Conclusion: Old Ideas and the Science of Animal Folklore

Ideas about animals seem to float, like the Crow's food reward, atop a tide of cultural representations of animals. Recently, some folklorists have argued that—in both science and folklore—this appears to be a moment when the tides are coming in toward the idea that humans and animals are very much alike and away from the idea of human uniqueness, of recognizable borders between animals and humans.¹ That very well may be true, but even if we are living in a time when the tides are changing, we conclude this special issue where we began—reaching out from a flood of anthropomorphized behaviors, metaphors, and narratives in an attempt to snag the shirt sleeves of involved humanists and social scientists riding the waves. If we can grab your attention, we offer a warning: Be wary, look skeptically toward the recent trends in the scientific study of animal cognition that suggest it is time to welcome, with open arms, nonhuman animals into our comfortable anthropocentric analyses. As the science-minded folklorist Jay Mechling espouses, the border between human and nonhuman animals is "every bit as arbitrary and, hence, as cultural as those normally the focus of folklorists' attention" (1989, 312).² For our part, we remain dubious that this tide—this most recent redrawing of the borderline, this animal turn—has much, if anything, to do with animals.

Like the animals who appear in fables, contemporary experiments in the Aesop's Fable Paradigm only confirm, once again, humans' perennial interest in other animals. We have looked closely at one genre of traditional narrative, the fable. We have considered one story from within that genre, the Crow and the Pitcher. We have focused on scientific and folkloric representations of a single animal, the crow. We have done all this in order to zoom in on the problems that surround recent assertions that crows possess a higher-order cognitive ability to comprehend and to act in accordance with a theory-like understanding of water displacement. Even if many of our readers still believe that crows may understand the physics of water, we hope that our tempered interpretations of the Aesop's Fable experiments demonstrate how maddeningly puzzling work in animal cognition can be. For humanists and social scientists wanting to make claims in nonscientific disciplines that experimentation with animals and the science of animal behavior have proven the humanness of nonhuman animals, we suggest truly opening that can of worms by perusing the index in the Appendix. Then, consider seriously each and every one of the hundreds (or thousands) of studies that present critical ambiguities similar to those inherent in the Aesop's Fable Paradigm. Overwhelmed readers may soon find themselves asking, "What do we really want from animals?" After all, tides come in, and tides go out, time and time again …

I will conclude by quoting a remark by the illustrious Humboldt. "The muleteers in S. America say, 'I will not give you the mule whose step is easiest, but la mas racional,—the one that reasons best;'" and as he adds, "this popular expression, dictated by long experience, combats the system of animated machines, better perhaps than all the arguments of speculative philosophy." Nevertheless some writers even yet deny that the higher animals possess a trace of reason; and they endeavor to explain away, by what appears to be mere verbiage, all such facts as those above given.

—Charles Darwin (1871, 456)

If we find a dog or a monkey exhibiting marked expressions of affection, sympathy, jealousy, rage, &c., few persons are skeptical enough to doubt that the complete analogy which these expressions afford with those which are manifested by man, sufficiently prove the existence of mental states analogous to those in man of which these expressions are the outward and visible signs.

—Georges Romanes (1878, 8)

It is an old belief that animals, and even plants, talk to each other, and that men can freely understand and answer them. But this belief, born of that primitive communism which makes the whole world kin, is gradually...