Who is Smarter?

How smart are animals? OR, can we really know when we judge them
anthromorphically?

In Vancouver a duck tugged at the pants of a policeman. She kept tugging
at his pants then she waddled to a sewer drain. The cop followed her and
much to his surprise trapped there below the street were her ducklings.

And in Scotland a park warden answered his phone. On the other end was
heavy breathing of a chimpanzee. The chimp stole the phone and he punched
the programmed numbers until someone answered. Not sure what he wanted
other than to mimic others with cell phones, but the point is, he did know
enough to make it work.

If you live with animals, as I do; not just including my wife and kids,
you know there is intelligence behind their eyes. Animals are smart and
they do think. Of course they don't think like us; they don't have
language like we do, but they can tell us a lot if we just listen. My dogs
can tell me when they want to go outside and when they want to go for a
walk. They tell me when they want me to play with them. They're smart.

And in some ways they may be smarter than I am. They can certainly do
better at hearing, at smelling, at seeing. And they know when they don't
want to eat something and when they do. They know how to get the toys they
like to play with and ignore the others. They can and do tell me when we
leave one of them outside. They can also be jealous when we treat one
differently than the rest.

They even have their favorite television programs. Some things they like
to watch and other things they refuse to let us watch and when my wife
leaves the house, one of our dogs will bark and scratch and make a fuss
until we either let her go with my wife and she always wants to sleep in
the same bed with my wife. One of our other dogs only sleeps with me and
one of them sleeps in my son's bed. Our biggest (and youngest dog), who
also happens to be the biggest is usually annoyed and shows it when the
others have our attention and he gets segregated at night.

As for self-recognition, Bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees do recognize
themselves in mirrors. This would indicate an awareness of themselves as
individuals. Zoologists will tell you that humans, apes and dolphins have
that capability. Tell me that isn't intelligence.

And new research also shows that dogs do have descriptive language and can
tell each other when there are predators near by. They can tell me when my
wife is driving the care and is a few miles away and almost home, even
when there is a lot of traffic on the road. How they do that is absolutely
amazing.

Marc Houser, the Harvard ethologist wrote: "We share the planet with
thinking animals." We can't use the standards by which we measure
ourselves. Many animals have other skills which we can't even imagine
having and these are attributes to them or to any of us if we were just
half as smart as they are in those ways. They can solve problems for them
we can't do for ourselves. These are skills they evolved to survive to
reproduce. They can hear distance, see other wave lengths which we can't
see and just because we can't doesn't mean we're stupid and they are just
smarter. Or, does it? [grin]

We share 98% of our genes with chimps and between 70-80% with dogs. But
what about emotions? We haven't even yet been able to figure out how to
measure emotions. We don't know if they are more sensitive than we are.
Perhaps they are?

  Hank Roth