The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Three hacks

The experimenters were trying to enliven the lives of zoo animals while simultaneously gathering data. As often happens, not all the data they gathered was in the categories expected.

As Hal Markowitz recounts in Behavioral Enrichment in the Zoo, date (1981), he was trying to set up a game for mandrills (Papio sphinx) in a Hawaiian zoo. It was a button-pushing game. Fast reflexes won. The goal for the mandrill was to push a lighted button on a console before a zoo visitor could push the button on a matching console on the other side of the barrier. This game had been a big success with Blue, a mandrill in another zoo. Blue was fast, he knew it, and he enjoyed proving it.

But the arrival of mandrills at the zoo was delayed, and Markowitz was asked to adapt the equipment for spider monkeys (Ateles ater). Spider monkeys spend most of their lives up in trees. Their hands are less well suited to pushing buttons. (That's why your spider monkey friends never text you.)

Markowitz's team hung a rope next to the apparatus, so a spider monkey climbing on the rope could reach a hand over to push the button. Only one spider monkey was interested, and her technique was to dangle, and push the button with her nose. She was fast enough to beat lots of hand-using humans.
  
At the Portland Zoo, another experimenter decided to study “ratio strain” in camels. Since camels have no hands, it was thought in this case that the nose was the appropriate thing for the animals to use. When a panel lit up, camels were to push it with their nose to get a delicious pellet. (No competition with visitors was involved.)

The idea was to see how seldom you could reward the camel before you reached “ratio strain,” the point at which the animal stops responding so often or at all, and perhaps shows “an increase in emotional behavior.” If an animal will push a button if it's rewarded every other time, what if it's only rewarded one time in ten? One time in a hundred? In other words, unseen powers move the goal posts, and the players get visibly peeved. 

The camel Adolph monopolized the equipment. As the ratio became less favorable, Adolph devised a new tactic. He'd stick out his chin   and vibrate it rapidly, pushing the button with great frequency. With this fast fighting technique he was willing to play even when he got a pellet only once for every 150 chin wiggles.

Markowitz wanted to make an apparatus that could be used by all kinds of animals. All they had to do was touch one of two steel plates situated below two lights. “I envisioned that snakes could sidle up alongside the detector and trigger it off, that elephants might choose to touch it with their trunk or rub against it with one of their legs, and so forth.”

The first player was to be Gabriel, a charming young elephant living in the children's zoo. Perhaps my predictable narrative method has tipped you off that things did not go as expected. Gabriel solved the  problem by squirting water from his trunk between the response panels. This shorted them out electrically, “so that a response on either side paid off.”
 
They tried to prevent this by emptying Gabriel's water trough before the experimental session. Then long before the session. Then long, long before the session. But crafty Gabriel stored water in his trunk. No matter how long they kept the trough dry, he was always ready to tamper with the equipment.

So much for the Universal Device.

 

Cool hammer. Too bad I'm not a nail.

A 2008 New Yorker story by Margaret Talbot on Irene Pepperberg's work with parrots and language made brief mention of unsuccessful work with mynahs and language. This was to explain why Pepperberg didn't train her eloquent parrot Alex with classic behaviorist methods of operant conditioning. I recognized the reference.

While reading about animal communication for Becoming A Tiger I ran across a long article called “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird.” (1967.) Experimental psychologists Joseph Grosslight and Wesley Zaynor had a theory that babies talk earlier if you pick them up when they cry. They speculated that by thus rewarding babies, you create a “noisy organism.” The noisy baby learns to attach meaning to noises later – but sooner than a quiet baby.

They couldn't experiment with babies. They went with talking birds. Mynahs – great choice! (Gracula species.) Easy to buy (then), easy to feed, can't bite your finger off, cheap. Definitely noisy organisms. They started the Mynah Bird Project. They scheduled a report called “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird and Implications for Man.”

The paper makes it clear that they understood that babies eventually learn language and mynahs don't. They say it several ways so no one thinks they're stupid or anthropomorphic. My favorite way they say it: “there is a complete absence of zoosemiotic considerations.” We get it, guys. You're not zoosemiotes.

(Zoosemiotics seems to be the study of signs or symbols in animal communication. You know, meaning. Can't have that.)

In the 1960s operant conditioning was new. It seemed as if, using this powerful system of rewards and punishments – you could get any animal to do anything. You could teach a rat to push a lever, a pigeon to peck when it saw the word “PECK,” a chicken to dance. (Okay, teach a chicken to “dance.” These are academics. It's a chicken. How well did you expect it to dance?)

Grosslight and Zaynor would use operant conditioning to create a bird equivalent of noisy babies. They viewed a mynah saying “Hello!” as “motor behavior not wholly unlike the classical operant bar-press of the rat in a Skinner box.” But, they reported in the plaintive 1967, “Verbal Behavior and the Mynah Bird,” that they had taken “and Implications for Man” out of the title due to “adversity.”

What adversity? Uncooperative mynahs. The researchers expected great results by putting each mynah in a sound-proof chamber and playing a recorded phrase which the bird would get food rewards for repeating. Isolation in sound-proof chamber = no chance of hearing other noises. Recording = identical stimulus each time. Rewards for repeating = according to operant conditioning principles, rewarding behavior increases the frequency of the behavior. Voila! Superior talking birds!

But instead of repeating the phrase, the mynah would stay mute, beak shut. Finally the researchers would give up and put the bird back in the aviary – and then the mynah would say it. Or the bird in the chamber would say the phrase once and never again.

The researchers were also bewildered by the daily “jungle hour,” when mynahs vocalized without food rewards. They screeched, cackled, hooted, whistled, clicked, and hollered—why?

Their failure to produce talkers led Grosslight and Zaynor to confess “we do not know the motivational or controlling stimuli for the emission of vocal or verbal behavior in the mynah.” They could not answer the question, “why does the mynah bother to talk at all?” (Some scientists complain researchers don't publish negative results often enough. Maybe they're afraid people like me would mock them. At least I didn't call them zoosemiotes.)

This doesn't mean operant conditioning doesn't work. It means the researchers didn't understand  mynahs. It didn't occur to them that being trapped in a soundproof chamber hearing repetitive tapes is already punishment for a mynah. They assumed that food is the only reward an animal cares for.

Nowhere do Grosslight and Zaynor say a harsh word about mynahs. They never blame the birds for the failure of their experimental vision. Which would be easy, because mynahs can be jerks.

I knew a pet store mynah who spoke dozens of phrases, which were scrawled on a card on the front of his cage. New customers would try the top few phrases on the card. “Hi there!” they would read, “I’m a  pretty bird!” The mynah would put its head on one side and stare out of one eye. “Hello! I’m a pretty bird! How are you?” the visitors would try. The mynah would stare out of the other eye. “Hello! Pretty bird! What’s your name?”

Silence.

As they turned away, the mynah would sneer, “You're stupid!”

He rolled the r – 'Yerrrrrr stupid!”-- in a way that suggested he had once lived around a ten-year-old boy.

So one of Grosslight and Zaynor's few successes makes sense. With food rewards they could increase the frequency with which the mynah Charlie said “I talk!” They could decrease the frequency with which Charlie said, “Ah shut up!” But they could not decrease it to zero.

It's enough to make you zoosemiotic.