Behaviors reveal sophisticated tool use and possible “pranking” among pachyderms
science.org
science.org
It's like a 6000 lb raven.
Do you think it would be safe for him to approach that group and to touch them in a friendly way?
I'm curious about their temperament regarding persons with whom that have some history.
No one really knows why, but the rumor was she was associated with a poaching group. Either way that elephant clearly hated this lady and made it known.
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/elephant-kills-indian-woma...
The old tricks are the best tricks. Now wait for them to point the nozzle at their face and release.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/toi-original/watc...
So yeah, elephants truly never forget. And some will make it their life mission to right the wrongs.
I call bs.
People hide, but for the burial, they come out of their houses, make noise, alerting the elephants.
Elephants get aggressive again. People run away. Elephants trample what they left behind.
Them, Elephants also trample the village.
Seems like a pretty likely scenario?
Stuff happens!
How did the elephants know generally where this person lived? How did they know specifically which house she lived in? How did they know there was a funeral to crash?
I'd speculate that the answer is scouting, and the idea of elephants scouting for other elephants in a planned attack is so damn cool that I just want to assume that must be the answer in the face of knowing that I'm speculating.
The first one involves a group of elephants who formed a circle around their caretaker's home for a couple of days to grieve when he died.
The second one involves an elephant who's shot at his head for poaching, he ran away to where forest rangers camp is, and just laid down to be taken care. The elephant survived.
Animals are complex creatures and see, hear and know more than we think. We should stop acting so boneheaded, IMHO.
I wonder though if generalizing to most/all animals really makes sense here.
I get the sense that these kinds of stories are mostly limited to highly social and fairly intelligent animals like elephants, dolphins, and dogs.
Maybe other primates as well, although IIUC they're more likely to be spiteful to some people than are e.g. dogs and elephants.
I could write tons and tons of things where she was very aware of my emotions and responded to it, or communicated with my parents in their own way.
So, I don't think it's limited only to "more complex" animals like dolphins, dogs, and elephants. Cats and birds (oh, look at cockatoos, crows magpies, etc.) are also in that group as well.
Cockatoos raid trash bins and find ways to open even the blocked ones if their strength allows.
Lastly, here's a parrot which trolls its owner and laughs about what it did! Oh boy, it's aware of what it did [0].
What's the downside to just assuming all animals are intelligent and treating them as such?
And if you include things I've read on Facebook, even jumping spiders.
A genetic project for the 21st century: try giving them voice and hands. See what happens.
Elephants are one of the races that have been "uplifted" to sophistry. Some (Neophants) have been engineered further and now have hands.
Check out the notes below the following two comics for some of the musings that make these stories so compelling to me:
How much intelligence is needed? Using a hose is an accomplishment for elephants. People in this thread are amazed that elephants can remember events, even traumatic ones like the death of a child. Has an elephant ever created a structure of any sort?
> if elephants could speak
I don't think they'd have much to say ...
That sounds like musth.
Wild.
I can't believe this line, it's such a ridiculous and bizarre thing it sounds like a joke. The famously singly-appendeged creature can also be left-handed. Come on.
Apparently though, not a joke, elephants really are right or left-"handed." https://dspace.spbu.ru/handle/11701/7138 "Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants." What a hilarious planet.
I'm being completely honest here, I believe pigs and cows are just as intelligent as dogs. They're simply limited by their physical bodies and our understanding of their expressions.
But I still won't go vegan.
On an intelligent level I believe it's wrong to inseminate cows so they produce milk, but I still won't stop drinking it. Because I am lazy and comfortable in my ways. And that's what I believe most people are, even if they won't admit to it.
Morality is an artificial instrument of social control that minimizes human wars. Otherwise, all creatures are here to kill and breed.
When asked about causes of our behavior, we readily make up an explanation, and we believe our own explanations completely whether they are true or false. There is a considerable literature demonstrating in an experimental setting how easily the behavior is controlled by the factors that are not consciously perceived, and how it is rationalized post factum in plausible but arbitrary ways. More informally, many fiction writers show characters, for example falling in love and showing that through their behavior, but refusing to admit that they are in love, even when explicitly confronted with the facts.
Of course one can say that an adult human can at least in principle, sometimes, examine what is going on, while a dog is probably much less capable of such complex analysis and is more like a small child. This seems plausible.
Once a friend of our dog came visiting, grabbed his favorite stuffy and happily chewed it in the yard. Which our dog clearly resented.
So he cleaned up the yard and hid all other toys in the house. Usually that's our job - he never bothers to look after his toys.
Then he came out with an old tennis ball, pranced around, played with it, like "Dude, this is the BEST toy EVER invented. An it's mine."
His friend dropped the coveted stuffy and came over to investigate... our dog dropped the ball, grabbed the stuffy and hid it in the house.
His friend was left with a slimy, boring ball.
I really can't think of any other explanation - he knew how to get his stuffy, but also anticipated this trick wouldn't work twice. So the cleanup in advance.
But he showed real intelligence by never doing anything like this in front of us ever again. ;)
It's a small wonder whether the dog did that when the owner was home!
A simpler, somewhat common version is when one dog pretends that there is something interesting outside, so that the other dog would drop the toy and would run to the window hoping to bark at the mailman, while the trickster picks up the left behind toy.
Some dogs actually learn to see through this ruse. It can be very amusing to watch them darting instinctively, then suddenly realizing what is about to happen, returning back to pick up the toy and only then going to the window more leisurely.
Just leave her alone.
The submitted title is also part of the original title anyway. A lot of publications have a less clickbaity version as a subtitle that is meant to work equally well as a title, and it's pretty common on HN submissions to see people submit that other title because it usually represents the content better. That's pretty clearly what happened here.
At the time of writing that post has 7 votes and one comment—"This is just so cool". This one has 154 votes and many substantive comments. That's quite the difference.
The context and subtext you're missing is that OP gets on every article that was posted more than once to point to previous postings, identifying the new one as a "dupe". They seem to be of the opinion that each thread should exist exactly once (or, grudgingly, once per year). I responded because in that context they seemed to be implying that OP changed the title to avoid getting flagged as a duplicate, so I was explaining why that is unlikely—the portion of the title they used is just better for this audience.
More generally, to me this is to me a classic example of why their idea of thread purity is wrong: the thread the other day did very poorly, whereas this thread reached a much wider audience. I don't really care why that was, but it's yet more proof that reposts are a good thing when the previous post fails to garner "significant attention". [0]
Anyway, back to the subtext, I agree that the repost seems to be warranted in this instance given the lack of discussion on the first post and presumably no "second chance" boost.
It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.
So if you're not able to make the right mental context switch at the right moment, you won't get the joke.
All humor? (Honest question)
I was under the presumption that e.g. slapstick or schadenfreude humor doesn't need linguistics, and is therefore seen in many animals. Animals that don't have any form of language but do have rather intricate social systems or even ranks and caste systems. but do have humor. E.g. where breaking or pushing those systems is the humor.
E.g. "boss gorilla slips on a banana peel haha".
Yeah. I don't blame her for getting mad.
Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.
Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.
Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.
Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.
As a counterpoint, I recommend reading Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton. If humans are just animals, they're the most bizarre animal we've ever seen.
This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."
Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.
Crows can identify singular persons, hold grudge against them and disseminate the information around to make sure that particular person has a hard time [0].
Magpies are also very smart birds, aggressively protecting their nests and offspring from cats and other threats. So they may have identified that fox somewhere else.
Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.
[0]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
They are both corvids (members of the family Corvidae) along with ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and others. Most corvids are fairly smart.
I like to imagine they go back to their group of bird bros and say: "Ha! Made him flinch!".
I can't say that I've understood it all, but he appears to criticize scientists for not thinking about play seriously, and instead reducing most aspects of animal behavior to things like survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.
This has to be both right? Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits, but the immediate reward for play must be fun.
I know the turn of phrase is popular even amongst biologists but I still think it’s weird to put it this way.
Evolution is a dynamic feedback loop on a multi-generational time scale. Plenty of neutral things can be transmitted for a long time without being culled out by evolutionary pressure and social behaviour can remain for a long time without being genetic at all.
It also shows who is best to lead a fight. Play much like curiosity, makes you able to navigate your environment. It very much has extreme usefulness.
To simplify a lot, either you have offsprings and your genes spread or you don’t and they don’t. Evolution is not a purposeful process towards fitness. It’s a reification of the results of the way genes are passed, how they and the environment affect individual characteristics and how an individual fitness to their current environment impacts their chance to mate.
Play hones reflexes. Its entire purpose is to train young animals on tactics, and on how to use their body, and on their local environment.
Put another way, if you aren't trained to use your body, you're more likely to die. The same goes with not learning tactics. Or what the local environment is like.
If you don't know what a tree is, if you don't know what a hole in the ground is, what a hill is, how well grass hides you or not, you are at a major disadvantage, if you're hunting, OR if you're hunted!
There can be other mechanisms to learn things, but play is one of them, and having children teach each other, lets the adult protect, and gather food to feed. It also ensures that youth is trained up on the current environment, not one that the parent recalls from youth.
Evolution is an abstraction subsuming other mechanisms. It doesn’t care about usefulness. That’s a finalist bias. Individuals reproduce or they don’t.
The rest of your post is pure conjecture. You can’t work backward saying: this thing is useful therefore it’s evolved. That doesn’t make sense especially for complex behaviour.
My sorta crank belief is that we are massively underestimating the intelligence and consciousness of animals (and possibly even plants?)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...
Like, I'm all for "we're underestimating animal brains" but they do have to have brains.
Do I think forests are conscious in the same way that we are? No. I do think "consciousness" is not a binary, and that we have poor tools and insufficiently-developed models for understanding it.
I don't have evidence I have consciousness. You assume you have it, but if you didn't what would really change? It's a made up word and the semantic value of the sentence "I have consciousness" is something like "I am special". Can you define consciousness in an objective way such that, were I to not have consciousness anything would be different for me?
It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me. I can't explain what it is, but it seems different to anything else I observe in the world.
The roomba robot doesn't experience, it just goes through its routine. You're more sophisticated (a robot made out of meat), so the behaviors and internal state are more sophisticated. Your "experience" is just one of many illusions you are prone too. You can go look up some of them that it's possible for you to be aware of, they're pretty crazy.
The statement I quoted is just another wording of "of course I have consciousness!".
This is entirely separate from whether one's perceptions are an accurate representation of reality, or whether one's experiences correspond to the parts of the brain that respond to things.
"it's possible for me to be aware of anything" <--- restating your premise. Not evidence that your premise is true. Your definition of consciousness is circular.
If you don't believe that you have experiences of any kind then there is indeed no point in us discussing things further.
If you do believe that you have experiences of some kind, then I can tell you that I am taking to be definitional of consciousness - that when I say "conciousness", that's what I mean - and we can start from there.
When a log crackles as it burns, those crackles do not correspond to an experience of suffering.
It can solve mazes. [0]
"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]
They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]
And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]
In elephant point of view, hose and shower are definitely sophisticated (=advanced) tools. While they may experience it regularly, they usually dont operate them. Like humans with airplanes.
And these day - clicky headlines suggesting advanced intelligence in charismatic animals are great for paying the bills.