Crows may soon be Sweden’s newest litter pickers | Hacker News Reader

Crows may soon be Sweden’s newest litter pickers

thelocal.com

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Interview in Swedish with Christian Günther-Hanssen, founder of the company: https://www.msn.com/sv-se/nyheter/news/christian-l%C3%A4r-kr...

The founder says:

* It takes a little over a month to train a crow to pick cigarette butts

* It takes one month to train a crow not to be afraid of the big box

(in total 2 1/2 months)

* Other crows will learn from the first crows that have been trained

Is there any info on how this affects crow health? Nicotine is pretty toxic stuff, eating one cigarette will make a 20kg dog sick and LD50 is less than 10: https://portal.ct.gov/DPH/Health-Education-Management--Surve...

In the interview the founder says that the next step would be to investigate how the health of the crows is impacted from picking cigarette butts. Such negative effect should then be weighed against any positive health effect that could be achieved by adding extra nutrients to the "reward food". Malnutrition can be a problem for crows eating too much junk food (from garbage).

Man it's really coming home to me now. We're training animals to pick up the toxic remains of the toxic drugs that we produce because we just can't be bothered, and now we want to make sure they stay relatively healthy doing it.

We’re employing crows with health benefits.

Generally, animals don't eat things that aren't food. They have taste buds and olfactory senses, just like us, and eat things that taste and smell evolutionarily "good". For me, cigarettes smell bad and taste terrible (I tasted one when I was about 7), and I doubt it's much different for birds that are omnivores. I suppose one possible path to them actually eating cigarettes would be if some was accidentally ingested, then they became addicted.

Then the crows will learn to distribute free cigarettes hoping people will pick up smoking and throw empty butts on the street.

See the Cobra effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

More likely, crows could game it by breaking up litter into smaller pieces to get more credit for the same work, or going after easier pickings that don't count as litter and don't need to be removed (rocks, twigs).

Example of dolphins doing the first trick:

>> Kelly [the dolphin] has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.sci...

Or they can just start stealing cigarettes and tearing butts off to get reward. Then you have to deal with crow crime.

"..we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground.." :)

We can, we have the technology, we're just not allowed to use it.

a $5 wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/

Are you saying that you want to hit people with a wrench until they stop littering? Is there a petition I can sign?

Sweden recently made it illegal to throw small pieces of litter like cigs on the ground. Of course hard to enforce but now police can actually act if they see it happen and perhaps make examples of some people.

800 SEK fine for cigs, chewing gum, snus for example.

I used to smoke but I always just stayed around a bin, or made sure I had one near me when I was done. It's really not hard. I'd like to see double that fine.

> I used to smoke but I always just stayed around a bin, or made sure I had one near me when I was done. It's really not hard. I'd like to see double that fine.

The problem with that is that bins are usually where people spend a lot of time. For example bus stops or benches in a park. If you have asthma it sucks to wait for a bus when someone smokes near it.

In Sweden it's also not allowed to smoke near bus stations or other forms of public communication (this includes train platforms etc.).

Yeah in Poland too, but everybody ignores it :(

There is an old story about chewing gum in China. Back in the 90s they banned shewing gum in Tiananmen square, but the law was of course difficult to enforce. So they made the police scrape up any dropped gum. Enforcement then happened easily enough.

> Sweden recently made it illegal to throw small pieces of litter like cigs on the ground.

Is that true? Then I'm surprised littering wasn't illegal before. (Or this this a case of "oh no, people are doing [something illegal]! let's make it illegal!"?)

There was a distinction between flight tipping and throwing small litter to the ground like cigarette buts or chewing gum. So littering was obviously illegal but only for larger things like a bag of trash in nature.

The new law is that even small things can be fined.

I keep a small pouch in my bag that is designed to store cig butts. Useful for when there are no bins around. It’s sealed so there is no smell and I can empty it into a bin later.

To be fair those estimates to pick up one butt are not very fair, since they are not giving any welfare benefits like social insurance to crows, no maternity leave etc.

If crows unionize and start demanding maternity leave and other benefits they should be entitled to I could see how they would become more expensive than humans considering their reproduction rate. So in the end this seems more like exploiting workers unaware of their legal rights.

And let's ignore the fact they mention only crows as if magpies were not allowed to participate or are they overqualified for this position?

If any crow reads this contact me at 1-800-CROWHELP to help you claim all the benefits.

Yeah, but it's gig work, so no benefits but you do get flexible hours.

Can't wait until the crows start stealing cigarettes out of peoples hands or mouths.

A net positive :)

Just don't hope for that or you might get flagged :D

And crows will start shoplifting cigarettes, too!

This would be absolutely fantastic, especially because crows are social animals and learn from each-other's behavior (so your trained contingent would expand over time)! That said there is a small risk - if crows learn to do this second hand and don't necessarily put the buds in the box, they could start fires by dropping still lit buds that were left on concrete in the wrong, combustible, place - dry grass, paper garbage, etc.

https://archive.is/AYqzj

Try chickens with cars...

https://michaelhendrick.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/chickens...

I found the costs interesting: "The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 80 öre or more per cigarette butt, some say 2 kronor." A Krona is about a US dime, so that's saying it's somewhere between 8 and 20 cents currently per butt. Call it ten cents. Then you'd need to collect a hundred butts to make ten dollars. The majority of humans on Earth would jump at that chance (assuming sufficient density of butts).

Maybe some deposit scheme would work. Two euros per package of cigarettes, get them back if you return your 20 cigarette butts. Bit disgusting, but I really despise all the cigarette butts even at the wildest locations.

Hard to find 100 buds in an hour.

You'd need to house, feed etc the workers at first-world standards (or pay them enough) which makes up the current costs. Anything else is basically slave labor.

USA: Hold my beer.

I expect that number is computed from the local hourly minimum wage, dividing it by the number of butts one can pick up in an hour.

That indeed would be a good income for billions, if they wouldn’t have to live in Sweden to do the job.

Startup idea: small drones for picking up trash, operated remotely by humans living in some poor country.

I love the drone idea.

If the median per capita income is still what it was in 2013[1], $1.5 / hr would beat it.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...

There is no legally defined minimum wage in Scandinavia. There are agreements between unions and employer organizations for the pay for classes of work. At least that's how it works here (Norway).

If that cost is the cost of an employer then the cost is at least twice the pay the person doing the work would get. E.g. to run an operation where someone is paid $10/h your cost is likely $20/h including insurance/clothes/transport and other overheads for the employer (Payroll taxes alone are usually around 50% on top of the hourly pay). So if the cost is a dime then a cigarette butt picker might make 5c which isn't as great. It's 200 butts/h for minimum wages.

I wonder where that number comes from, we clean our streets with vehicles these days whether there are cigarette butts there or not.

Streets are relatively easy to clean. I'm imagining the crows cleaning up the dirt under bushes, half-open drainpipes, etc.

The number is also interesting because one could simply apply a littering tax.

Kind of how there (still) is a tax on empty CD media...

Sort of! Depends on where you live - it might not be much in Sweden.

Crow-sourcing may have gone too far.

This is a wonderful idea, but wouldn't it be simpler to increase the tax on cigarettes to pay for the cleanup that's currently an externality?

That is on it's way too (link in swedish https://tobaksfakta.se/nedskrapningsavgift-foreslas-pa-cigar...)

No. This is a bad idea just like any other that involves taxing more for the sake of... well... anything.

People would just have even another incentive to buy even more smuggled cigarettes.

Source?

A quick Google suggests it does in fact work as intended https://i.redd.it/jrn155a2gf4z.png

Taxing seems to work fine on other products, even including people shopping elsewhere, for example with soda : https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3302335

> We find the tax is passed through at an average rate of 97%, leading to a 34% price increase. Demand in the taxed area decreases by 46% in response to the tax. A large amount of cross-shopping to stores outside of Philadelphia offsets more than half of the reduction in sales in the city and decreases the net reduction in sales of taxed beverages to only 22%.

You might be against taxing for ideological reason, or maybe you have other arguments than "it's a bad idea" and I'm open to hearing them, but so far it seems like a good idea.

In most places cigs are already taxed. I think it is 10000% here in Canada, eg 100x the cost from the manufacturer.

The logic is to pay for the additional health care.

If the same is happening in Sweden, then there is already plenty of tax. But I guess more could be added.

Manitoba has some of the highest cig prices in the world. I think the cheapest packs of smokes you can get is around $16? (i don't smoke but some friends do)

That would make smokers feel entitled to leave their buds everywhere...

The crow-sourcing approach also means continuous delivery of cigarette buds whereas Humans would only go through one area on a particular schedule.

Why spend more to clean it up if this approach is cheaper?

Why not do both? That may be what you are saying.

How you pay for the cleanup, and how you do the cleanup, are indeed separable concerns.

Yes indeed, although it seems like there must be drawbacks we're risking, for instance:

1. If this takes the crows out of the workforce, are we missing out something else they could be trained to do?

2. What are the risks the crows could start getting smart and stealing things that will be treated as litter, or stealing actual litter from bins? What if they learn they can harass people on the street for their "litter"? :)

3. Would it be better for the economy to give a humans jobs doing the cleanup vs supervising crow learning / reward?

4. Is it right to use crows like this? Are we impacting their ability as wild animals to survive independent of humans?

I wouldn't say it's an either/or situation. There have been fines recently added for littering (including throwing cigarette butts). Tobacco tax increases is the Swedish national sport. I don't have a breakdown of what a pack costs today but a rough guess is that the price would be first 50% tobacco tax and then 25% VAT on top of that. Don't quote me on those figures though. It gives you a rough estimate.

Even though I found these ideas to be more sensationalist than pragmatic but after watching that moneky drive that golf cat, I would say I am a believer. We have gone beyond giving direct insutructions to robots and gave them autonomous decision making abilities so, giving micro tasks and training concious animals seems equally possible.

These viral videos of an orangutan driving a golf cart seemed to be fake to me, possibly done with the help of a remote controller or automated steering.

There is another Swedish guy, Hans Forsberg, who trained Eurasian Magpies (also corvid family) to pick up litter. He has lots of videos on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvmhl-E4QQ0

Isn't there a risk of nicotine, cigarette toxins, and human origin pathogens entering the crow's digestive system from them carrying these cigarette butts around in their beaks?

Also a bunch of crows eating from common food sources seems like a way to spread disease among crow populations.

It's not like crows aren't already picking through human trash in big flocks.

Agreed about the communal disease. For the toxins though, it is all about dose and I could see this program increasing that by at least an order of magnitude. No idea whether it would add up to significant levels though.

Glad someone is finally doing this. An interesting machine learning project might be to develop a low cost cigarette butt recognizer for use with this device: http://thecrowbox.com/

A billion butts? Do 10M Swedes really average 100 butts chucked into the environment?

Great idea though if it works, win-win for crows and people. Maybe we'll get articles about clever crows that import butts from neighboring areas to get paid.

> A billion butts? Do 10M Swedes really average 100 butts chucked into the environment?

it's per year.

Roughly 10% of swedes smoke to some level. If we say half of them are only occasional smokers and the other half smoke on average 10/day, that's 1.8B/year

But surely Swedish smokers don't chuck 55% of their butts into the environment.

You'd be surprised, have you ever been to Paris? Swede smokers are barely any different.

There are cultural differences, I put my smokes out and bin them, most people I know do too. Bin density is great in Sweden too, which definitely has an effect on how many butts are put into the environment.

> There are cultural differences, I put my smokes out and bin them

There always has to be a Swede saying stuff like this.

Living in Stockholm I see THOUSANDS of cigarette butts lying around on the ground, all the time.

Reminds me of when I was walking a local street behind some Swedes and an Englishman (some sort of business group) and the English guy stepped in some dogshit and all the Swedes were like "Oh you're so unlucky because EVERYONE in Sweden picks up their dog-dirt"

To my eternal shame I didn't say anything. This street me and the kids call Bajslagsgatan (street is really called Roslagsgatan) - the approximate translation for our nickname would be DogShit Street.

> There always has to be a Swede saying stuff like this.

That's quite racist, but since I said there are cultural differences between different places I guess so am I? There aren't many countries with as much socialism as Sweden and since it doesn't work without everyone doing their part we're proud to do it, it doesn't mean we're perfect but we try. I know no-one who wouldn't say throwing shit on the ground is bad.

> Living in Stockholm I see THOUSANDS of cigarette butts lying around on the ground, all the time.

My 1.2, 1.4 eyes must be broken then because I don't have the same experience. Outside of nightclubs and bars, yes. Near central hubs where people are in a hurry, yes. On average, no.

> Reminds me of when I was walking a local street behind some Swedes and an Englishman (some sort of business group) and the English guy stepped in some dogshit and all the Swedes were like "Oh you're so unlucky because EVERYONE in Sweden picks up their dog-dirt"

That'd be because most people do, "EVERYONE" should "NEVER" be interpreted as literally everyone, there are always people who deviate from the norm.

> To my eternal shame I didn't say anything. This street me and the kids call Bajslagsgatan (street is really called Roslagsgatan) - the approximate translation for our nickname would be DogShit Street.

You're telling me that on a street in the middle of Stockholm where there are no trees and the buildings are around 6 stories high people just let their dogs shit on the pavement and walk off? I call major bullshit. If you'd have said Vanadislunden which is nearby and has a dog-park, I'd believe you.

EDIT: Apparently there are a few trees at the end of the street crossing over to Birger Jarlsgatan (Next to Norra Real), I guess every urban dogowner let their dogs shit there.

If they're anything like Finns, they probably do. Why get the ashtray in the car dirty when you can just throw it out the window?

The common Swede doesn't smoke in their car, they don't even have ashtrays anymore. We stop at a car-stop and smoke, then continue driving.

I was suprised when backpacking Australia how "everyone" smoked in their car.

That doesn't sound unlikely. I'd guess that most smoking occurs outdoors. Smoking is pretty much banned indoors except for in people's residences. Many smokers avoid smoking in their own homes due to the damage it does to walls and furniture. Ashtrays are uncommon outside.

I can't speak for Sweden, and I don't know why it happens anywhere, but a lot of smokers do inexplicably fail to see their throwing cigarette butts on the ground as littering. I know people who are not, generally speaking, assholes, and would never otherwise litter, but think nothing of doing this.

is there anywhere in the world where smokers don't behave like this? It's certainly the case in Canada

For some reason, smokers seem to think that the world is their ashtray.

> ... win-win for crows and people.

Until after conditioning generations of swedish crows to rely on this the company gets acquired, humans die off, or the robots get shelved for some other reason. They're going to suffer the fate of Google Reader users.

In other words, be inconvenienced and get by with other methods?

Seriously though, there's a winter flock of crows near where I live, and I wonder how they find enough to eat. There are thousands of them. But clearly they get by, and have enough energy to fly around a lot and have huge, noisy parliamentary debates.

People assume that the environment is much more sterile and empty in the winter than it really is.

Wouldn't be that clever. They only have one beak per bird, so travelling longer distances isn't worth the effort, or you'd have to pay them with more food. Crows can make these decisions and might decide there are easier ways to get food.

It depends, if they could swallow them and then vomit on purpose then their capacity would be significantly increased over one beak capacity.

Birds can't do that. Also they'd get nicotine poisoning. That would be a risk even if they used their goiter. And it would taste terrible.

Do they even have taste buds which would taste the difference. From what i know birds can't taste spiciness, so they can eat whatever habanero you give them.

Every animal has some sense of taste and smell. It's the first brain nerve in vertebrates.

A billion butts? Do 10M Swedes really average 100 butts chucked into the environment?

I've known a few smokers who get through 40+ cigarettes a day. That's almost 15,000 a year from one person. Obviously they're not throwing all those butts on the ground, but it's certainly believable that a huge number make it into the environment.

I normally think of Swedes and snus, not cigarettes.

> It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground.

Well... you can, by providing enough litter bins that people don't have to hold a cigarette butt or a dog-poo bag for half a kilometer or more. Unfortunately, since litter bins cost money to operate, most cities don't put up enough.

For toilets, it's the same. Public, free-of-charge toilets are an absolute rarity... and politicians whine all the time about people just relieving themselves on the next bush.

Fucking dog poo bags.

Anyone who doesn't use fully biodegradable bags (eg cornstarch) is evil.

Anyone who leaves them hanging on trees deserves to have their animal taken away and be given community service cleaning up excrement.

Rubbish/refuse/litter/trash though, put it in your pocket, or a shoulder bag, then dispose of it when you get home. No need to put litter bins all over the place.

I agree with most of this.

The thing about litter bins, though, is that if you do put them in good spots they are effective at modifying the behavior you are against here. If you want to affect a change in behavior, you will have better success working with the flow of how we know humans interact with the environment than against it.

"Anyone who doesn't use fully biodegradable bags (eg cornstarch) is evil." Care to elaborate?

Put pure dog poo in a compost bin and it will degrade and dissolve into the compost.

Put dog poo in a non-fully-degradable plastic bag and put it in a compost bin and it will just be the same poo in a decade.

Well I heard smokers in some parts of the world carry a little jar in their pocket where they store their butts. I don't think you can blame the cities for citizen laziness? Seems more of a cultural problem.

A Swedish startup is training wild crows to pick up cigarette butts and other small pieces of litter. Their method will soon be ready for testing in the city of Södertälje. The wild crows can be trained through a step-by-step learning process. The birds can learn to pick up litter by placing it in to a machine which dispenses food.

“They’re wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis,” said Christian Günther-Hanssen, founder of the company behind the method, Corvid Cleaning, to Swedish newswire TT.

The company chose to use crows as they are the most intelligent bird, Günther-Hanssen told TT.

“They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other. At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish,” he said.

Over a billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets each year, and they represent 62 percent of all litter, according to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation.

Now, the method is ready for large-scale testing. A potential pilot project is being investigated in Södertälje municipality, where crows will help pick up litter.

“It depends on whether we can find a place in Södertälje which will work with the food dispenser, and then if there are opportunities for financing,” Tomas Thernström, waste strategist at Södertälje municipality, told TT.

Similar schemes have been trialled in other countries in the past, such as this story from 2018 about crows helping to keep a French theme park clean and tidy.

Günther-Hanssen believes that the scheme could save the municipality at least 75% of costs involved with picking up cigarette butts, depending on how many the crows collect.

“The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 80 öre or more per cigarette butt, some say 2 kronor. If the crows pick up cigarette butts, this would maybe be 20 öre per cigarette butt. The saving for the municipality depends on how many cigarette butts the crows pick up”.

If the pilot project works in Södertälje municipality, the hope is that the results could end in a permanent solution which could be used in the rest of the country to complement current cleaning solutions.

If it’s possible, they would like to get going this spring, Thernström said.

“It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. That’s an interesting thought,” said Thernström.

Considering the cultural importance of crows in Nordic culture I see this as an elegant solution that fits just right. Can't wait to see what funny things happen next.

A truly novel approach to labour shortage - more of this please!

Not sure about "labor shortage". More like "wage shortage".

Not sure - feel we are heading towards full employment https://data.oecd.org/chart/6BaX

I would be (also) fine with them training the birds too poo on people that litter. I think that would be effective in reducing new litter. One issue is of course that you really don’t want false positives..

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368

I wonder if they'll only pick them off of the ground, or if they'll start going after cigarettes in people's mouths.

Not that I'm objecting, mind you. Just curious.

If the food dispensers start catching fire I guess we'll know what happened :)

Uncredited prior art from 2018: https://www.crowdedcities.com/

If they can do this with pigeons, our cities are saved.

I hope it doesn't make people even more likely to throw down butts, thinking "Ah, the crows will take care of it."

Aka the Chinese approach, everyone who visited any national park in China knows what I'm talking about (trash all around the trails, which ain't accumulating).

It's actually kind of promoted behavior to leave your dirty tray in McD on table, you don't wanna cleaner to lose their job cleaning the tables, same with street sweepers.

In other news, a cigarette shortage has been reported, with thousands of crows queued outside tobacconists around the nation.

Reminds me of a Hitchcock movie ...

Now it is clear that those birds were trained by some AI to solve some problem.

The squirrels will eat all the reward food.

This is more likely than one may think. Just look at the case of Rober vs. Gus.

If the crows are expecting a treat, my hunch is they'll defend... or eat the squirrels. A couple years back I watched a small murder of crows encircle, kill, and eat a very large rat. I was amazed, but apparently this is not uncommon and smallish mammals are very much on the menu for crows, who hunt in packs.

Is there any good reason we can't simply mandate biodegradable cigarette filters?

I don't know if such a thing is feasible to build. The other problem with cigarette filters is that they fill up with toxic chemicals. And unfortunately most "biodegradable" things still take a long time to degrade. It does not solve the littering problem, if anything it seems as though it would encourage littering? I don't want litter outside.

Feasible to build? I smoked rollies with cardboard filters for a decade; each "built" myself.

As for the toxic chemicals, I am also strongly in favor of mandating tobacco-only cigarettes; ones without the cancerous cocktail of additives designed to maximize addiction. That would not only take care of a massive chunk of toxic chemicals but have the very likely effect of making quitting easier for addicts.

As for such a mandate "encouraging littering" - mitigating harm from littering doesn't encourage litter, that's like saying getting rid of plastic bags encourages littering of paper bags. It's such a weird point to even try and make.

A cardboard roach is not a filter, it's just a cigarette (or joint) holding/structural device. In the case of weed smokers, not having a filter is beneficial. Most cigarette smokers don't want to skip having an actual filter. Even most people I've known to use cardboard to smoke tobacco mixed with weed, would then use a filter when rolling a tobacco-only cigarette.

I hope that once the crows have cleaned up the ground, they will also attack any smokers in public and take the cigs from their hands :P

Any chance we can jump to the second part? I'm worried about poor crows smoking.

What about rowdy crowdies(murders) of drunken crows in bars, buying booze with cash from selling the dry butts to street people....coming to Swedish town near you soon...

There's actually health benefits (I'm not paid by Big Tobacco I swear):

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11952 ("City birds use cigarette butts to smoke out parasites")

Basically every plant chemical (flavor, drug) that humans are interested in is a defense against pests or infections.

There was a crow in Austin that used to steal car keys from picnics. It was such a nuisance they had to capture it.

How.... strange.

I have never in my life, ever, seen people leave car keys anywhere but their pocket, unless they are home.

Is this normal in Texas? Maybe garb is the cause, jeans being more popular, thus a tighter fit, more desire to remove keys from pockets?

I am very confused.

I see it often, especially when people have no pockets or have difficult to use pockets. In the mentioned case of a picnic, I could see someone leaving keys on the table for the duration instead of having them press uncomfortably against the leg while in the pocket. Years ago I did maintenance at a park, and from time to time I saw people do exactly that.

Interesting. Are your experiences in Texas too?

I imagine local styles would contribute here. Also, just how many keys a person has.

I have two keys. My FOB is round unless tge key is exposed, and a single house key. So number of keys is important too.

But why would Texans have more keys? Are keys more important in Texas?

My work "key" is a card. Are there fewer cards used for entry in Texas? Do Texans dislike tech and cards?

Is there a law against cards vs keys in Texas.

Oh man, I have so much research to do now. Damned crows!

There's no local style in Austin, I lived there. It's a bunch of college aged kids from all over, so there's a huge mix of styles though a lot of people do tend to end up adopting a modernized "hippie" style after living there a few years. Most grow out of it a few years later, some don't.

Womens clothes usually have less, smaller or even fake pockets.

Which they compensate for by putting said keys in a purse, not out in the open.

> Are your experiences in Texas too?

Sorry I didn't specify, this was not in Texas.

Beach

I wouldn't be surprised if crows were smart enough to be able to learn how to pick-pocket humans, to be honest

Why would you steal a car if you can fly?

Given that the crow was stealing multiple car keys, my assumption would be that it wasn't using the cars, but that this was more of a side hustle.

Fun fact, for crows, every market is a black market!

Related, Never Trust a Dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7tBkVu5oM

I hope they peck your eyes out.

It would be great, but if this becomes real, it will probably take a lot more time before they accurately distinguish smoking from other activities.

They'll make friends with smokers and increase the pleasure of smoking. :P

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