A New Study Shows Animals Solve Puzzles Simply for Fun

A raccoon’s thoughts are a little unnerving. In the videos that the UBC team has been sharing since early March, you can see a small, masked animal hunched over a clear plastic box, its paws working a latch with the calm, unfazed attention of someone going through a junk drawer. After about three minutes, it consumes the marshmallow. Then, rather than straying, it returns to the box and continues to open objects.

The new study in Animal Behavior focuses on that precise moment, right after the snack. Working out of the University of British Columbia, Hannah Griebling and Sarah Benson-Amram assembled a puzzle box with nine different entry points, ranging from simple to extremely difficult. There was only one marshmallow available during each 20-minute trial. The sixteen raccoons at a Colorado research facility were meant to locate the food. In reality, they simply continued.

Griebling said, “We weren’t expecting them to open all three solutions in a single trial,” to the media. “They kept problem solving even when there was no marshmallow at the end.” It’s an odd sentence to sit with. We often assume that animals act in ways that clearly relate to their survival—calories in, calories out, evolutionary ledger balanced. That is contradicted by the notion that a raccoon might play around with a latch out of something like interest.

This information gathering is referred to by researchers as “foraging,” which sounds more organized than it actually is. The animal expends actual energy on a task that has no immediate reward, most likely because the knowledge itself may be useful in the future. It’s more difficult to determine whether that qualifies as curiosity in the sense that people use the word. The raccoons might just be doing a cheap background scan of their surroundings. They might also find it enjoyable. It makes sense that the study does not attempt to resolve the possibility that both could be true simultaneously.

The data does demonstrate that the animals are making calculations. They experimented with various latches, different orders, and a sort of careless looting when the puzzles were simple. They tightened up and stuck with what worked as the puzzles became more difficult. Griebling likened it to placing a restaurant order. You experiment with a cheap menu. You choose the dish you are familiar with from the pricey menu. That reasoning has a familiarity that probably says something awkward about us as well.

Additionally, it partially explains why raccoons have thrived in urban areas. They have been plaguing Vancouver for years, and anyone who has attempted to obtain a green compost bin is aware that the game is pretty much over. It includes the forepaws, which are packed with sensory nerves. Originally designed to feel around in stream beds, they are now used to prevent childproof catches. However, the cognitive component is more important. An animal that learns for the purpose of learning is one that will figure out your bin on a quiet Tuesday night.

For as long as people have written about raccoons, Benson-Amram noted, raccoon intelligence has been a part of folklore. The evidence was what was lacking. Even though this study is small—sixteen animals, one box, and a lot of marshmallows—it is at last providing some evidence. Watching the video gives us the impression that we have been underestimating something that is right in front of us. The researchers are cautious to point out that wild and captive behavior aren’t always the same and that further research is required before making generalizations about animal minds.

Even so. It’s difficult to ignore the consequences. If raccoons enjoy solving puzzles, it becomes much more intriguing and difficult to rule out the possibility that other animals do the same.