Do Animals Have a Culture?John FriedlLately, social scientists have begun to ask if culture is found just in humans, or if some animals have a culture too. When we speak of culture. We mean a way of life a group of people have in common. Culture includes the beliefs and attitudes we learn. It is the patterns of behavior that help people to live together. It is also the patterns of behavior that make one group different from another group.Our culture lets us make up for having lost our strength, claws, long teeth and some other defenses. Instead, we use tools, cooperate with one another, and communicate with language. But these aspects of behavior, or culture”, can also be found in the lives of certain animals.We used to think that the ability to use tools was the dividing line between human beings and animals. Lately, however we have found that this is not the case. Chimpanzees can not only use tools, but actually make tools themselves. This is a major step up from simply picking up a handy object and using it. For example, chimpanzees have been seen stripping the leaves of a branch, then putting it into a termite nest. When the termites bite at the stick, the chimpanzee removes it and eats them off the end-like our use of a fork.For some time we thought that although human beings learned their culture, animals could not be taught such behavior. Or even if they could learn, they would not teach one another in the way humans do. This ,too, has proven to be untrue. A group of Japanese monkeys was studied at the Kyoto University Monkey Center in Japan. They were given sweet potatoes by scientists who wanted to attract them to the shore of an island. One day a young female began to wash her sweet potato to get rid of the sand. This practice soon spread through the group. It became learned behavior, not from humans but from other monkeys. Now almost all the monkeys who have come into contact with this group do not. Thus there is “culture” deference among animals.We have ruled out tool use and invention as ways of telling animal behavior and human behavior. We have also ruled out the learning and sharing of behavior. Yet we still have held onto the last feature-language. But even the use of language can no longer separate human culture from animal culture. Attempts to teach apes to speak have failed. But teaching them language has been very successful if we are willing to accept other forms than just the spoken word. Two psychologists trained a chimpanzee named Washoe to use Standard American Sign Language. This is the same language used by deaf people. In this language, talk is made through gestures, and not by spelling out words with individual letters. By the time she was five years old, Washoe had a vocabulary of 130 signs. Also, she could put them together in new ways that had not been taught originally. This means she could create language and not just mimic it. She creates her own sentences that have real meaning. This has allowed two-way talk. It permits more than one-way command and response.Of course, there are limits to the culture of animals. As far as we know, no ape has formed social institutions such as religion or law. Also, some chimpanzees may be able to learn sign language, but this form of language is limited in its ability to communicate abstract ideas. Yet with a spoken language we can communicate our entire culture to anyone else who knows that language. Perhaps the most important thing is that the line dividing us from them is not as clear as we used to think.