I’ve felt for some time that our knowledge of animal development is abysmal compared to that of human development. Alex and koko are examples of well-intentioned and interesting experiments, but ones that have been founded on misassumptions that animal development is some small, proper subset of human development.
Granting that some part of communication is “hard-wired” in the brain, I agree that there’s no reason than an animal that evolved separately from us, and millions of years before, should have the same wiring. Even if elements of their hard-wired grammar were the same as ours, having a different set would automatically affect their high-level though processes.
At one point a couple years ago I took steps along the road of starting a program to teach parrots how to speak using feedback from computers, rather than a human doing the “Polly want a cracker?” method of rote repetition. Unfortunately, it turns out that talking parrots, like chimpanzees, require a great deal of 1-on-1 attention, and parrots, at least, are jealous of attention given to other birds. That made my idea of simultaneously experimenting on 10 birds (so that at least a few of them would turn out to be good talkers) impractical. I entirely abandoned the project, to my family’s relief.
Sally Blanchard is the closest I know of to a parrot psychologist, though quite a lot of her focus is on illness and misbehavior in caged animals. For my purposes, that would be somewhat like studying convicts to understand normal human thinking.
One of the women at work brings in a highly intelligent kitten she adopted from the pound. The cat and I get along very well (partly because I slipped some beef broth in its cat food one day). When the cat is fearful, or sleepy, or hungry, these motivations can be readily identified: I have the same fear of being squashed by something 1,000 times larger, the same droopy eyelids when I’m sleepy, the same “stick my face” in the food urge when hungry.
However the cat’s “higher” thought patterns are quite mysterious. The other day the cat spat at a manager who walked in the office, and continued to do so until they left. At the same time, it reacted normally toward me and toward its owner. A more pervasive example of mysterious higher-order behavior, is why cats find some human activities worth watching, and others boring.