Perhaps measuring animal intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence isn't the best litmus test. As Mark Twain once said, "It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions."
But, in the just-released Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, witnessed by Stephen Hawking, a prominent group of scientists has declared that humans are not unique in ways that matter. Says the panel, "Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these [same] neurological substrates [as human beings]." Yes, they stand on their toes or tentacles, snatch their offspring from their arms or their arboreal nests, and they feel the same way about it as would you or I. The question is, how is this knowledge to inform our behavior? After all, shouldn't it?
Of course, hundreds of studies have already demonstrated animals' logical, mathematical, linguistic, and emotional intelligence. For example, for years we blithely believed that humans were the only species to use tools, until researchers documented that wasps were using pebbles as hammers, octopuses were carrying coconut shells as portable hiding places, crows were using sticks to dig in the ground for grubs and many other examples. The mathematical abilities of fish have proved to be on a par with those of monkeys, dolphins and bright young human children.
We know that elephants flirt with each other and gather to grieve over the loss of a loved one, that cows shed tears, and that monkeys have refused to pull a chain to access their only source of food if doing so caused another monkey, even a stranger, to experience a painful electric shock. In that famous study, one monkey starved and went without water for nearly two weeks to avoid hurting his fellow. When the experiment was repeated, other monkeys also chose to starve rather than giving shocks to another monkey. A similar study done with human subjects showed that 65 percent of people continued to give other people increasingly strong electric shocks if an experimenter simply told them to do so. It's not the monkeys who need their heads examined!
While miscommunication is blamed for many human calamities, chicks are able to cluck back and forth with their mothers from inside their shells before they are even hatched. Chickens!
One of the Declaration's signatories is Irene Pepperberg, whose work with a parrot named Alex showed that birds can learn meaningful English, count and identify colors, objects and shapes. Alex could even communicate his feelings in English.
Can any human speak even one word of another animal's language? No, but perhaps it's better that way, because if we could speak to them, how would we explain our systematic use and abuse of all the other species?
Can humans smell nuances of fragrance on the individual petals of a single rose and know whether insects have landed on it or human hands have touched it? No, but dogs can, and they try their best to, despite being dragged along by an impatient human anxious to get to Starbucks before work. Can humans navigate using only the sky's polarized light? No, but bees can. Can humans change the color of their skin to blend in with their surroundings or keep an aggressive rival at bay? No, but cuttlefish can.
So, animals are conscious beings, capable of understanding cause-and-effect relationships, forming abstract thoughts, solving problems, using language, making tools, exhibiting long-term memory, and showing empathy, in many cases with skills that are superior to those of humans. But more importantly, animals can comprehend when they are being abused and killed, and they feel anxiety, fear and pain, just as humans do.
Chickens can only watch as other chickens are slammed upside-down into shackles and have their throats slit. Baby elephants cry out for their mothers, who are prevented from reaching them as they are beaten in order to make them perform confusing and even painful circus tricks. Mother monkeys grieve when their babies are torn away from them in the wild, to be sold to experimenters.
It's interesting that one of the definitions of the word "human" is "sympathetic." More and more people are beginning to show that they understand why that is important.
I am so sorry the animals have to put up with our stupid sorry selves.
Humans still make war with one another, and are the only creatures on Earth who have to pay to live there in some form or another. Once we learn ourselves what it means to be Human, then maybe this world would have greatly improved its image from the overlord psychotic apes we are today, to the true bastion of life we fantasize it to be.
However, animals are super bright and intelligent especially in their natural surroundings. They can adapt to change, and most of all they share the same feelings as we do because feeling love, pain or grief is something involuntary, innate. Killing them therefore to satisfy our egocentric lives and our taste buds is not stupid, but simply brutal. The lion kills the zebra because it cannot do otherwise. The biology of a lion is such that it wouldn't survive on salad, it's a obligate carnivore and has no choice. Humans on the other hand have now developed the technology to cook and process meat-free food in a way that is tasty, nutritious, healthy, environmentally-friendly and biologically relevant. Meat eaters have really no excuse. Of course it's their right. But by eating meat you purposely and brutally contribute to the extinction of intelligent life on this planet. You are actually exterminating your own ancestors. You are killing a part of you, you are killing part of your own intelligence.
I don't think you can safely say that humans are "more evolved" than all other animal species present in the nature right now. Since all current life on this planet has a single origin (shown by the fact that all of our DNA has the same structure), you could say that every current species had the same amount of time to evolve. However, some have not changed for a long time or changed very little (e.g. crocodiles), while others are relatively new (e.g. humans). This depends on the amount of "pressure" that a species had to endure (you could say, more gruesome survival of the fittest) due to changing environment, thus resulting in some species having gone through "more" evolution. Nevertheless, this does not mean that they are smarter or better than any other species. They just might be more adapted to their environment. Thus, we can only claim we are "more intelligent" because we measure intelligence on a scale that we ourselves have invented.
a season,
of compassion
and reason?
This (article itself( is just a bunch of activist rambling. Telling me stories about how bees can navigate using polarized light and cuttlefish can camouflage themselves does absolutely nothing to prove that animals "comprehend when they are being abused and killed." Nor does it show that animals are somehow better, especially considering we CAN do those things--often in manners far superior to animals thanks to our uniquely human intelligence. Can bees put satellites in orbit enabling them to navigate most of the planet using GPS? Can cuttlefish formulate dyes and make camouflage gear--and more impressively coatings and materials that hide them from things that don't rely on vision for hunting them? Humans can--and unlike them, we aren't born with built-in equipment and a nervous system pre-wired to use it right. Even a bacterium can navigate in ways that involve beyond human capabilities--yet they completely lack a nervous system.
And a monkey refusing to shock another monkey doesn't show that it has "superior" empathy to that of a human. For all we know it could just be unable to go against the instinctual response that's part of the mirror neuron system without a sufficient motivator. A monkey needs a monkey reason to hurt another monkey--it happens all the time in the wild for seemingly frivolous reasons (coveted fruit tree, anyone?). One would assume that a human would be better able to coerce a human into harming another human--after all, we know what types of things pressure our own kind. Additionally, we might just be better at inhibiting our innate aversion to harming our own kind--which could actually be a good thing in normal situations.
I'm pretty sure you mindlessly reacted without thinking much about it.
How human of you.
My dog can smell fear on a person a mile away. I can't. She knows hours before me when a storm is coming. I can't.
We are as a species destroying our home: the animals aren't.
I could elaborate but your mind set os seti
There's most likely some form of consciousness going on, but contrary to what PETA's peddling, there's nothing suggesting that animals can even conceive of death or abuse. Do you think a dog sits around pondering if it will die? Does it even know it can die? It seems kind of unreasonable to say an animal can have a human experience if it can't think like a human. Feel pain? Certainly. But experience pain and all of the rational baggage that comes with it as part of having human cognitive capacity? Probably not.
If you would like to feel free from the rational baggage of guilt and split mind that comes from not doing unto others as you would have done unto yourself, and doing unto others as you would not have done unto yourself, I highly recommend adopting a Vegan and Ahimsa lifestyle. I wouldn't call any being stupid or inferior until one imagines seeing from the perspective of that animal.
Apparently your fancy learning did not enable you to understand what you were reading.
Nobody said animals had "human" cognitive capacity.
And while animals may not ponder death (how liberating) I am quite certain they "conceive" of abuse when it is being inflicted on them.
And I would bet money when they get a whiff of you they are not charmed.
Better than : your imagined superior humans, animals know empathy ...or not...when they ancounter it.
No other mammal has discovered the secret of nuclear fusion. Are you suggesting that it's coincidence? Perhaps we are smarter than every other mammal. Good on us. Does that somehow make us responsible for keeping lions from eating gazelle in an inhumane manner?
When a cow decides for itself to create a IED and bomb a Pizza Hut, McDonalds, or Taco Bell, then I might agree with you, until then there is a reason that people eat cows. Why haven't you started a chapter to get lions to stop eating zebras, or humans for that matter?
Could it be that PETA has no better relationship with animals than I do? You know what would impress me? Teach a hungry lion to eat a nice salad instead of running down any other meat beast and feasting on it. No not raising it from birth to eat salad, go grab a lion from the wild and teach it that, and not by restricting meat, let it choose, and teach it to choose salad without negative reinforcement.
Color me shocked!! Shocked I tell you!
Most carnivores who eat meat must struggle to continue to be the meat eater that they are. Humans don't have to struggle anymore to eat meat. (at least in America).
There has never been a study done, or been a mammal that has reached the pinnacle of the food chain like we have.
Is eating red meat for every meal without any form of exercise bad? Of course it is! Beyond that, how extensive have our studies been?
I hope the Indians and Chinese are working on this. In the US it would be considered junk science!
It is the great complexity of behavior that can originate from such simple assemblages of cells that constantly astounds the human intellect. Even more so with the advent of more social upheaval and discordant behavior around us 'people' every day.