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8 Smart Species Challenge How We Think of Animals

by Piper Hoffman
February 24, 2013
2:30 pm

Animals are smarter than we thought.

This matters not just because it’s cool and fascinating. It matters because people use lack of intelligence as the reason to treat humans and non-human animals differently. It’s okay to eat animals and experiment on them, the rationale goes, because they are just dumb animals.

Science is biting itself in the butt on this one by continually discovering that animals aren’t so different from us after all, which will make it harder to justify experimenting on them.

These are some of the smartest animals in no particular order:

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Permalink Reply by Chris Breman on February 25, 2013 at 1:51am

And people are more stupid than we think. For one thing: they cannot watch and observe.

Whenever I am in front of the mirror with Luna my cat, she recognizes me in the mirror and greets my image (by closing both her eyes for a moment - I learned to greet her in the same way) She recognizes her own image too, and then acts on the mood she sees of her image: a happy greeting - tail up - when she sees a happy cat, or she turns away when she sees a cat in a indifferent mood. I can never decide if she sees herself or just a cat.

I tried to show this to a neighbour who likes cats, but after listening and watching she said to me: " You're making this up, aren't you?"