What Your Pet Is Thinking

By Sharon Begley
The Wall Street Journal

From the day they brought her home, the D’Avellas’ black-and-white mutt loathed ringing phones. At the first trill, Jay Dee would bolt from the room and howl until someone picked up. But within a few weeks, the D’Avellas began missing calls. When the phone rang, their friends later told them, someone would pick up and then the line would go dead.

One evening, Aida D’Avella solved the mystery. Sitting in the family room of her Newark, N.J., home, she got up as the phone rang, but the dog beat her to it. Jay Dee lifted the receiver off the hook in her jaws, replaced it and returned contentedly to her spot on the rug.

Just about every pet lover has a story about the astonishing intelligence of his cat, dog, bird, ferret or chinchilla. Ethologists, the scientists who study animal behavior, have amassed thousands of studies showing animals can count, understand cause and effect, form abstractions, solve problems, use tools and even deceive.

But lately scientists have gone a step further: Researchers are providing tantalizing evidence that animals not only learn and remember but also might have consciousness — in other words, they might be capable of thinking about their thoughts and knowing that they know.

In the past few years, top journals have published reports on self-awareness in dolphins and wild chimps whose different nut-cracking “technologies” constitute unique cultures. Others argue that rats have a sense of fun, mice show empathy for cage-mates, and scrub jays are capable of “mental time travel” that enables them to remember where they stashed worms and seeds.

While researchers have yet to attain the field’s holy grail — proving animals are self-aware — the findings already have broad implications.

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