Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

The Wrong Question

For most of the twentieth century, the scientific study of animal intelligence was dominated by a question that was subtly but significantly wrong: can animals do what humans can do? Can they count? Can they recognise themselves in mirrors? Can they deceive? Can they plan for the future? The tests designed to answer these questions were designed around human cognitive capacities, and when animals failed them, the failure was recorded as evidence of absence rather than what it usually was: evidence that the question was inappropriate.

Frans de Waal, the Dutch-born primatologist who spent decades at the Arnhem Zoo and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, has spent his career arguing that this is backward. Animals are not failed humans. They are successful members of their own species, with cognitive capacities shaped by millions of years of evolution to meet the specific challenges their environments presented. To measure them against human benchmarks is to discover what they lack in human terms, which is not the same as discovering what they have in their own terms.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is de Waal’s systematic presentation of this argument, supported by decades of research from his own laboratory and from the wider field of animal cognition. It is rigorous, often funny, and genuinely transformative in the way it reframes a question that most people have never examined.

The Ecological Approach

De Waal’s alternative to human-benchmark testing is ecological: understand what challenges each species faces in its natural environment, and design tests that measure whether and how the animal meets those challenges. By this measure, almost every species tested turns out to be impressively intelligent — not in human ways, but in ways that reveal sophisticated cognitive processing appropriate to its ecological niche.

The examples are extraordinary. Chimpanzees, tested on a working-memory task involving numbers flashed briefly on a screen, consistently outperform human adults. This is not because chimps are smarter than humans in some general sense; it is because the capacity for rapid visual memory appears to have been a significant survival advantage in chimp evolutionary history, and human evolutionary pressures did not produce the same result. The test, designed by humans, happens to measure something chimps do better — which is a useful reminder that “intelligence” is not a single capacity.

Crows and corvids — a family de Waal gives considerable attention — solve multi-step physical problems, demonstrate future-planning behaviour, and appear to engage in something recognisably like social calculation. Octopuses, more distantly related to vertebrates than almost any cognitively studied species, demonstrate problem-solving, learning, and individual personality differences. The category of “cognitively complex” turns out to include a much wider range of species than traditional cognitive hierarchies suggested.

The Mirror Test

The book gives extended treatment to one of the classic tests of animal self-awareness: the mirror test. An animal is anaesthetised, marked with a coloured spot on its body that it cannot see without a mirror, and allowed to recover. If it notices and investigates the mark when placed in front of a mirror, this is taken as evidence of self-recognition — the capacity to understand that the mirror shows itself.

Chimpanzees pass this test. Elephants pass it. Orcas pass it. Dolphins pass it. Magpies pass it. But dogs and cats, typically, do not — which was taken as evidence that dogs and cats lack self-awareness. De Waal’s response to this is characteristic: dogs and cats live in a world constituted primarily by smell, not sight. The mirror test is asking a visual question of animals that process their identity and their world through olfactory channels. Dogs, given the equivalent test adapted to smell, demonstrate something much more like self-awareness. The test, not the animal, was inadequate.

This point — that tests reveal the assumptions of their designers as much as the capacities of the animals they test — is the book’s central demonstration. Applied across the range of cognitive capacities the book examines, it generates a substantial revision of what we think we know about animal minds.

The Social Intelligence Problem

De Waal is especially good on social intelligence — the cognitive demands of living in complex social groups, managing hierarchies, tracking relationships, forming and maintaining alliances, reading the intentions of others, and adjusting behaviour accordingly. For social species — and chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, dolphins, and many other cognitively studied species are intensely social — these demands are enormous.

The research on chimpanzee politics, to which de Waal made foundational contributions in his earlier book Chimpanzee Politics, revealed that chimp social life involves strategic alliances, third-party reconciliation, political calculation, and what appears to be genuine empathy — the ability to understand and respond to the emotional states of others. These are not peripheral features of chimp life; they are its centre. A chimp that could not perform these social cognitive tasks would not survive in a chimp group.

The argument that social complexity drives cognitive complexity is now well-established in evolutionary biology. De Waal helped establish it, and this book is partly a retrospective on what that research programme revealed and what it implies for our understanding of intelligence more broadly.

The Ethics Question

De Waal approaches the ethical implications of animal cognitive complexity carefully — more carefully, some critics have argued, than the subject warrants. He acknowledges that if animals have rich inner lives, complex social relationships, forward-planning capacities, and emotional responses that parallel human emotions, our current treatment of many of them is difficult to justify. But he does not develop this argument at length, preferring to let the scientific case speak for itself.

This restraint is defensible — he is a scientist, not an ethicist, and the scientific case is genuinely the more important contribution. But readers who come to the book wanting the implications spelled out will find themselves doing that work themselves. The scientific evidence is comprehensively presented; what it means for how we should treat animals is left largely as an exercise for the reader.

Why the Title Is the Point

The book’s title is its best sentence. The question “are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” is not rhetorical — it is genuinely open. Our cognitive architecture shapes what we can perceive and what questions we can ask. The tests we have designed, the frameworks we have used, the categories we have applied — all of these were designed by and for a particular kind of mind, and they may have systematic blind spots when applied to minds structured differently.

De Waal’s career has been devoted to developing methods and frameworks that can see past some of these limitations. The book is both a report on what those methods have revealed and a meditation on the epistemological challenge of knowing minds unlike our own — which turns out to be a question not just about animals but about the limits of any one kind of intelligence studying another.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — One of the most important books in popular science about animal minds. De Waal’s argument is simple, rigorous, and genuinely unsettling.