The proof is in the pudding, it seems. Don't be decieved by her pretty face and charming manner, Tea is a terrible liar. She does it rather subtly, in fact. Did you notice the way that she readily conceeded that genus
homo (chimps, bonobos and humans) are natural liars in order to more convincingly deny her own guilt? Don't believe a word of it!
Tea, like all primates, is an accomplished liar. Just this weekend I was reading about the language skills of a distant relative of ours, the Vervet Monkey. (One of the lower primates, not very closely related to humans, or to orangutans, for that matter. Here is a picture. You might also remember the one in the "what do we all look like thread", or possibly Tea's lying "you are all a lot of fakes" thread, that was picking the nits out of Sol's hair.)
Vervets live in troops of about 40 and they are of interest to linguists because they are not too difficult to study in the wild and they have a very rudimentary language - something that is considered likely to throw some light on the development of human language. So far, humans have discovered about ten words. The easiest to understand (so far as we humans are concerned) are the danger words: "snake", "eagle", "human", and "leopard". At first you might think that these are not "language" at all, just involuntary alarm calls, no more advanced than the instinctive call of a sparrow that spies a hawk. Not so: there are several telling differences. First, vervets have to
learn their calls: young ones pick them up from adults and (just as young humans do) quite often get them wrong for the first year or two. Second, they issue them in different ways according to circumstance: a mother will say the "eagle" word much more often if she is with her child than she will with relative strangers, and it's not unknown for a vervet to (apparently deliberately)
not give the alarm when the threat is to another vervet that he doesn't like! Third, vervets quite inteligently make up new calls when required. Not too long ago a troop of vervets were observed interacting with a new arrival in their area: lions. To begin with they made do with the "leopard" call, but soon evolved a slightly different call to mean "lion".
And finally, vervets use their calls to lie from time to time. Sometimes one troop gets into a border dispute with another troop. A fight ensues, and sometimes one of the vervets on the losing side will suddenly give the "leopard" call. Both sides hurriedly stop fighting and race for the nearest tree!
Now do you believe me when I say that Tea is not just an accomplised liar, but the ability was something she was born with?
By the way, though I've been making the case for the entire primate family being liars just now, I don't think that lying is restricted to primates like us. For example, Belinda's dog Max lies to me now and then. I'm
sure that the message he is giving me sometimes when I arrive in the evening and Belinda isn't home is a straight-out lie. I've known him look at me and near enough to say out loud "Belinda isn't here, and I'm
hungry - can't
you feed me?" And he will try this on even though I know damn well that she fed him half an hour ago, just before she left. If I was there when she fed him, I get a clearly different routine: a "look, I know I've had dinner, but it wasn't very much and I'm still hungry: you could give me a
little bit more, couldn't you?". The two routines are quite different, no way they are the same thing. When Max knows that I know he has been fed, he asks a little favour. When he thinks that I don't know, I get the full routine. One day I'm going to arrive and Belinda will be out and I genuinely won't know if she has fed the dogs or not. That will be an interesting test of canine psychology and my ability to read it: will I be able to tell if Max is trying to fool me or if he is genuinely hungry?
Another example is the famous day I stupidly left a pound of excellent cheese on the outside table. Max
knows he's not allowed to touch anything on that table, and he never, ever does when there is anybody home. But that day I forgot to put the cheese back in the fridge and we went out for a while. When we got back we were treated to the biggest display of pure-as-the-driven-snow innocence you could hope to witness, and I am quite certain that Max knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, when he had eaten as much as he could manage - about half a pound - he snuck off and buried the remainder in the hope that we would not find it. Max is crazy about cheese.
(And speaking of language, he and Ida can't speak, of course, but they recognise that cheese word as readily as I do. You can be talking quietly away to a human and drop the "C" word and - instantly - there are two pairs of eyes watching you just in case there happens to be some of the magic flavour to be had.)
And finally, I'm not quite so absolutely sure of this, but not too long ago I had what looked very like an instance of lying from one of my cats. I got home after work one day and Ginger was on the roof. Seeing me, and sensing a possible opportunity to get fed, she moved promptly to the edge of the roof to descend the tree that grows nearby, just around the corner of the house - same way that she usually gets up and down. But this time she slipped, and did a spectacular 30-foot fall into the garden bed. She landed just out of sight around the corner of the house. She was quite unhurt (amazing creatures, cats) but then, instead of the normal direct approach to me, she dissapeared. Fifteen seconds later, she appeared around the
other corner of the house, doing her absolute best to pretend that nothing in the slightest unusual had happened. Now I can't prove it, and if someone else told me the story I'd think that that person was romancing, but deep down I'm absolutely certain that she was highly embarrased about her clumsy fall, and that the unexpected circuit of the house was designed to trick me into thinking that that had been some
other cat that fell off.
