Leah, the gorilla with the walking stick

The gorilla in the elephant pool is documented at PLOS biology.

Descriptions of novel tool use by great apes in response to different circumstances aids us in understanding the factors favoring the evolution of tool use in humans. This paper documents what we believe to be the first two observations of tool use in wild western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla). We first observed an adult female gorilla using a branch as a walking stick to test water deepness and to aid in her attempt to cross a pool of water at Mbeli Bai, a swampy forest clearing in northern Congo. In the second case we saw another adult female using a detached trunk from a small shrub as a stabilizer during food processing. She then used the trunk as a self-made bridge to cross a deep patch of swamp. In contrast to information from other great apes, which mostly show tool use in the context of food extraction, our observations show that in gorillas other factors such as habitat type can stimulate the use of tools.

Elsewhere it is noted that the gorilla testing the depth of the pond is nick-named Leah.

No viable account of lived-experience, Erlebnis or Lebenswelt is now defensible which is not also adequate to expliate the world of at least great apes, elephants and perhaps also dolphins and whales, our porcine companions and the crow.  Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Heidegger, did phenomenology (at least as a propaedeutic to a philosophy of leved experience) a disservice in his attack on Galileo as much as in his misplaced Cartesianism (which has so little to do with Descartes.)

The day of a Peter Geach speaking of "brutes" in a text on mental acts is at an end (at least outside the confines of theology.)

One step in the right direction has been taken by Colin McGinn (also an atheist) is restoring some of the terms of conscious experience, awareness, attention and reverie.

The ethnological accoutn will be that Leah acted without thinking and without awareness or experience. But without regard for Heraclitus she steps into the pond a second time but not as she did the first time.  At what point did she become cognizant of her predicament: when the water proved deep or when she noticed the stick?

The challenge is laid out quote clearly in a Merck manual for veterinarians on swine:

Postweaning sows and prepubertal gilts should be kept in the sight and smell of a boar to induce synchronous estrus (the Whitten effect). They also experience a dormitory effect (the McClintock or Fraser-Darling effect) with regard to synchrony due to the presence of other females. Sexual behavior in pigs is almost universally associated with the “chant de coeur” or song of the heart. Courting pigs are vocal. Boars have a gape response (flehmen), and some boars can detect estrous females through olfactory means. Boars will nuzzle the head, shoulders, flank, and anogenital area of sows during courtship. If the pheromonal cues are present, boars progress to pushing on a sow to see if she will move. If she stands, she is willing to mate. Boars exhibit a unique, pheromonally based solicitation behavior toward females: they “champ”—chewing and gnashing their teeth, producing frothy saliva that is rich in the pheromone androstenol. Androstenol is also present in preputial fluids. Courting boars mark trees with urine and saliva produced by champing. Boars are naturally slow to ejaculate (up to 30 min), which may be a correlate of their long courtship, but mate best if raised in a rich social environment. Boars raised in isolation have decreased sexual performance later in life.

The pheromone explanation would have appealed to the Viennese neuroanatomist who reassured Ludwig Binswanger that he would find a place for his higher concepts in the chemical basement. What a philosophy of the self-aware organism must achieve is not a rejection of reductionism, but an alternative in which reductionism is side-stepped or at least taken out of the focus. In past years, history was thought to offer such an explanatory example.

A pheromone explanation is also relevant in many human contexts: but it is not the singular determinant for most human action in the arena of eros, sexuality and sexual relations.

Until we have studies of porcine social groups in relatively natural settings, we will be ill-positioned to assess the behavioral determinants in boar and sow behaviour.

When the Mangalitza pigs recently arrived in Great Britain, some may have been unaware of what necessitated their delivery. The last Lincolnshire curly-coated pigs are reported to have been sent to slaughter when they lost interest for a "large firm" and its "research purposes".  That was in 1972. Hopefully such action would be unthinkable in the western world today.