What counts as animal intelligence: wolves, elephants, chimps and captive minds

The Short Version

People who spend years close to wild animals keep describing abilities that a laboratory puzzle or a count of tool use would never pick up. Diane Boyd, after four decades with wolves, tells of animals that dug up her hidden traps and left them on the trail, and of a female that turned up to fill a vacancy in a distant pack within two weeks [1]. Forrest Galante and Joe Rogan argue that we wrongly define intelligence as the ability to manipulate the environment, a test that orcas and dolphins fail only because they have no need for houses or phones [2]. Paul Rosolie describes elephants as a society with memory, ritual and rules, and says studying them in captivity misses who they are [3]. Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride, who made Chimp Crazy, show the other face of the same fact: a chimpanzee is clever enough to work a combination lock, and that cleverness is exactly what makes a cage both cruel and dangerous [4]. The observers do not agree on everything, and Boyd in particular warns against giving animals human reasoning, but they converge on what follows from it: watch animals where they live, and stop confining the ones whose minds need more than a cage can give [1][2][3][4].

Table of contents

What They Said

Diane Boyd: wolves that outthink the trapper, and a scientist's caution

Boyd is a wildlife biologist who has studied wolves for four decades as they returned to the northern Rockies, and her examples come from fieldwork [1].

The first is about traps. To collar wolves she buried traps carefully, and she describes wolves digging them up, flipping them onto the trail and leaving scat beside them [1]. She suggests, without claiming to know, that this was perhaps a way to teach younger pack members [1]. Whatever the motive, the animals had found an object she had gone to great trouble to hide and then made it conspicuous.

The second example is one she says baffles her. When the breeding female of the Ninemile pack near Missoula was poached, a collared female that Boyd had lost track of in Glacier months earlier showed up within two weeks to take her place [1]. Boyd does not know how wolves find such vacancies [1]. Her other records show how much ground the search could cover. An 80-pound female she collared as a pup in Glacier was shot seven months later 540 miles north in British Columbia. A Wyoming wolf reached just north of the Grand Canyon, and a wolf killed in Colorado turned out to be from the Great Lakes region [1]. A 111-pound male she caught in 1990 dispersed alone into Idaho's Frank Church Wilderness and survived about four years without other wolves, until a black female released in the 1995 to 1996 reintroduction ran straight to him, and they bred for years [1].

Her account of wolf society is unsentimental. "They live in packs because they're not very efficient killers," she says [1]. Unlike mountain lions, wolves have no claws to hold prey and can use only their teeth, so elk, moose and bison take teamwork and cost them broken legs and jaws [1]. One Yellowstone wolf had its jaw broken by an elk, healed, and was later seen hunting again [1]. Packs are family groups that defend territory against unrelated wolves, often to the death, and she says wolves killing other wolves accounts for around 70 to 75 percent of wolf deaths in Yellowstone [1]. A pack will tree a mountain lion and kill it, often without eating it, simply to remove a competitor [1].

She gives evidence that wolves learn from experience and that what they learn depends on where they are. Wolves that walked into Montana from Canada on their own had learned to avoid livestock along the way, which is one reason she opposed releasing wolves and preferred natural return [1]. Yellowstone wolves learn to ignore people inside the park and are then shot just outside it, and wolves raised pups in a gated Montana subdivision where there was no hunting [1]. Early in her career she tried to turn that learning against them with sirens, flashing lights, fladry streamers and beef baits laced with lithium chloride to make wolves sick. The wolves ate every bait anyway [1].

Boyd is also the most careful of these observers. When Rogan brings up reports of a 400-wolf super pack in Siberia and argues that extreme conditions might change behavior, she tells him he is giving wolves human reasoning [1]. Wolves live in families, the largest Yellowstone pack she knows of reached 34, and typical packs run 10 to 15 [1]. She describes life in the woods as giving a person a blend of science and intuition, and she uses both, but she labels her guesses as guesses [1]. She warns against inflated claims in the other direction too, saying of the viral story that wolves transformed Yellowstone's rivers that "wolves have not saved the planet" [1].

Her conversation adds two findings that complicate any simple score for intelligence. Rogan and his producer read that Yellowstone wolves infected with the parasite toxoplasmosis are far more likely to become pack leaders and to take risks [1]. And Boyd says Yellowstone research suggests the gene for black coats came from dogs and is linked to disease resistance, affecting mate choice in outbreak years [1]. Leadership and choice of partner, the things we read as character, are tied to infection and genes in ways no observer could see by watching alone.

Forrest Galante and Joe Rogan: the wrong yardstick

Galante, a wildlife biologist and conservationist, makes the most direct argument about measurement. He and Rogan both say we wrongly define intelligence as the ability to manipulate the environment [2]. Cetaceans are nomadic apex predators that move in three dimensions and simply do not need houses or phones [2]. Rogan suggests they are sea people, points to the dolphin's large cerebral cortex, and predicts that future generations will look back on keeping these animals the way we look back on slavery [2].

The evidence Galante offers is what he has seen. Orca populations have their own languages and diets and often cannot communicate with each other [2]. Off Baja, Mexico, he jumped into the water with a transient pod. The bull kept away, but the cows and calves circled him and his friend twice, studying them with big eyes, before losing interest [2]. He and Rogan also discuss newly documented footage of orcas head-butting ocean sunfish so hard that they explode, which Galante compares to a bored person swerving to hit a turtle [2]. A mind that gets bored and makes its own entertainment is not always kind.

On elephants, he believes they have emotional highs and lows far deeper than humans can comprehend [2]. His fresh examples came from rescues in India with Vantara, which he calls the world's largest wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center. "It makes the San Diego Zoo look like a roadside attraction," he says [2]. One elephant that had been hit by a car would not bear weight on its injured leg. It walked on three legs and used its trunk as a fourth limb [2]. He adds that elephants were never designed to carry people and that the worst damage comes from walking on concrete, since they walk on their toes on soft padded feet [2].

His chimpanzee stories show social complexity in the wild. On a river in the Congo region, chimpanzees and gorillas gather on opposite banks, throw things and display at each other, and research shows young chimps and gorillas feeding together in fig trees, with chimps even imitating gorilla chest-beating [2]. He describes an ongoing chimpanzee war in which a large troop split in two after rival leaders emerged and females were scarce, and the groups now fight regularly, which Rogan finds deeply human [2].

Galante's second argument is about who is entitled to say what an animal can do. He tells of a world-leading shark researcher, with dozens of papers on one species, who joined a field trip and then explained that she could not swim and had never been in the ocean. She had dissected specimens and could give the tooth count, but had never seen one alive [2]. His verdict: "the guy who fishes and eats it in the village next door is more of an authority than this person" [2]. He does not want papers abandoned, and he says a dead animal should still be cut open and measured. But he thinks observational knowledge should be a requirement for anyone considered an authority, saying, "i think you have to have observational knowledge" [2]. He is clear that this does not mean touching the animals, and that with wild chimpanzees it should not [2].

The model he and Rogan hold up is the research shown in the series Chimp Nation, where scientists were embedded with one group of chimpanzees for more than 20 years [2]. Rogan describes the protocol that made it possible: stay at least 20 yards away, never have food around them, and do not look them in the eyes, while chimps lived, died and raised young around the same people [2]. Galante's summary of his own outlook is that "Every animal theory we've ever had evolves and changes as we learn more" [2].

He extends the point to animals that science has dismissed altogether. The saola, a large bovid in Vietnam and Laos, was waved away by Western scientists until it proved real. Many so-called cryptids, he says, are simply real animals nobody bothers to look for, like a burrowing snake well known to the villagers who dig their crops [2]. Rogan adds that there is an arrogance in assuming we have audited every animal on the planet [2]. Local knowledge was ahead of the literature.

Paul Rosolie: elephants as a society alongside ours

Rosolie, a naturalist who has spent 18 years in the Peruvian Amazon and has lived among elephants in India and Africa, calls elephants his absolute favorite animals [3]. A bull elephant, he says, is "an octopus faced butterfly eared behemoth that's a survival machine" [3].

His case that they form a society rests on a list of abilities. Elephants communicate with seismic vibrations, live in matriarchal societies, remember ancestral maps to water, and have burial rituals [3]. He sees them as a sibling species that shared this epoch with us, and believes they deserve representation in government [3].

He describes a code of ethics. Older males discipline young ones, and the matriarchs decide where the herd goes, which he contrasts with grizzly bears, where males may kill cubs [3]. He tells of a herd crossing an Indian village that surrounded a terrified girl and touched her belly with their trunks, because they could sense she was pregnant [3]. He also tells a less flattering story, of a young male who crushed a pestering warthog and then paraded around proudly [3].

On method he cites Frans de Waal's work on animal intelligence and argues that studying elephants in captivity misses who they are [3]. The abilities he lists are ones a pen cannot show: there is no ancestral route to water inside an enclosure and no herd for a matriarch to lead.

Rosolie applies the same close reading to animals that few people credit with any inner life. He insists that nothing in the jungle wants to get you, except perhaps the mosquitoes, and that animals want to eat and live in peace [3]. Some bushmasters, which he believes are the largest vipers on Earth, coil beside trails for weeks while digesting and barely react to people [3]. He tells of an Indian snake rescuer who calmed a nine-foot king cobra in a family's home by letting it drink from a water bottle, because it was simply thirsty [3]. Apart from two giant constrictors, he says, there is no such thing as an aggressive snake [3]. Black caimans he calls "peaceful dragons that sit on the side of the river," and he knows of nobody eaten by one [3]. What looks like aggression is, in his reading, usually an animal with a need that someone failed to notice.

His stories of play and partnership point the same way. A river otter once ran up to him on a stream, seemed to beckon him along, and led him to a lake where a family of otters was taunting a 16-foot black caiman, darting in and biting it as it thrashed, clearly having fun [3]. He would choose to be a giant river otter if he could, because they live in close social families that remind him of a big Italian family [3]. With herpetologist Pat Champagne he co-authored papers showing that anacondas are not purely ambush predators but pursue prey, using streams as corridors and even burrowing [3]. Sustained observation overturned the textbook picture of even a snake.

And he keeps returning to how little is known. For most of the region's roughly 1,500 butterfly species nobody knows which plants the caterpillars need, and about half of rainforest life is in a canopy that scientists have had to reach with ropes, slingshots and hot-air balloons [3]. His rangers recorded pygmy marmosets on their river, and he had the only photograph of an emperor tamarin there, despite armchair experts insisting such species were absent [3].

Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride: what a cage does to a clever animal

Goode and McBride spent years filming people who keep chimpanzees and tigers at home, about 250 days and roughly 1,300 hours of primary footage for Chimp Crazy alone [4]. Their evidence about chimp minds is what happens when those minds are confined.

Goode says people who kept many tigers told him they would prefer a hundred tigers to a single chimp [4]. The reason is intelligence joined to strength. Chimps can figure out combination locks and need multiple layers of locks, and they become dangerous at around five to seven years old [4]. The filmmakers describe them as fighters that target faces, genitals and fingers, with enormous strength and no remorse [4]. Rogan remembers a baby chimp on a television set climbing on his back and feeling as if it were made of steel wires [4]. Goode notes that chimpanzees are more closely related to us than any other ape [4].

Their stories of captive chimps are the starkest material in any of the four conversations. A chimp in Kenya, raised in isolation, became fixated on pornography and on its blonde keeper [4]. Some chimps watch the same movie over and over [4]. Tonia Haddix's chimp Tonka stared at Instagram Reels in a basement cage [4]. Goode describes rocking as a sign of desperate depression in chimps [4]. Rogan's reaction is that nothing about such a life is natural, from the cage to the chicken nuggets and soda [4].

The story of Travis makes the cost concrete. Travis, owned by Sandra Herold in Stamford, Connecticut, lived for years in relative freedom as a local celebrity and tow-shop mascot, until an incident in traffic led the state to confine him [4]. McBride believes that confinement played a major role in the eventual attack [4]. Many performing chimps, they add, have their canines removed, are castrated or wear shock collars [4]. McBride says attacks by captive animals are widely underreported because owners fear losing their animals [4].

On zoos, Goode draws distinctions by species. Giraffes and giant tortoises seem to cope with captivity, he and Rogan agree, but cetaceans, elephants and most primates do not [4]. As it is put in their conversation, "the whales and cetaceans and elephants are not happy in zoos," and neither are most primates [4]. Rogan describes the moment zoos stopped sitting right with him, a lone monkey screaming in a tiny cage in Denver and a polar bear pacing endlessly in a small enclosure. "It's animal prison for animals that did nothing wrong," he says [4]. Goode says the film Blackfish shook zoos into adopting enrichment programs, such as putting food in a ball so that an animal has to work for it [4].

The filmmakers also look at the humans. Owning a chimp is still legal in roughly 20 states [4]. Goode describes the "monkey moms" who dress their monkeys like dolls and treat them as children [4]. Rogan's theory of the type is "a less than extraordinary person who gets attached and addicted to extraordinary experiences" [4]. The conversation ends on a 1964 Bronx Zoo exhibit that labeled a barred mirror "The world's most dangerous animal" [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

The four conversations agree on the central point. Animals show capacities in the wild that the usual tests do not capture, and the people who see those capacities are the ones who have put in years of watching. Boyd has four decades with wolves [1]. Rosolie has lived among elephants and in the forest [3]. Galante's ideal is 20 years with one troop of chimpanzees [2]. Goode and McBride filmed for hundreds of days [4].

They agree that captivity distorts what it claims to show. Rosolie says so about elephants [3]. Goode's rocking chimps, and the one fixated on a screen, are his evidence about primates [4]. Boyd's habituated wolves show that even wild animals behave differently where human rules change [1]. Galante and Goode separately name the same groups as unsuited to confinement: cetaceans and elephants, with Goode adding most primates [2][4].

They also agree, though they stress it differently, that a capable mind is not a gentle one. Orcas destroy sunfish for no apparent reason [2]. A young elephant kills a warthog and shows off [3]. Wolves kill mountain lions they do not eat, and most Yellowstone wolves that die are killed by other wolves [1]. Chimpanzees wage war on former troop-mates and maim people without remorse [2][4]. None of the observers uses this to argue that the animals deserve less. Goode and McBride use it to argue that such animals cannot be kept safely [4].

The disagreements are worth stating plainly.

How far to read human qualities into animals. Rosolie speaks of an elephant code of ethics and of representation in government, and Galante of emotions deeper than humans can comprehend [2][3]. Boyd's instinct runs the other way. She tells Rogan he is giving wolves human reasoning, and she marks her own interpretation of the dug-up traps with a "perhaps" [1]. Each has a reason. Rosolie and Galante are arguing against a habit of underestimating animals, and they think the cautious view has missed real things, as it did with the saola and with anacondas that hunt [2][3]. Boyd is arguing against myths, such as the super wolf and the super pack, that do wolves harm by stirring up fear [1]. The summaries give no test that would settle which of Rosolie's claims are literal and which are a way of speaking, so the gap stays open.

Whether all captivity is wrong. Rogan comes closest to saying yes, with his prison image and his comparison to slavery [2][4]. Galante pushes back on the broad anti-zoo movement. Captivity has saved species and connected children to nature, he says, and there is a huge gray area between Tiger King and the San Diego Zoo [2]. Goode holds a middle view: zoos can still serve through assurance colonies for species that are extinct or nearly extinct in the wild, and he cites the California condor, brought back from around two dozen birds to hundreds [4]. McBride notes the scale of the question, with roughly 750 million visits to U.S. zoos each year, more than attend the five major sports combined, while relatively little of the money goes to conservation [4].

Individuals or species. Goode says he is not fully aligned with PETA. When the choice is between removing an introduced rat or mongoose and losing the last of an endangered tortoise or iguana, he will remove the invader, where, as he puts it, "PETA basically views it as the rat has rights just as much as the tortoise" [4]. Galante gives a parallel case. Rogan was saddened by a wolf sanctuary where the animals were neutered, and Galante explains the tradeoff: releasing wolf-dog hybrids would muddy wild gene pools [2]. Respecting animal minds does not remove these choices.

Whether intelligence is the right basis at all. The implied rule in much of this is that smarter, more social animals have a stronger claim. Rosolie widens it, grieving over a caiman killed with a machete and left uneaten, and over a stingray whose tail a man cut off for bait [3]. For him the claim does not depend on a high score.

Why It Works

The sources suggest several reasons that standard measures miss what field observers see.

The yardstick is built around us. If intelligence means changing the environment with tools and buildings, a nomadic ocean predator will always score low, however rich its communication or social life [2].

Animals sense what we cannot. Elephants use seismic vibrations and, in Rosolie's account, detected a pregnancy [3]. Rogan dismisses scent-blocking sprays, he and Boyd marvel at animals' senses, and Boyd cannot explain how a wolf learns of a vacancy far away [1]. A test designed around human senses will not register abilities that run on other channels.

Much of what animals know is held by the group and passed down. Orca populations have distinct languages and diets [2]. Elephant matriarchs carry routes to water [3]. Boyd suspects wolves teach their young about traps [1]. Knowledge of this kind shows only in an intact group over years.

Captivity removes the conditions the mind is built for. A chimp with locks to solve and nothing else to do ends up staring at a phone or rocking [4]. An elephant on concrete is in pain before any question of its mind arises [2].

The tools of study are short-lived. Boyd's collars last about four years for VHF and one to two for satellite [1]. The canopy holds half the forest's life and is barely reachable [3]. Long questions get short answers.

Academic incentives reward the wrong thing. Galante argues that academia rewards publishing, that a tiny funding pool sets researchers against each other, and that a person can become the leading authority on an animal from specimens in jars [2].

Behavior has hidden drivers. The toxoplasmosis finding and the black-coat gene show that what looks like temperament or preference can have causes invisible to both a test and an observer [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The argument is strongest for long-lived, social, wide-ranging animals: wolves, elephants, great apes, orcas and dolphins. These are the species every source singles out [1][2][3][4].

It applies less clearly to animals that seem to cope with captivity. Goode and Rogan name giraffes and giant tortoises [4]. And it does not rule out captivity used to save a species from extinction, which Goode and Galante both defend [2][4].

It does not license believing every story. Boyd doubts the super pack. The morphic resonance idea that Rogan reads about, that once some animals learn a task others learn it faster, is presented in the conversation as a hypothesis and nothing more [1]. Galante himself tracks the fading evidence for the thylacine honestly, saying the local legends are growing fewer [2].

Close observation has rules of its own. The chimp researchers kept their distance and never brought food [2]. Rosolie admits to grabbing a bushmaster by the tail and to being bitten to the bone by a caiman, and Galante lowered himself into a pond of crocodiles in a homemade cage, which Rogan begs him not to repeat [2][3]. Getting close is not the same as observing well.

Nor does respect for a clever animal mean it is safe. The filmmakers' whole subject is people who mistook closeness to a chimp for a relationship on human terms [4]. Boyd notes that wolf attacks on people are now extremely rare, and that bears could kill people far more often than they do, but her advice still includes carrying bear spray [1].

What To Do With It

1. Question the test before you accept the score. When someone ranks an animal's intelligence, ask whether the measure is tool use and building. Galante and Rogan's point is that this rewards being like us [2].

2. Give weight to people who have watched the living animal. Galante's standard is observational knowledge alongside scientific data, and he counts hunters, fishers and villagers among those who have it [2].

3. Prefer long studies of intact wild groups. The 20-year chimpanzee study and Boyd's 40 years with wolves are the models these sources admire [1][2].

4. Observe without interfering. The protocol Rogan describes is to keep at least 20 yards away, never have food around the animals, and avoid eye contact [2].

5. Do not judge an elephant, an ape or an orca by how it behaves in an enclosure. Rosolie says captivity misses who elephants are, and Goode says these animals are not happy in zoos [3][4].

6. Do not keep primates as pets, and question the laws that allow it. Chimps become dangerous at five to seven years old, defeat locks, and suffer visibly in confinement, yet ownership remains legal in roughly 20 states [4].

7. Sort zoos instead of treating them as one thing. Look for enrichment, for species that tolerate captivity, and for real conservation work such as assurance colonies. Galante's gray area between a roadside attraction and a serious institution is the useful frame [2][4].

8. Do not ride elephants, and keep them off hard ground. Galante says they were never designed to carry people and that concrete does the worst damage to their feet [2].

9. Read behavior as need before you read it as aggression. Rosolie's thirsty cobra and resting bushmasters are his examples [3].

10. Keep your own claims modest. Boyd says "perhaps" about what her wolves intended and refuses stories she cannot support. That habit is what makes the rest of her testimony credible [1].

Sources

1. Diane K. Boyd on 40 Years With Wolves: Myths, Reintroduction and Life Off the Grid · The Joe Rogan Experience
2. Forrest Galante on Orcas, Elephant Rescues, Cryptids, Crocodile Cages and Broken Conservation Science · The Joe Rogan Experience
3. Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God · Lex Fridman Podcast
4. Eric Goode and Jeremy McBride on Chimp Crazy, Tiger King and America's Captive Wild Animals (JRE #2203) · The Joe Rogan Experience