Our anthropocentric way of looking at things must retreat further and further, and the standpoint of the animal must be the only decisive one (von Uexkull, 1909/1985, p. 223).The early post-Darwinian comparative psychologists were very sympathetic to the kinds of cognitive questions Griffin (1976) posed in his initial attempt to establish a cognitive ethology and break the shackles of a mindless behaviorism (Burghardt, 1985). But these early attempts at comparativeCOGNITION AND REPTILESthe boy disappeared underwater with the croc. But then the boy suddenly appeared supine and safe on the back of the croc, which then swam to the shore, flipped the child safely onto the bank, and calmly returned to the deep. I think that such a story about a dolphin, even less documented, would be far more readily accepted. Why is this the case? There are two main reasons: (a) crocs have an image problem in terms of benign behavior and appearance, and (b) their relatively small brains and perceived lack of intelligence would seem to preclude thoughtful altruistic behavior, even if derived from parental responses, as are considered responsible for similar human rescues by dolphins.
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Gordon M. Burghardt (2013) studied this question.