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 Roboreader |
Incredible Animal Intelligence
Do we give animals enough credit for their intelligence? Most of us never give animal intelligence a second thought. If we see an animal do something that is consider silly by human standards, we think “dumb dog or cat”, if it was of the genus Canis or a feline. While we see animals do some things that we would consider really stupid if a human did them, can we assume that animals are stupid? I guess it seems that way at first glance, but we have to take a deeper look into animal intelligence before we jump to any conclusions. Just because a dog might chase his tail, doesn't mean that he doesn't have intelligence. We have talked about animal intelligence before, as a matter of fact we have probably talked about most everything before, but there is always new data coming out that makes some of these subjects very fascinating. Did you hear about the chimp at the zoo that was planning attacks on people that came to watch him. When I say planning, I really mean it. He decided that he would collect piles of rocks the night before the zoo would open and use these rocks to throw at visitors the next day. Here was the problem, there were not many rocks in the area and after a few gathering sessions there were no more rocks left. He had thrown them all. The next thing that he did was go into the pond that was in his area and scoop up rocks from the bottom. He would take the rocks and put them in neat piles all around his area where he could move around throwing the missiles more accurately. He even got to the point where he felt he could do more damage by throwing several at once. Finally the zoo had to take steps against him. While this act of throwing was nasty, it certainly showed that he could plan for what he was going to do in the future. If that isn't intelligence than I don't know what is.
Goldfish There was a news article the other day that talked about how people think things like gold fish are dumb and can not retain memory for more than about 3 seconds. A teenager has just disproved most of this. He conducted an experiment where he took tiny pieces of bacon and kept putting them into his fish tank in the same spot. At first it took the goldfish about 15 seconds to find them, but as time progressed it finally took about 3 seconds. The next step was to remove the bacon for six weeks. After six weeks he put the bacon back in the tank in the same spot and it only took the goldfish a few seconds to find it. The fish had not only remembered where the bacon was from 6 weeks before, but it remembered the shortest route to the bacon. This certainly is not Einstein like intelligence, but it is intelligence of a sort. Intelligence is a very strange thing. It is hard to quantify. Experiments with mice have produced a very strange result. As mice learned how to navigate a maze and produced offspring, their offspring were better at first navigating the maze than their parents and so forth. Was intelligence being passed down from mouse to mouse somehow? It would certainly seem that way doesn't it, or at least memory? It has long been theorized that memory may be chemical and that some memory is passed down from insect to insect. Bees are said to be good examples of this. They remember a lot of things. They know the time of day and the location of food sources relative to the hive location and they also know how to transmit the information to other bees. The reason that we know that they know the times of day is that they have demonstrated this when getting food. They usually arrive at the precise time when food gathering from these sources is at its best.
Gorilla A boy was at the zoo. He liked to watch the gorillas. The gorillas were on the other side of a railing in a pit. Somehow the boy must have leaned over the railing and fell into the pit and the fall rendered him unconscious. You would have thought that falling into a gorilla pit would be the end of everything, but just the opposite happened. A female lowland gorilla about 8 years old, saw what had happened. She walked over to the boy and gently picked him up and hugged him and carried him to the door where the paramedics were waiting and handed him over to them. Not only had she shown intelligence, but she had displayed a degree of compassion that was unexpected. Her trainer said that he saw this on television it gave him goose bumps. How could an animal have such feelings?
Dog There are just so many stories about animals like dogs that have rescued people from fires and helped people in many other ways. Look how people rely on guide dogs when they are blind. If a dog didn't have some intelligence, could it be relied upon to look for cars when crossing the street? Sure it is trained, but if it was that stupid, could it even be trained for the job. Remember that this is a job where a human life is at stake and we think nothing of using a dog for this assignment, that is how much faith we have in them. A dog was crossing a busy highway and got hit by a car. Another dog saw what happened. Incredibly he risked life and limb and got to the injured dog and dragged him to safety dogging cars all the way. If this didn't demonstrate compassion, bravery and intelligence I don't know what does. The video of this incident can be seen by clicking HERE. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/03/dog-saves-other-injured-d_n_148238.html) |
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