By David Wojick |March 16th, 2026|1 Comment
I normally study human cognition, especially the structure and dynamics of complex issues. But as a farmer and backcountry horseman, I also study cognition in wild animals and horses.
After much research, I have something for interested people to watch for in animals, which I call knowledgeable behavior. This means that what the animal does requires a great deal of knowledge. What is especially interesting is that this knowledge is often instinctive, not learned.
Animals often exhibit complex inherited knowledge. This has implications for conservation policies.
I wrote a bunch of this research down as a long series of blog articles. See “Horse cognition and other critters” here.
The key to seeing this behavior is to think AI-like. That is think what an AI robot would have to know to do what the critter you are watching does. In many cases, the behavior is amazingly complex and flexible.
An obvious example is building a bird’s nest. Nests can be very complex and built in a lot of different ways from a variety of materials, which have to be handled differently, for a given species. Knowing how to do this requires a lot of knowledge and decision making.
Moreover, a nest is sometimes built by a pair of birds which requires shared knowledge. Birds do not learn how to build these complex nests from their parents or from repeatedly trying and failing as a human would. They are born knowing how to do it. How DNA does this is a mystery.
Plus, there is a lot more to it than building the nest. They have to pick a good site and know where the materials are. I once observed an extreme case of getting materials. A bird was building a nest at my house, which fronts a fairly large field. The bird flew across the field to some bushes about a hundred yards away and quickly returned with some nest material that it added in.
That bird knew where that stuff was so it must have studied the area for good materials before it started. It also knew when it needed that particular stuff. That is a lot to know by instinct. Instincts are often talked about as though they were mindless rote behavior, but they are more like having the expertise to do complex projects.
Another extreme example that I have seen is the cow circle. A small herd with young calves was approached menacingly by two large dogs. The cows formed a defensive circle, tails together and heads out. The calves got into the middle for protection. The dogs decided not to bother them and wisely left. The cows probably did not learn how to do this, and the calves certainly did not. The knowledge was instinctive.
In many cases, the behavior is well known, but we do not think about the knowledge required to perform it. Here is an example: I go to my open, roofed shed to get my riding mower, and there is a baby bird on the floor. It cannot yet fly, so it runs and hides under the mower. I sit on the mower, and it runs out and over to hide under my truck. This all makes sense but think about it. The baby bird had to know when to hide, how to hide, when to leave the hiding place, and how to find another. That is a lot of instinctive knowledge and judgement.
The trick to seeing knowledgeable behavior is to stop and think. What would the critter have to know, perceive, decide, and do in order to perform this action? Over the years I collected many observations like this which are discussed in the various blog articles. I also discuss how to do it and the general theory of knowledgeable animal behavior.
Then, too, there are lots of cases where I simply do not know what the animal is doing. For example, we have lots of crows and they are very busy, flying about and calling in several different ways. I often cannot figure out what they are doing so can’t tell what they know. But I am sure they are doing serious things that must require a good bit of group knowledge because their behavior never seems aimless.
My overall conclusion is that animals lead complex lives that we do not understand. A lot of what we do understand clearly involves a good bit of instinctive expert knowledge. If you do not see that try to make a bird’s nest.
Watching animals and thinking about what they must know in order to do what they do can be a lot of fun. But beyond that, intelligent behavior should be factored into conservation modeling.
For example, how the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale will act to avoid harassment from offshore wind operations. In this case, intelligent avoidance can lead to deadly ship strikes and net entanglements. That model has yet to be built.
This is my kind of stuff. I am accused of spending way too much time in the backyard looking at birds and other animals. My favorites are House Sparrows. They stick it out all year long from -20F to 100+F, they are tough.
I am not sure that it is all inherited. In Australia crows have learned to turn cane toads on their backs, rather than eat through the back, which is poisonous.
Certainly there is lots of learning as well. I focus on instinct because there is this wildly false idea that instincts are some sort of mindless rote behavior.
I might note that, along with nest-building plans and materials gathering skills, birds also come equipped with songbooks and navigation charts. 😊
Very true. In fact crows have a lot of different calls which likely amounts to a language. Several involve specific numbers of sounds so they can count as well. But navigating by the stays is incredible.
By the stars.