Ever tried to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree? That’s basically the vibe of Frans de Waal’s groundbreaking book. Honestly, if you’ve ever looked at your dog and wondered what’s going on in that furry head, or felt like your cat is judging your life choices, you’re already halfway to understanding the core of de waal are we smart enough.
The late primatologist Frans de Waal spent decades watching chimps, bonobos, and capuchins, and he came to a pretty humbling conclusion. It isn't that animals are "dumb" or "acting on instinct." It's that we, the humans, have been too narrow-minded to design the right tests. We’ve spent a century trying to force animals to be human, and when they failed at being us, we called them unintelligent.
The Problem With the Human Yardstick
We love a good hierarchy. Humans at the top, followed by apes, maybe dolphins, then "lower" animals like bugs or fish. De Waal completely trashes this ladder. He argues that intelligence isn't a single line; it's more like a bush.
Imagine you’re testing a squirrel’s memory. If you ask it to remember a list of words, it’ll fail. Obviously. But a squirrel can remember the exact location of thousands of buried nuts across several acres. You’d get lost looking for your car keys in your own living room. Who’s the smart one there?
This is the concept of the Umwelt. It's a German word for "the surrounding world." Every animal lives in its own sensory bubble. A tick doesn't care about the sunset; it cares about heat and the smell of butyric acid from a passing mammal. An elephant cares about infrasonic vibrations in the ground that we can't even hear. To understand de waal are we smart enough to know how smart animals are, we have to stop asking if they can do what we do and start asking if they can do what they need to do.
📖 Related: Hairstyles for women over 50 with round faces: What your stylist isn't telling you
When Scientists Fail the Test
The book is full of hilarious and heartbreaking examples of researchers just... missing the point. Take the classic "mirror test." For years, scientists said elephants failed to recognize themselves in mirrors. Why? Because they used small mirrors placed outside the cage.
Think about that for a second. An elephant is huge. It uses its trunk to explore. It doesn't even look at its own face in the wild. When de Waal and his colleagues finally gave an elephant named Happy a mirror the size of a wall inside her enclosure, she didn't just look at it. She used it to inspect the inside of her mouth and a mark painted on her head that she couldn't see otherwise. She passed.
The failure wasn't the elephant's. It was the humans who didn't realize that a tiny mirror is useless to a five-ton animal.
Another "oops" moment involves octopuses. Scientists tried to get an octopus to open a jar with a crab inside. The octopus ignored it. Conclusion: octopuses aren't that bright. Then, someone had the bright idea to smear the jar with fish slime. Since octopuses "taste" with their arms, the smell triggered their hunting response instantly. They opened the jar in seconds.
👉 See also: How to Sign Someone Up for Scientology: What Actually Happens and What You Need to Know
The "Magic Wells" of Animal Cognition
De Waal talks about "magic wells"—those moments where a species shows a type of intelligence that is just totally alien to us.
- Chimp Flash Memory: There’s a chimp named Ayumu at Kyoto University who can look at a screen of numbers (1 through 9) for a fraction of a second before they're covered up. He can then tap the squares in the correct order every single time. Most humans can't even get past five numbers.
- Crow Grudges: New Caledonian crows don't just use tools; they make them. They’ll bend wire into hooks. They also recognize human faces. If you mess with a crow, it’ll tell its friends. Years later, crows that weren't even born when you were mean will dive-bomb you. That’s social learning and long-term memory that rivals a small-town gossip circle.
- Wasp Faces: Even "lowly" paper wasps can recognize individual faces of other wasps. If they couldn't, their social hierarchy would collapse.
Why We Fight the Idea of Animal Smarts
Why are we so resistant to this? De Waal calls it "anthropodenial." It’s the flip side of anthropomorphism. While anthropomorphism is projecting human traits onto animals, anthropodenial is the flat-out refusal to admit we share any mental traits with them at all.
For a long time, the scientific community was dominated by Behaviorism. This was the idea that animals are just "black boxes" that respond to stimuli. You poke the box, a noise comes out. No thoughts, no feelings, just "learned responses."
But if you’ve ever seen a chimp console a friend after a fight, or a bonobo share food with a stranger, you know that’s bunk. De Waal points out that we share 99% of our DNA with these guys. It’s actually more "unscientific" to assume our brains work in a completely different way than to assume there’s a massive amount of overlap.
✨ Don't miss: Wire brush for cleaning: What most people get wrong about choosing the right bristles
Moving Toward a More Humble Science
So, what does de waal are we smart enough actually tell us about our future? It suggests we need to stop being so obsessed with "uniquely human" traits. Every time we find a "human" trait—tool use, culture, empathy, planning for the future—we eventually find an animal that does it too.
The goal isn't to prove that animals are "just like us." They aren't. An albatross has a mental map of the ocean that would make a GPS look like a toy. A bat's "vision" through sound is a cognitive feat we can barely simulate with computers.
Actionable Insights for the Everyday Human
If you want to apply the lessons from de Waal to your own life, here is how you start:
- Observe without judging: Next time you watch an animal, don't ask "Is it smart?" Ask "What is it trying to solve right now?"
- Check your ego: Realize that your sensory world is just one version of reality. You are "blind" to the smells a dog perceives and "deaf" to the songs of a whale.
- Support ethical research: Look for studies that use non-invasive, "species-appropriate" testing. The best science meets the animal on its own terms.
- Acknowledge evolutionary continuity: Stop looking for the "gap" between us and them. Start looking for the bridge.
The real takeaway from de waal are we smart enough is that we are finally becoming smart enough to realize how much we’ve been missing. We aren't the only conscious beings on this planet; we’re just the ones who happened to invent the most complicated ways to talk about it.
To really get the most out of this shift in perspective, try spending ten minutes just watching a bird or a squirrel without looking at your phone. Don't try to "train" them or feed them. Just watch how they navigate obstacles, interact with others, and respond to the wind. You'll start to see the complexity that de Waal spent his whole life defending.