When animals go to school

That's a perfect example of something that sounds like it would be innate but apparently is not.

That's a very interesting way in which innate stuff and learned stuff interact. The little cats we live with and the big cats that live in the wild, like the tigers, have hard-wired behaviors involving being interested in little sneaking, scuttling things. They crouch, stalk, sneak up and pounce. But it's really quite another matter to put that together into a whole suite of behaviors where you've identified creatures that are good to eat and not fatal to attack, and then put all those behaviors together, and actually kill the animal, and kill prey often enough to make a living.

There's a story of the orphaned lion who was raised by rangers in a South African game preserve, and who took as his role model their Australian cattle dog. And was very, very interested in wild antelope and learned to herd them.

His interest in wild antelope was hard-wired. He had lots of innate behaviors, like sneaking, crouching and pouncing. But he had no idea at whom to direct that, so he pounced on his friends when he was playing with them -- the dog and the people. He was very interested in impalas, but the dog, his role model, herded them, so he herded them, too. Not a good way for a lion to make a living.

So, if the lion was learning in the wild, it would learn by watching what its parents do?

Lions are a good example, because they go around and hunt things in the daylight in open spaces, so we can observe them. There's a lovely account of a lioness killing a zebra, and being watched by cubs as she does it. And they can't all have been her cubs, because there were 13 cubs, all lined up.

It's like zebra-killing school. You write at one point: "It may be possible to save a species through captive breeding but to lose its culture when no wild individuals are able to pass what they have learned to subsequent generations." What animals do you most fear this happening with?

Well, it's very likely to happen with a lot of tigers. For example, the South China tiger appears to be completely extinct in the wild. China has plans to fence off a huge area as a nature preserve, reintroduce prey species that have been wiped out and reintroduce the South China tiger from zoo animals.

But, of course, those zoo animals are going to be pretty clueless. So that's going to take some kind of program to teach South China tigers how to make a living.

What things are the hardest for humans to teach animals?

There is so much that we don't understand. For instance, creatures that live in the water, like a dolphin. It's very hard for us to teach echolocation, which we haven't got. It can swim so much better than we can, it's as if we can't swim at all.

One of the nice cultural behaviors that I found out about in doing the research were these dolphin/human fisheries in southern Brazil, where wild dolphins go into the murky water where human beings can't see the fish, and they essentially point to the fish.

The human beings throw nets over the fish, and they get the fish that they catch in the net, but some of the fish try to escape by swimming out under the net. So, the partnership helps the dolphins catch fish, too. It's been going on for more than 150 years, according to local records. And no one teaches the dolphins except for their mothers.

And if that was something, hypothetically, that we wanted to teach dolphins, we're just not equipped to do it. And there must be all kinds of things that dolphins and whales do that we haven't detected, haven't seen, know nothing about.

It's interesting to read about people trying to teach young birds to fly. We can't fly. You may have noticed that. But parts of the behaviors of flying are hard-wired in young birds, but other things they have to learn. Young birds should learn to land into the wind. Because if you land with the wind behind you, the wind is liable to push you right off your feet, and you'll fall on your beak. And it's hard for people to demonstrate that to birds. But if they're raising goslings, as Konrad Lorenz did, they can summon them in such a way that they land into the wind.

And the Durdens, who raised a golden eagle, were particularly well equipped to teach an eagle, because they had experience as small-plane pilots. So, they knew a lot of stuff about small planes and wind that they were able to try to pass on to Lady.

But there are other things that they can't teach her, like, "That branch is too small. If you land on that branch, you'll fall off." That she had to learn for herself.

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