals succeed in provoking wonder and awe. Video of novel dolphin behavior, in particular, is impressive on its face. But in a culture where animal cognition research is regularly featured on nature shows on television and where 10 million people have viewed a clip of the lyrebird s call on YouTube, what can a museum exhibit contribute that goes beyond showing and leads the visitor toward a change of mind-set? How can the visitor be helped to translate interest in the animals behavior to an interest in animal welfare? One possibility is to create not just an exhibit of the animals performance but also a way to interact with the animals or with the display: to personalize the act. Here the Wild Minds exhibit is largely disappointing. After watching the video of a crow bend a wire to lift a basket containing the elusive edible, museum goers can only gaze at the wire, basket, and tube placed safely behind Plexiglas next to the video. The chimpanzee station is more successful; it gives visitors the chance to compare their own performance with that of their Great Ape cousins. The comparison is stark, but what the exhibit does not say is that it is not a fair match: the chimps were well practiced at this task. A station inviting visitors to guess the context of various dog barks reproducing an experiment that asked human participants to do the same was frustrating: most people get the meanings wrong. However, that was the case in the original experiment, too (Pongrácz, Molnár, Miklósi, & Csányi, 2005). Although participants categorized the barks correctly at rates greater than chance, for some categories ( walk or ball request), they guessed right less than 30% of the time. This makes it a strange choice to reproduce in a setting where the only feedback visitors get is whether they are right or wrong on each guess. When I visited, two elementary-school children wandered away from the exhibit and, instead, went to gaze at a nearby aquarium containing a single, motionless lizard. Their distraction is not a condemnation of the exhibit, but it is an indication of what captures the young imagination: life, movement, and the chance of a connection. An animal, even in a cage, provokes that; a passive video is less successful. There are two other reasons an exhibit that does not break out of the mold of classroom teaching and video viewing may feel unsatisfying. First, visitors arrive at the exhibit with their own understanding of what animals can do. Wrought from television shows or their own exposure to animals in the wild and domesticated, humans are ready to assert understanding of a species based on limited exposure. This makes it difficult to understand what the behavioral scientist is doing, which is to ignore all of that nondata and start building an understanding of the species from the ground up. Second, the animal tests reproduced in this exhibit emerge from a context that is opaque for the viewer: Why is the bird asked to get meat out of a tube? Why do we care about kinds of

5 296 REVIEW SECTION barks? However, that context is critical to understanding what exactly is being tested and what exactly can be concluded from an animal s performance. Finally, the overarching theme of the exhibit what animals really think does not strike me as helpful. I do not believe there is unanimity within the field about what thinking even means. So to present it as a clear line here no, the spider is not thinking, one station declares is oddly reductionist. Despite or perhaps because of increased public familiarity with animal behavior, mounting an exhibit that provokes visitors to think differently about animals is a formidable challenge. It is a challenge not yet satisfyingly met. REFERENCE Alexandra Horowitz Barnard College Pongrácz, P., Molnár, C., Miklósi, Á., & Csányi, V. (2005). Human listeners are able to classify dog (Canis familiaris) barks recorded in different situations. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119,