Santino!

Here's a link to the story of the 'plan-ahead chimp' Santino. Maybe it's not so surprising this primate got so irate at crowds of people that disturb it, what with it sharing the name of perhaps the most irascible character in the Godfather.


The paper that the report mentions is Osvath (2009). Here's a summary:

Planning for a future, rather than a current, mental state is a cognitive process generally viewed as uniquely human. Here, however, I shall report on a decade of observations of spontaneous planning by a male chimpanzee in a zoo. The planning actions, which took place in a calm state, included stone caching and the manufacture of discs from concrete, objects later used as missiles against zoo visitors during agitated chimpanzee dominance displays. Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals [1]. Spontaneous and unambiguous planning behaviours for future states by non-humans have not previously been reported, and anecdotal reports, describing single occasions, are exceptionally scarce [2,3,4]. This dearth of observations is arguably the main reason for not ascribing cognitive foresight to nonhuman animals [1]. To date, the surprisingly few controlled demonstrations of planning for future states by animals are experimentally induced behaviours in great apes [5,6,7] and corvids [8,9]. The observational findings in this report suggest that these laboratory results are not experimental artefacts, at least in the case of great apes.

There's been a few, mostly humoristic write-ups about this news report, including one by John Hawks, and another one by PZ Myers. As we discussed in class, I think that the crucial aspect of this research on Santino's behavior is that of establishing that some non-human animals exhibit behaviors that imply a relatively sophisticated form of planning. The debate over this blows open some of the preconceptions that many researchers still have about human uniqueness...

Reference:

Osvath, M. 2009. Spontaneous planning for future stone throwing by a male chimpanzee. Current Biology 19(5): R190-R191. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.01.010