Giant tortoises show surprising cognitive powers
nature.com
nature.com
My small Meyers Parrot similarly plays games, remembers things for months but does eventually seem to forget things he has learned. His neocortex is probably only one square inch.
My personal belief is that in life in the universe (with about 400 billion galaxies times about 100 billion stars per galaxy) is wide spread, if rare. I think there is also some pressure for life to develop different types of intelligence based on their biology and environment.
Anyway, I am in strong agreement with the people here saying that it is difficult to recognize non-human intelligence as intelligence.
Eg tickling is learning to protect vulnerable spots on the body
You know you're not the only dog owner to say stuff like this, which I've always found odd. I think it's a kind of American exceptionalism writ large into vegetarian(?) thinking, where people see themselves as separate from the circle of life, instead of as someone in a relationship with nature. (Where they consider their pets "separate" and "part of nature" so its OK when they consume meat.)
Pretty much everyone in farming communities knows that animals are intelligent, its the people who are extremely separated that find the odd epiphany. I recommend talking to the farmers next time you're in Central Illinois.
By the way, pasture is good for the environment.
I grew up around hunting and farms and also don't find it surprising that animals are fairly intelligent.
While your statement about pasturing being good for the environment is partially true in that there are some forms that do some good, by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.[1] A lot of this land would actually be used more efficiently for production of non-animal proteins like legumes, especially considering the land that is used to supplement pasturing through production of animal feed in most modern agriculture.
> by and large meat production is actually one of the largest causes of GHG emissions.
Your link puts it at 14.5% for the entire life-cycle, which makes it one of the... smallest causes for GHG emissions. It's the smallest versus any other sector in the graphs I can find[1] (vs Commercial and residential, Transportation, Industry, Electricity are all larger slices of pie). Why say its one of the largest?
It really depends on the land and the crops. Lots of land cannot support anything but pasture, and lots of places would be ecologically improved with more pasture. Killing (say) a cow is worse than the killing all animals + ecosystem of the field that row crops require (obviously complete habitat destruction for any field critters at harvest time, but also pesticides and herbicides and such side effects).
If you are worried about GHG issues, why not talk about food footprint or animal deaths per calories? Should you really be trucking in lettuce from Mexico and California if you live in New Hampshire, where I live? Should you be buying avocados if what grows here are animals? Should lettuce be grown at all?
It seems very... speculative that so many are confident that the calculus tips in favor of "not the cow" here. If you eat pastured cow, you are supporting the ecosystem of cow (for its life or partial life if it EOLs in a feedlot) but also possums, raccoons, ducks, field mice, butterflies, snakes, birds, bees, and thousands of other insects that populate the fields of pasture. Ideally, for your entire meat consumption for the entire year, you eat a grand total of 1/2 cow. If you eat only row crops you support the destruction of these creatures, necessarily, unless at the same time you are carving out land for them elsewhere. But if there is reduced insect biomass in the world, or colony collapse disorder among pollinators, then I say this is blood on the hands of the vegetarians. Row crops (corn/soy/etc) have other destructive effects in the nature of their planting and harvesting, and good pasturing (which isn't all of it) builds soil and restores land. (If you want better pasturing everywhere, you're making an economic argument for something else, just like people who wish row crops didn't require mass pesticide/herbicide dousing.)
It gets even more nuanced and weird if you look into the ecological destruction required to keep other crops going. And it gets further nuanced still if you get into what GHG emissions for livestock are. In the 1800's Americans destroyed an absolutely massive biomass of bison, to near extinction[2], and replaced them with an almost equivalent biomass of cows, unintentionally making the methane impact... pretty neutral, on the lifetime scale of things. But maybe if the bison still roamed free today, environmentalists would advocate for destroying them, I don't know.
[1] for example: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#/media/File:Biso...
(Technically birds don’t have a neocortex, but apparently they have something that allows them to do many of the things that our neocortexes do).
I always wonder what was the pressure for humans to develop recursive language, and the cultural explosion about 70,000 years ago.
And in the millions of years before that, the pressure to rapidly dwvelop larger brains. Other animals didn't seem to do that (though, we probanly haven't tracked the development of other animals brain-sizes over such time spans as assiduously as our own).
As Mark Twain said (and I am paraphrasing), "the only distinction between man and the lesser animals is that the lesser animals don't sit around and talk about what makes them different from us."
Yes, they do. I won't let my cat near the computer, as she'll use it to log onto catnet and plot the cataclysm with the other cats. I've also caught her leafing through my electronics parts catalogs. I'm not sure how worried I should be.
(PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats.)
As I tell students, I would bet that within our lifetimes, as research continues and our instrumentation becomes better at detecting non-human communication means, we'll finally be able to detect and decode 'language' in a non-human animal which is sophisticated and rich enough as to be impossible to handwave away.
But what I keep to myself is that this kind of discovery, and the cross-species conversations it would prompt, has the potential to change the course of the dialogue on animal rights and what it means to be 'human'. But I suspect it will wind up being largely buried outside of certain academic and spiritual communities, mostly because I don't think parts of our society could handle learning the bovine words for 'slaughterhouse' or 'mourning'.
Those videos are on Instagram, not buried. I'm fairly sure any breakthroughs will make it to a Planet Earth documentary and we'll feel sad about it for a while then go buy beef from the shops anyway.
Reptilian brain crap which seems based on superficial shape when we really should know better now given evidence sitting in front of us.
It doesn't really hold. Sheep are infamously too dumb to live unassisted perhaps owing to overbreeding for docility.
Meanwhile cephalopods are capable of opening jars and get up to mischief like getting out of their tank and shorting out light fixtures when bored and I have observed hermit crabs transmitting behavior socially ("punching" instead of pinching with their larger claw) and figuring out how to rotate an improperly secured lid on its axis.
Most reptile training is pretty basic, and this experiment fits into those expectations:
If you're comparing them to dogs, which are pack animals where those skills are critical, it's not fair. They project their feelings.
Introverted animals have a lot in common with reptiles.
Humans really need to get over themselves as the only species that possesses intelligence.
Emotional... well that's something else.
Oh you mean like many of those who are homeless, who also happen to have mental health issues, yet we don't provide shelter, health care or food for?
Doesn’t it? It’s something we don’t say, because it’s horrendously impolite, and I wouldn’t say it myself outside the context of this conversation, but yes, the life of an intelligent person is worth less than that of a person with Down’s syndrome.
Don’t take my word for it though, look at revealed preferences. How many parents abort their unborn Down’s Syndrome babies?
That is controversial but probably not in the way that you originally meant.
You want to look at smart, look at house cats. They've got it figured out.
Cats also seem pretty intelligent to me.
Nobody should expect another species to share our concept of a capitalistic market, for that matter.
The Baboon That Controlled a Railway for 9 Years - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpoLkMcQh24
Although not factory work this Baboon was a productive member of society being paid in alcohol and a small wage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(baboon)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160125001616/http://www.earthf...
Humans (on the whole) aren't even particularly good to other humans, yet some people seem to have the expectation that humans be particularly good to animals.