More on Animal Intelligence We are finding out more incredible things about animals every day. So many times, we have thought of our behavior as being unique and yet it is also the same as some animals. Take the case of rats for instance. Scientists have recently found out rats will trade with each other. Who would have ever believed this? There is more to the trading however. Scientists have also found out it is equitable. Scientists at the University of Bern found this exact behavior in animals. One thing they noticed was when Norwegian rats would preen each other. The rat that got preened would often give food to the rat who did the preening, trading a commodity for a service. Knowing rats trade is quite an eyeopener. Could it be they actually care for each other? No one usually thinks of rats as caring animals, but it turns out they can make great pets. While we may have thought monkeys are a little smarter than your average animal, we could have been wrong, because they may be a lot smarter. We think the concept of money is a human concept and only humans can grasp the fact money can buy things. Apparently, we are not the only creatures who can realize this. An experiment was conducted in 2005 with capuchin monkeys. Usually scientists are the ones who conduct animal experiments, but this one was different. This experiment was conducted by an economist and a psychologist. An economist seems like an unlikely experimenter, doesn’t he? The economist commented on the fact the capuchin had a small brain. He said they pretty much focus on food and sex. He went on to say they had selfish desires and if one was to feed them something they liked the monkey would eat it all day, finally throw up, then come back for more. At first a monkey was given one dollar in the form of a disk. It took a while, but the monkeys learned they could take their dollar and buy fruit with it. Then the monkeys were given 12 one-dollar disks so they could decide what types of food to buy, which were set at different prices. The researchers found the monkeys learned how to budget their money. The price of Jell-O was lowered to see if the monkeys would buy more instead of grapes. They did and bought more Jell-O. Eventually the monkeys were taught how to gamble. It got to the point where a monkey might take a bit of something, not like it and go to the researcher to see if he could return it for a refund and buy something he liked better. We are finding out animals are a lot smarter than first thought. Lately this is not new news, because there have already been a lot of articles about this. One of my favorites deserves repeating. It is about a dog and a dolphin. It seems both animals have figured out how to tell what time it is. The dolphin would swim into a harbor at the same time everyday and the dog would go there at that time to meet the dolphin. When the dog would see the dolphin, it would jump into the water and the dog and dolphin would play for a couple of hours until the dolphin left. This is repeated every day. As amazing as this friendship is, how do the animals know when to meet? The closest thing to a human being in intelligence is said to be a chimp. The have the closest genomes to us which are said to be at least 98 percent identical. Does this mean they are 98 percent as smart as us? Not really, but they have a lot of traits we possess. Chimps use tools and travel in organized groups. They also are capable of violence. They are self-aware, have certain customs and behave in certain ways. They can feel empathy and altruism. In some memory tests chimps have performed better than humans. When octopi brains were first examined scientists were astounded to find they had a lot of features similar to human brains. They had folded lobes and distinct regions for processing visual and tactile information. Researchers have noticed they are very curious and hate to be bored. They are also able to use tools and learn quickly. An Octopus can open a jar from the inside and outside. They will hit you with a rock sometimes in defense. One octopus unscrewed a recycling valve in an aquarium spraying water all over the floor. Sometimes they leave the water to grab prey. One shot water from his abode into the light above and blew out all the lights in an aquarium. Did he have an escape plan? Animal intelligence is far above what we used to think it was. Maybe it is a good thing we are starting to develop laboratories which can grow meat, since we are finding out we might be killing creatures that are far smarter than we thought. There have been cases where cattle have escaped from slaughter houses. Did they realize what was going to happen to them? It is turning out even the types of animals we thought of as not to smart are showing signs of intelligence such as fish. Could we be doing something which is making animals smarter without realizing it or could mother nature be advancing animal evolution? |
