Excerpts from: Griffin, D.R. 1995.  "Windows on animal minds."
Consc. and Cognition 4: 194-204.

"The simple kinds of conscious thinking that probably occur in
nonhuman animals can be studied objectively by using the same basic
procedure that we use every day to infer what our human companions
think and feel. This is to base such inferences on communicative
behavior, broadly defined to include human language, nonverbal
communication, and semantic communication in apes, dolphins, parrots,
and honeybees. It seems likely that animals often experience
something similar to the messages they communicate."

"There is one well-studied example of animal communication where
subject matter does entail readily identified objects that are remote
in space and time from the situation where the animals are
communicating. ...it occurs in one genus of social insects, the
honeybees."

"As might be expected, this surprising discovery of symbolic
communication employed by insects has not gone unchallenged. As one
critic put it, von Frisch's discovery seemed to upset 'the very
foundation of behavior and biology in general' (Rosin, 1978. Such a
claim makes sense only if our concepts of biology and animal behavior
include a firm conviction that all insect behavior consists of
stereotyped and inflexible instinctive responses. Although no one can
seriously doubt that the waggle dances contain information about
distance, Wenner and Wells (1990) have argued that bees do not use
this information."

""The view that the behavior of all invertebrate animals is rigidly
stereotyped and genetically programmed is now an outdated
generalization. "

"If parrots and honeybees are capable of simple conscious thinking,
as suggested by the versatility of their communicative behavior,
there is no solid ground for excluding a priori the possibility that
simple perceptual consciousness and elementary forms of rational
decision making may be quite widespread among multi-cellular
animals."


(Donald Griffin, Ph.D.,  is a biologist who has taught at Harvard,
Cornell and Rockefeller Universities and currently works at Harvard's
Concord Field Station, an animal research facility. He is the author
of the 1992 book ''Animal Minds")