Talented Animals

I’ve already covered animals who paint. But today I want to talk about other extremely talented animals. And its all in honour of a border collie called Gin.

Any non-UK readers (and to be honest probably quite a few British readers) won’t have the faintest idea who Gin is.

Well, Gin (and owner Kate) are finalists in tomorrow’s Britain’s Got Talent. And if there is any justice in the world they will win the £10 000 prize money and the chance to perform at the Royal Variety Performance*. So get voting!

But, my all time favourite talented animal was a horse named Clever Hans.

When talking and writing about Clever Hans the first thing animal behaviourists and historians will say is: “Oh, Clever Hans! He turned out not to be so clever after all”.

Read his story and decide if you think Clever Hans was clever or not.

Clever Hans was a popular attraction in Germany, where he appeared to be able to solve maths problems, read and generally demonstrate himself to be smarter than the average horse.

The psychologist Oskar Pfungst was unconvinced, and in his role as a 1900s James Randi he undertook a scientific investigation into Hans and his alleged intelligence.

He found no fraud. But Pfungst concluded that, far from performing these intellectual tasks himself, Hans was in fact responding to subconscious clues from the people around him.

This is the point where people say Hans wasn’t so clever. But I have to say I think he was robbed! He may not have been actually doing maths problems, but he was picking up on subtle clues. Similarly, Gin (much as I love him) is not actually dancing in time to the music – he’s picking up on clues from his owner (who seems a pretty good dancer herself).

Anyway, Pfungst’s research remains important today. Especially, in discussions of Facilitated Communication, a controversial technique sometimes used to communicate with severely disabled children.

*Although, personally, I also have a soft spot Bollywood-Michael Jackson Fusion Dance act Signature.

Scary Dancing Clowns on Britain’s Got Talent

If you suffer from coulrophobia (that’s fear of clowns) you were probably shaking life a leaf after one recent episode of Britain’s Got Talent. A troupe of gymnastic child clowns. I hope no one watching also had pedophobia (fear of children).

While I’m not actually scared of clowns, they do creep me out considerably. The phobia is surprisingly common and a recent study suggested that small children in hospitals were being freaked out rather than comforted by clowns painted on the walls.

Is there any real reason to fear clowns? Its been suggested that clowns sometimes represent the folkloric Trickster archetype. And in his colourful garb the Pied Piper bears more than a passing similarity to a clown. And he was certainly a danger to small children. There’s also the fact that serial killer John Wayne Gacy was a clown. Pennywise is pretty terrifying in Stephen King’s It.

And then there were the mysterious Phantom Clowns. I still shudder when I think about them. For more read Loren Coleman’s excellent book (and a must-have in every Fortean’s personal library) Mysterious America For a very brief overview of some of the debates around the phenomena try The Fortean Critic.

One last thing before the scary clown children movie (who thankfully failed to get through to the next round) my favourite clown urban legend. I quote one version here from the University of Maryland’s Legends Collection:

“This girl always babysat for this certain family in a nice, medium sized suburban neighborhood. The family had two kids; the little girl was six and the boy was eight. They lived in a nice, two story house. But there was something weird about the family. They loved dolls. They had a huge collection of dolls. Kind of weird, but you know. And so they had dolls displayed in cases and dolls sitting out.

One night, the parents go out to a dinner party, and this girl comes to baby-sit the children. She takes care of the kids, feeds them dinner, plays with them, and then puts them to bed upstairs. After that, she comes back downstairs and sits on the couch in the living room to start watching TV. But the whole doll thing is really creeping her out. She just doesn’t like the way they are sitting there and seem to be looking at her. But the one that was really bothering her was this big clown doll that was sitting on a rocking chair near the couch. She tries to just forget about it but she can’t. She feels a little dumb, but she decides to call the parents and ask them if she can put a blanket or sheet over this clown doll to cover it up.

When she reaches the parents and asks them about the clown doll, she hears a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Then the mom says to her in a hushed but extremely stern voice, “We DO NOT have a clown doll. Get the kids, call the police, and get out of the house as quickly as you can.”

The babysitter runs upstairs, wakes the kids, and brings them outside to her car, where she calls the police from her cell phone. When the police got to the house and searched it, they found that the clown doll was actually a schizophrenic midget that had been dressing up as a clown and living in the family’s house for the past week.

The parents reported to the police that for the past few days the children had been telling them that a clown ghost had been coming to visit them at night. The parents said they had just chalked it up to the kids’ runaway imaginations.”

Well, here it is…the clown dancing: