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Denkende Tiere by Karl Krall

Denkende Tiere. Beiträge zur Tierseelenkunde auf Grund eigener Versuche. Der Kluge Hans und meine Pferde Muhamed und Zarif. (original publication in German: Thinking animals. Contributions to the study of the animal soul on the basis of own experiments. Clever Hans and my horses Muhamed and Zarif.) is a book written by a German pioneer of "Tierpsychologie" (German: animal psychology, nowadays comparable to Ethology or comparative psychology), Karl Krall. The book was published in 1912 by Friedrich Engelmann in Leipzig. Krall writes about training and testing the horses he owned himself and inherited from Wilhelm von Osten, who originally trained Clever Hans (Kluge Hans) to complete mathematical calculations. The horses were trained to communicate with their trainers through tapping their hooves on the ground at a specific rate or amount of times, as well as other signals such as pointing towards a given direction with their heads. Additionally, the author reports about various other experiments performed on different species of animals and by other persons.

Denkende Tiere is part of the special Jesuit collection of Maastricht University, which holds over 265,000 historical books on theology, philosophy, history, literature, law and social sciences that date back as far as to the 16th century.

Context

Animal psychology in the early 20th century

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, French scientists Buffon and Lamarck led the rise of scientific animal psychology, which was then greatly influenced by Charles Darwin. During the early 20th century, animal psychology was marked by either anthropomorphic idealism or materialism. In line with the anthropomorphic idealism, it became analogous to human psychology in Germany during this time. Researchers aimed to analyze and understand the inner life of animals in order to act on that knowledge in practice. Initially, biologists such as Oskar and Katharina Heinroth, Otto Koehler, Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz categorized their work as animal psychology before adapting the label of ethology or comparative psychology, as is the standard nowadays. Krall is considered to be one of the German pioneers of animal psychology, which in turn gave rise to the present ethology and comparative psychology we have today.

Krall was not only interested in training his animals to perform tasks, but aimed to investigate the animal's understanding of concepts, language and even their senses. As an animal psychologist, he aimed to discover what it meant to be and think as a horse by teaching them how to communicate. Krall proposed that animals are not as subordinate to humans as was believed at the time, strongly believing that Hans and his other animals had their own will and personalities. Some behaviors, such as correctly answering questions to Osten, but not his guests, were interpreted by Krall as the horse's usage of humor. He reports about an instant in which Hans stated to have two eyes, two ears, but three tails, as another example of the horse's humor. The author also claims to have learned that the horse's senses, especially their eye sight was better than it was thought to be at the time. Through testing the horse's eye sight, smell, taste, and hearing, Krall found that the horse performed better than would have been expected, and often better than his trainers themselves.

By continuing to study the inner life of the world famous Hans and other animals, Krall contributed to the growing field of animal psychology. As stated in Denkende Tiere, animals were generally believed to be subordinate to humans and were often not studied for other purposes than, for example, conditioning. Despite the controversy it was surrounded by, Krall's book still encourages its readers to pay more attention to the animal's attitudes and internal reasons for its own behavior, similar to human psychology.

Wilhelm von Osten and his influence on Karl Krall

Wilhelm von Osten (* 30. November 1838; † 29. June 1909) was the original owner and trainer of horses Hans I and Hans II (Clever Hans). Von Osten trained his horses for 14 years before inviting the public to watch the abilities of Hans at his residence in 1904. He reportedly taught Hans how to read, complete simple mathematical calculations, understand spoken language and concepts. Hans would communicate through stomping his hooves on the ground, or pointing in given directions with his head. As Hans became internationally famous, many experts, scientists and intellectuals visited von Osten's residence to see the phenomenon. This also evoked Krall's interest, as he became von Osten's private student and eventually inherited Hans. In Denkende Tiere, Krall describes von Osten as being too harsh with Hans, which he hypothesized to have caused the horse to lose interest in his lessons and become bored and badly tempered during his training.

Karl Krall (* 9. April 1863; † 12. January 1929) inherited his family's jewelry business before contacting von Osten about Hans. After becoming von Osten's private student and inheriting Hans upon von Osten's death, Krall created his own training facility for Hans and additional animals he purchased. He believed the better conditions would encourage the animals to cooperate more and become more productive and happy. Although Krall's studies and his own magazine were not greatly successful, he continued his research on different animals, including dogs, horses, and ponies. He was also in correspondence with persons who owned animals with similar talents and extraordinary behavior, which he shares in Denkende Tiere. Krall eventually sold his family business and continued his research until his death in 1929.

Clever Hans signaling the direction of "right"

Krall teaching Zarif how to spell

Contents

Denkende Tiere consists of several chapters and the appendix. Three main chapters are subdivided into smaller chapters on the topic.

First, the author focuses on the famous horse Hans, which had been previously trained and owned by Wilhelm von Osten. It is described how Clever Hans was able to learn different words, read, understand spoken language, calculate and use humor. A recurrent motive is that the author strongly arguments that most mistakes made by Hans are due to a bad mood, boredom, his strong own will, or simply humor.

In the following pages, Krall reports his experiments and results with his own horses, Muhamed and Zarif. The author describes how von Osten may have negatively impacted the training of Hans, often treating the horse badly and thus impacting the mood and cooperation of the horse. Thus, Krall uses his own methods to train the young horses, providing them with more freedom and a higher quality of life. The horses were trained to complete more complicated mathematical calculations, listen to and understand, as well as spell, in multiple languages (such as French). It is noted that Muhamed appeared to be highly intelligent and do exceptionally well during the mathematics tasks. Eventually, the horses were observed to communicate upon their own will, without being requested to do so.

Finally, the author includes different examples of similar phenomena in other animals, either observed and trained by himself or other persons. Krall reflects on his experiences and observations, stressing the importance of acknowledging the animal's own will. Another important factor during training is said to be the differentiation between the inability and simply refusal of the animal to complete or attempt a given task. Eventually, Krall adopted and trained a pony, a blind horse, and other horses himself.

In the appendix, Krall finishes Denkende Tiere with a more detailed description of his experiments, along with pictures and additional thoughts.

Reception

At the time, Clever Hans was a controversial topic, as von Osten had supporters as well as many critics of his interpretations of the horse's behavior. Originally, a commission lead by Carl Stumpf, a German philosophy professor, concluded in 1904 that the Clever Hans phenomenon was real. Upon hearing of this, a PhD student of Stumpf, Oskar Pfungst, investigated the horse himself experimentally. He is known for debunking the phenomenon, proving that when the horse could not see anybody, he would not be able to answer the questions. Another example is that the horse apparently could not answer questions if the trainer could not answer the question himself. Nowadays, the "Clever-Hans-Effect" is well known as the response bias, a tendency of the subject of the experiment to respond to questions inaccurately.

However, Krall states to have disproved many of the major criticisms of the horse's talents, including the Zeichenhypothese (German: signal hypothesis) mentioned above. This hypothesis mainly refers to the fact that the horse may have sensed other signals (such as unconscious signals based on body language of his trainers) in order to react correctly to the right answer, instead of truly understanding the question and arriving at the answer on his own. Yet, the author reports about various detailed experiments, including tests that showed the horse arriving at the right answers without being able to see, or even in absence of his trainers.

Despite the criticisms and investigations on his work, Krall continued to train several animals until the end of his life. Since Denkende Tiere was published after Pfungst's discovery of the Clever-Hans-Effect, the book was not as successful with the public. Likewise, Krall's magazine "Tierseele" (German: Animal Soul), which included reports of similar incidences of animals being able to learn and think, was not met with great enthusiasm. However, Krall's efforts greatly contributed to animal psychology and inspired intellectuals such as Stumpf and Pfungst to contribute to the future of experimental psychology by carrying out rigorous scientific experiments to test the horse's true abilities, as well as eventually researching this effect on humans.