Psychology in Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think

In the animal kingdom, life is often labeled as a game of survival of the fittest; fend for yourself; kill or be killed. In popular culture wild animals are often given a persona of savage, sub-par intelligence. They are often disregarded as lacking the ability to process more complex thoughts or being “simple-minded”. In all actuality more complex thought and mental activity are necessary for survival. An animal’s actions are not necessarily inherent from birth. Rather they are learned behaviors, developed through the guidance and support of many different factors, both internal and external. Displays of the animal learning process are observed on a daily basis in all living creatures, ranging from your childhood pet hamster to the wild lions of Africa’s safari plains and even to human beings. In his book Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think Marc D. Hauser discusses the fundamentals of the animal learning process. He displays that the practice and principle of learning knows no boundaries between species or animal form, but does hold slight to significant variation in method.

In his reflection of the Japanese macaque’s methods of using ocean water to more easily sift sand from wheat, making it far more edible, Hauser attempts to explain the various ways in which an animal like the macaque could learn this kind of behavior. The origin for this skill may be explained by many primary methods, as the first of her species to do this may have stumbled upon it in one of many different ways. One such explanation is that by coincidence the macaque saw a bunch of wheat in the ocean, decided to pick it up and eat it, discovering there was no sand present. In this situation, Hauser equates that deductive reasoning led to knowledge of being able to wash the sand from the wheat (Hauser 137). I slightly disagree however and believe it is more a display of inductive reasoning based on the scenario and discovery made. Inductive reasoning makes more sense in this situation...