Animal Learning & Cognition: An Introduction

This textbook by Dr. Pearce is three steps up from Dr. Wynne's Animal Cognition. The latter scholar tries to be sarcastic and cute, and reflects an ultra-sceptical view on animal emotion and intelligence. Some books in this field are very technical and frankly difficult for nonspecialists. I happen to be a college educated reader, but one with no background in animal psychology or zoology. Yet I found the book very readable with the exception of a few discussions. I have been very disappointed with books in this field that don't attempt to be accessible to nonexperts, or which reflect speciesism - a bigoted view of nonhuman life-forms. Pearce wisely points out that we should not assume that species that look like humans are smarter than other species. Octopi - which are related to slugs - are very bright. And there is mounting evidence that crows can do higher order thinking! Check out the "Smart Crow" videos over at Youtube. It is difficult to watch these videos of untrained crows using wires to pull basckets of food out of glass tubes without recognizing their actions as intelligent. You will see the crow carefully inspect the tube and try to penetrate it with his tool. Once he fails he sticks the wire in the open top of the tube and manipulates it until he pulls out the bascket of food. It looks very deliberate. Dr. Pearce wants to say that the birds learned this by trial and error (which does indicate intelligence). However, he is unwilling to admit that the crows are reasoning because their is inadequate evidence for this ability in animals. His reasoning seems circular, since Dr. Pearce is looking at the evidence that demonstrates what he sees no evidence for. Check out the video for yourself. Throughout this book (and most books in this field)we see scientists consistently providing "plausible" alternative explanations to experiments that suggest a human-like intelligence in other species. Which really begs the question: What type of evidence do we need to prove that we share the planet with other intelligent beings? All the scientific weaving and dodging is disturbing to me, and, no, I'm not a vegan, nor an animal rights activist. I think this is "speciesism" in action. We test cosmetics and drugs on these animals, and we eat them for lunch. So really we don't want to believe that these other beings have souls, too. If I could I would give the book 4.5 stars for this defect, but it really is a wonderful source of up to date information - so 5 stars. I was disappointed by the lack of information on mathematical abilities in animals, especially birds. There is now evidence that chickens can be taught to count, but this study was not cited. The author may not know much about how animals handle math. There is a famous bird show in my area, staring birds that can multiply and do addition, but the author only considers peer-reviewed laboratory experiments. Anecdotes are not considered either, nor homevideo footage. There is extensive footage