Do Animals Use Tools?

I’m a weekly volunteer guide at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and we make a big deal with the guests about how sea otters use tools. They find a small rock and use it to break food like sea urchins off from a rocky ledge and then they turn the same rock into an anvil on their chest and whack the urchin against it to break the food open.  Look, we say, how smart otters are.  They can use tools, it’s not just people who use tools.

I think the idea is that people will care more about the ocean, and maybe do something to help protect and conserve it, when they can identify with and relate to a cute animal like the otter that does some pretty ingenious things to survive.  Behind the scenes the Aquarium educators refer to otters as one of our charismatic, or iconic animals, and as ambassadors on behalf of ocean conservation. 

Since I’ve been writing about building and tools for a couple months now, I thought I’d ponder how animals use tools, and when it was that people figured out we weren’t the only tool users.

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Do other animals besides humans use tools?  Are there other animals that can create and manipulate objects for their own benefit?  Is being a tool user one of the key distinctions between humans and other animals?

Yes, yes, no.

In 1960 Jane Goodall observed chimps doing something that was so unknown and unthinkable at the time that when she published her findings, it turned the scientific world was upside down.

Until then, social scientists and anthropologists and animal behavioralists all assumed and agreed that only humans used tools.  Indeed that was how humans were defined and distinguished from other animals – we were the only ones to use tools.  Only we could figure out how to make tools and how to adapt natural objects into tools.  Oh, smart humans.

But on that fateful day Goodall noticed a chimp pick up a twig and carefully remove all  its leaves. Then the chimp used the bare stem to dig around in a huge termite mound, lifting the twig to its mouth.  Over and over.

I think one reason Goodall is such a compelling person is that she is not only a really smart person, but she also communicates so well to the general public.  She transcends so-called scientific objectivity by being an activist and advocate for all creatures.  (Just this week she spoke out on the slaughter of Cecil the lion.)

So as Goodall tells the story, she wasn’t sure what the chimp was up to, so she tried it herself, doing exactly what the chimp did. (I probably have an unfair stereotype of scientists, but her humble admission of ignorance and her willingness to imitate a chimp seems more proof that she is unusual, and very creative.)  When her twig brought insects out of the mound and she, like the chimp, scrapped them off with her own teeth, she figure out what the chimp was doing.  Making a tool.  The twig had become a tool, a fishing hook, and the chimp was using it to fish for termites, to procure food.  Chimps were tool makers and users.

This may seem obvious now, but in 1960 it was revolutionary.  “Man” was not so special, so uniquely smart after all.

Since then we have noticed (and a lot of it is noticing, they’ve been doing it all along) lots of animals using tools.  Mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects – clever and amazing and effective.   It’s a little humbling, but inspiring, to see a brownheaded nuthatch take a small piece of bark in its peak and use it as a lever and a wedge to pry up a round of bark and expose insects.  They use the same bark tool over and over and carry it 

Well bark, that’s not really a tool, is it?  We humans use real tools, like screwdrivers and jackhammers and electron microscopes, right?  After Godall’s discovery, scientists started debating how to define “tool.”  One widely used definition is

"The external employment of an unattached or manipulable attached envirnomental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object, another organism, or the user itself, when the user holds and directly manipulated the tool during or prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool.^[5]

There are other simpler definitions:

-an external object used for a specific purpose.

-an object carried or maintained for future use.

-an object that has been modified to fit a purpose.

The nuthatch’s bark wedge/lever sounds like a tool to me, using any of those definitions.

It’s hard for me to imagine how different the world view was before 1960 and Goodall’s discovery (actually just careful observation), but it seems that science and the public were still stuck in the idea that humans were constitutionally different from other animals.  Theologians had long insisted that humans were the crowning glory of God’s creation, better and above the “lower” animals. I assumed we’d gotten over this a century earlier, with Darwin, accepting that humans are not different, or better, singled out (by God?) for special treatment and privilege.  But maybe those who had grudgingly accepted Darwin just believed evolution proved that humans had evolved beyond other animals, into smarter tool users.

However this revelation happened (and you can tell I like it that it was a woman who simply noticed something that had been going on all along) there was no going back.  As Darwin said we are related to all animals, so Goodall said we are not so much smarter as we thought.

Thank God for folks like Goodall and Darwin.  These two observant and unorthodox scientist, from England, were willing to travel to risky new lands (and seas), make careful observations, and to shatter human hubris. 

For me, tool use by animals is good news, not a step down in my special favor in God’s sight.  I’m always looking for more connections between me and other animals, not fewer.  They’ve got a lot to teach me.

I like how Job puts it, in the Bible: “Just ask the animals, and they will teach you.  Asks the birds of the sky, and they will tell you.  Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.  Let the fish in the sea speak to you.” 

I’m trying to listen.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter