In the animal kingdom, the astonishing power of the number instinct

If you have cats, and one of them dies, the other may spend months looking for their companion in the usual places, howling away, but for progeny, litters of kittens average about four or so (by nipple math!). If a kitten dies or is somehow lost, the mother will likely miss them on an individual basis, but will the change in the number of kittens in a kitten pile also cause a feeling of loss?

What about with the aforementioned ducks? You might have twelve ducklings and a reduced capacity in the mother to recognize them individually; she might instead look at the ducks collectively. I saw a bit of a nesting duck leading her babies out for their first foray into the water. She would quack and every so often another duckling would pitch themselves out of the nest-hole and onto the water. Eventually the quacking didn't get her any more ducklings and she proceeded onward. She had an astounding nineteen ducklings.

However, that number is going to decrease over time. Will she have a creeping experience of fewer and fewer ducklings? Or is it something like "many, three, two, one"? And what kind of internal state comes about? Certainly we see that loss in the larger primates, and even in our own pets, but when it gets down to birds, many of them do not have a lot of brain matter to work with -- what's their state? Is there enough memory and experience to overcome instinct? "All of my babies died last year and the year before ..."

Overall, and this is just the vaguest of grim suspicions, what if, at each increase in memory and care for offspring, evolution must select against those organisms experiencing a kind of despair, a learned helplessness, at the futility of the ever-larger spheres of their existence? It's not an issue if you're just a handful of neurons wiggling your way toward the next source of food, but it could become large enough to struggle against the survival instinct, and I wonder if numeracy is one of those critical struggles.

and a spreadsheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertil...

There's a high-quality video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=Advan...

I'm just surprised it's theoretically possible to do it yourself. Tests are upwards of $100.

This is a pretty wonderful place; if you ever need PT for your dog and you live on the SF Peninsula, I highly recommend them. So does Brownie.

After the first few visits she had the route memorized. When I turned off 101 and onto the city streets, she got more excited at each turn as we approached their parking lot.

She's made an amazing recovery. Here's how she was doing in March:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGAf3oo6Jc

And even better since then: now she runs and chases squirrels in the yard. She's still a little wobbly, but I can see why she was so excited about her visits to Scout's House.

Then why can't I fly?

We know that language had a role in our ability to count. Most primitive societies with limited language only counted 1 or 2 and everything else was "many". It's why many languages have a "half" and a systematic one-thirds, one-fourth, one-fifth, etc. If we had "numbers" and the ability to count, we'd say "one-twos" rather than half. This is true for most cultures/languages.

Also, if you think animals grasp the concept of number, do you think they have the ability to understand negative numbers?

My point is that these 2 activities are clearly different, and that non-humans clearly engage in the last one but I'm not so sure I have ever seen clear evidence they engage in the first one.