Cows can use sophisticated tools
nautil.us
nautil.us
While I'll never begrudge science that points out the obvious -- that's often where the most value comes from -- this particular avenue is always a little funny to me, as it often belies an expectation that other animals are unable to do these things by default.
Animals fear motorized vacuum cleaners.
Except it doesn't show that.
The reason people make this judgement is because they don't have a coherent or clear definition of "intelligence". Nothing has been undermined, except in those who took the view that animals are dumb automatons. That's more of a legacy of modernism and the desire to gain "mastery over nature" more than anything else.
The essential feature of human beings - from which the rest of human nature and its consequences follow, including our social nature - is rationality. This entails an intellect, which is the abstracting faculty. It is the intellect that makes language possible, because without the capacity to abstract from particulars, we could not have universal concepts and thus no predicates. Language would be reduced to the kind we see in other animals.
For clarity, the functions of language are:
1. expressive: expressing an internal state or emotion (e.g., a cry of pain)
2. signaling: use of expressive to cause a reaction in others (e.g., danger signals)
3. descriptive: beyond immediate sensation; describes states of affairs, allowing for true or false statements
4. argumentative: allows critical analysis, inference, and rational justification
Without abstraction, (3) and (4) are impossible. But all animal activity we have observed requires no appeal to (3) and (4). Non-human animals perceive objects and can manipulate them, even in very clever ways, but they do not have concepts (which are expressed as general names).
Could there be other rational animals in the universe? Sure. But we haven't met any. And from an ontological POV (as opposed to a phylogenetic taxonomic classification), they would be human, as the ontological definition of "human being" - "rational animal" - would apply them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
Feels like a lot of animals just lack ability to articulate. Which might evolve if they had a need but feels like an chicken-and-egg problem more than anything?
A dog or chimpanzee can easily understand conceptual ideas such as 'walk', 'play', 'food', and so on, even through language. Not to say humans don't process these in different ways, and are able to manipulate them as abstract concepts as other species generally cannot, but in isolation it seems the fundamental principles can be widely accessed. What sort of test might you propose that demonstrates the difference you describe?
People have many beliefs, inaccurate to varying degrees - many to a large degree. Science is a solution to our pretty bad intuitions. Sometimes it discovers they are wrong; sometimes science shows they are correct - it's hindsight to say it was 'obvious'.
Also, I don't think it's obvious to 99.x% that cows use tools.
I feel that language models are revealing things about our cognition that some people are as unwilling to accept, similarly to how some people had trouble with accepting heliocentrism.
or a more manual version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2O7Z7cJB-w
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...
Poor lads really are exceptionally dumb
Describes quite a lot of headlines, unfortunately for us.
Monkeys learn quickly. Cows oddly enough can also learn quickly in social cohesion. So one cow figures something out; the others often quickly adapt and learn too. So the main step is the initial hurdle to overcome. There are lots of videos about this on youtube, starting with simple ones such as scratch-objects where cows rub against and it helps them scratch areas they can not easily reach on their own.
Cows are pretty smart. Sheep are dumb animals that try to kill themselves any number of ways. Chickens are dumb lizards with feathers.
AFAIK, fungi have never used mechanical tools.
They can solve complex algos using parallel processing, but no tools. Unless you consider zombie ants to be a tool...
this behaviour is quite common in cattle and other animals, often seen rubbing or using sticks to scratch spots. sometimes it is dangerous as they find fences with nail poking out and cut themselves when rubbing to to calm an itch.
Oh wait, the article says external is in the "scientific definition". Fine.
....wait, no
Having spent my childhood around cows, I can say there's a great deal of doubt in my mind on that point. I know from extensive first-hand experience that cows are quite stupid.
Like most things. . . It's shades of grey.
"... the tool is a detached object (rock) used to procure some thing (food) ordinarily incapable of being accessed without a tool.". Also it is "manipulated independent of its location." [0]
Rubbing against a tree is not tool use. Similarly, dropping a nut on a rock is not tool use, but dropping a rock on a nut is.
It gets a bit more complex: You can pickup a stick and use it (similar to the cow); you can first prepare the stick by stripping leaves and branches off (some primates); you can bend the stick into a useful hook (New Caledonian crows).
Look up corvids and especially New Caledonian crows. they are pretty amazing; in some tasks they apparently outperform all primates except one particular species.