Aesop's Fable in Animal Behavior Study [culture]

[frameacloud]

Trigger warnings for this article: wild birds in captivity. Work-safe.

In fables, animals speak, do clever things, and otherwise behave like humans so that we humans may more easily see ourselves.  We take for granted that fables are teaching-tales, not to be taken as literal facts.  The animals do fanciful, imaginary things.  However, there seem to be some exceptions where the stories could have been based on observation of real animals.  There is a curious case with the fable of the Crow and the Pitcher.  It’s included in Æsop’s Fables, a collection of ancient Greek moral tales.  I’ve been told that an identical story is in the Pancha-Tantra (“Five Chapters”), an Indian book of fables.  The fable goes like this:

“A thirsty Crow found a Pitcher with some water in it, but so little was there that, try as she might, she could not reach it with her beak, and it seemed as though she would die of thirst within sight of the remedy.  At last she hit upon a clever plan.  She began dropping pebbles into the Pitcher, and with each pebble the water rose a little higher until at last it reached the brim, and the knowing bird was enabled to quench her thirst.  Necessity is the mother of invention.”¹

            Is this anthropomorphism (interpreting animals as human-like, as is characteristic of fables), or could this be something that real animals do?  Usually the events in fables are clearly imaginary, but this one is to be wondered about.  We are beginning to understand the remarkable intelligence found in crows and other members of the corvid family.

            A recent study in animal intelligence resembled the fable.²  Four rooks (crow-like corvids) were presented with this scenario: they were each given a vial, containing a little water, with a worm floating on top as bait.  Then they were given stones.  The clever rooks were able to solve the problem quickly and intuitively.  As reported in Science Daily, “Two of the birds were successful on their first try to raise the height of the water to a level at which the worm floating on top could be reached whilst the other two birds needed a second try.  […R]ather than attempting to reach the worm after each stone was dropped, they apparently estimated the number needed from the outset and waited until the appropriate water level was reached before dipping their beaks into the tube.”  The test was repeated with variations, each revealing a little more of what the rooks understood of what they were doing.  For example, rooks showed that they understood that this was a property unique to fluids: they didn’t bother to drop any stones into a vial of sawdust.  When given stones of assorted sizes, the rooks “learnt rapidly that the larger stones displaced more water and they were therefore able to obtain the reward more quickly than using small stones.”³  The rooks weren’t trained to do this.  They just figured it out.

            This isn’t the only tool use expressed by rooks.  In another study, rooks learned to bend a piece of wire into a fish-hook shape to pull some food out of a narrow jar.  In this study, the researchers said they doubted that rooks use any tools in the wild… in any case, they haven’t been observed doing so.  Why not, though?  Anyone who has kept parrots knows that the smartest animals love a brain-teaser.  A challenge to the wits keeps them entertained.  In a healthy ecosystem, an animal’s time isn’t entirely taken up by a grim struggle for survival, and they even find time to play.  Tool use is awfully hard to observe in the wild, so much so that we only recently found out that animals used tools at all.

This experiment is one of Aesop’s fables captured in real life, showing that intelligence in animals isn’t necessarily anthropomorphism.  (So vain we are to think that intelligence is exclusively human-like!)  In my opinion, we should consider the possibility that the fable of the Crow and the Pitcher appeared in both Greece and India not because the story migrated from one place to another, as has been suggested by folklorists.  Rather, I fancy that it might have been a real and natural corvid behavior that was independently observed by people in various parts of the world.  The memorable sight could have been first told not as a fable, but as an anecdote. “I could learn something from that bird,” they might have said.

- O. Scribner

Sources

Public-domain illustration from Æsop’s Fables: A New Revised Edition From Original Sources, illustrated by Harrison Weir, John Tenniel, and Ernest Griset. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18732/18732-h/18732-h.htm

1. V. S. Vernon Jones. Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation.  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11339/11339-h/11339-h.htm
2. Christopher David Bird and Nathan John Emery. “Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm.” Current Biology. Volume 19, issue 16, 1410-1414, August 6, 2009. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2809%2901455-9
3. “From Fable to Fact: Rooks Use Stones and Water to Catch a Worm.” Science Daily. August 10, 2009. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090806121754.htm