The Creative Lives of Dogs: The importance of fostering creativity in our canine companions
Among other things, creativity arises out of curiosity, flexibility, empathy, intelligence, and self-awareness. Animals apply creativity to communication, play, construction, exuberance, and emotional agency.
JESSICA PIERCE: Several months ago, an acquaintance told me a fascinating story about his dog Luka. Every night, Luka gathers his large assortment of toys and arranges them in a particular configuration–one that changes from one night to the next. After making his “painting with toys,” Luka settles down in the middle of the pile and goes to sleep.
This story has been running through my head as I’ve been reading Carol Gigliotti’s fascinating new book, The Creative Lives of Animals. Was Luka’s nighttime ritual an act of creativity? Although Gigliotti doesn’t write specifically about dogs, her work has invited me to wonder more actively about the creative lives of dogs–especially pet dogs, whose creativity should be on full display for us as their housemates and life partners…
“Animals create.” This is the opening salvo in Gigliotti’s book. Her goal is not, she says, to compare human creativity to the creativity of nonhuman animals but to see both as “part of a ‘deep source’ of encompassing creativity”. She defines creativity as “a dynamic process in which novel and meaningful behaviors are generated”. Novel behaviors are creative if they are meaningful and purposeful to the individual.
Gigliotti offers various lines of evidence for animal creativity. She explores the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of the creative process and suggests that these are present in a broad range of nonhuman animal species. Among other things, creativity arises out of curiosity, flexibility, empathy, intelligence, and self-awareness.
Her book gives example after example of animals using creativity to meet the demands of their physical and social environments. Animals apply creativity to communication (the creation by prairie dogs of descriptive terms for unique objects or threats), play (the imaginative play of crocodiles), construction (the innovative engineering of beaver dams), sexual exuberance (the diverse mating dances of the Western Grebe), to emotional agency (the use of social diplomacy among chimpanzees). SOURCE…
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