Recognizing the Intelligence of Crows

Here's a very entertaining and informative video on how people are recognizing the intelligence of crows--using tools, learning about traffic patterns and machines--with a very refreshing point of view of how people can learn to live together with them. It runs 10 minutes (I know it says 11:33, but the last 1:33 is a commercial), but it's the weekend so hopefully you have the time to watch it.

More Cat Language

I can attest to the fact that the blink works with big cats as well as with house cats, since I used it to help me get familiar with several lions and tigers. Of course it helped that the environment they and I were in was conducive to starting a relationship. More on that in a bit.

Tigers have been given the reputation of being solitary cats, so it is interesting to learn that they actually have a simple vocal greeting that they use with each other. It's called a "chuff", and you can hear an example of it here:  .

It's easy for a human to imitate this sound; just say, f-f-f-f-f-f, and put a lot of air into it, and don't be afraid to spray a bit.

Tigers are very responsive to this sound; even a poor imitation of it will usually get a positive response. And if you should ever find yourself face to face with a tiger, wouldn't you want to know how to say, "hello, friend"?

Tiger chuffing brings several stories to mind. One concerns the movie "Two Brothers"--when the two cubs see humans for the first time, they are curious, and one of them chuffs at the humans. Writer/director Jean-Jacques Annaud earned my respect forever for getting tiger vocalizations right, not only in that cute little scene but throughout the movie.

Another story is about me, several years ago, when I was all full of myself for knowing how to chuff. I went to the local zoo and chuffed at the tiger there. This obviously caught her by surprise--how often would she have heard a chuff from the people that pass by? Then, with the most eloquent display of body language, she told me that for her own sanity she had to ignore the people that passed by her cage, even if they did know how to say hello. I respect that, and it makes me sad that it has to be that way.

And so we return to the concept of "aloof, loner" cats, and environments conducive to establishing a relationship. The local zoo is not such an environment.

(time out for a commercial)

As you may know, this blog is part of my pair of sites devoted to Kimba The White Lion. I depend on sales from The White Lion Shop to keep everything going. I have just lowered the prices on every Kimba collectible item in the shop, and on the manga, in addition to the previously lowered prices on everything else. Nearly every item on the collectibles page is one-of-a-kind, and changes to consumer product laws may make it very difficult to get vintage items like these in the future, so I hope you'll take a look and find something to your liking.

Paying Attention

One of the most common things you hear about cats is that they're aloof, they don't care, they don't listen.

That's not been my experience at all. I frequently have difficulty using the computer because one of my cats is "requesting" my attention. They will bring a toy to me so that I will play with them. They are very responsive to everything I say; even a little "tsk" when something annoys me.

I think the difference between my experience and some other people's experience can be explained by cats' intelligence and by how much attention people pay to them. Cats are flexible; they can be sociable or they can be loners, depending on the situations in their lives. If they learn at an early age that the people around them are not "connecting" with them, ignoring them, they will eventually stop putting forth the effort themselves. Hence, aloofness.

Many years ago when I was a kid, my family was not very tuned in to the pets in the house, and so neither was I. But one day I noticed my cat in the next room looking at me and doing a slow blink. I realized this was not just a mere blink but a deliberate gesture, so I did the same sort of slow blink. She did it again, so I did it again. Then she ran to me, stood up on her back legs, and hugged my leg. She could not have said, "At last! Somebody gets it!" any clearer if she had spoken English.

The slow blink is one of the most basic items of cat language. It has many meanings, depending on the situation. It can mean something similar to blowing kisses. It can de-fuse a potentially bad situation: My kitten knocked something over right in front of me. He froze, wondering if I was angry. I blinked. He blinked in return. No worries.

So basically the blink is an amiable kind of sign, ranging from non-aggression to love. As you pay attention to your cat and the various situations of each day, the blink becomes second nature to you and you become aware of its many shades of meaning. You also won't ever think your cat is aloof and unresponsive to you.

Emotions

Here's another article by Edward Willett, this time on the subject of emotions in animals. He says that, thanks largely to Jane Goodall's convention-breaking research on chimpanzees, scientists are more willing to allow that animals feel emotions.

Like any astute observer needs scientific proof, but it is good that the walls of blindness are crumbling.

It is interesting how, in the article, there are numerous attempts to weasel (my apologies to weasels) out of ascribing a full emotional life to animals. He suggests that people are having fewer children, turning to animals for companionship, and hoping the animals have feelings for them. I suggest that if people are turning to animals for companionship, they are paying attention to them.

That reminds me... tomorrow I should post a story of the rewards of paying attention.

The Intelligence of Bees

I think that in school everyone was likely introduced to the "bee dance"--the discovery that bees can, in a sense, draw a map to a source of food that they've found, by doing a meaningful "dance" to be observed by the other bees in the hive. What is odd about the way this fact is usually told is that it is presented as purely instinctive behavior; somehow we are supposed to believe that the steps and their meanings are hard-wired into the bees' brains. I've never seen an explanation of how this hard-coded programming manages to cope with the infinite number of variables in the real world.

But that's old news. More recently, scientists have been able to train bees to detect bombs, scientists have been able to determine that bees can count and, in my favorite of these types of stories, that bees can learn to recognize human faces... even in a crowd of strangers.

Not bad, considering that bees naturally have no real need to recognize human faces. And not bad considering that for the movie "Marley and Me" 22 different dogs were used to play the part of Marley--and I haven't heard one person complain about the differences.

Yes, I do think the ability to recognize facial features of a different species should work in both directions.

Love, altruism, problem solving...

The video below comes from an incident in Chile. You can make a long list of the qualities the hero dog exhibits, but there is no way you can explain away his actions as mere instinct.

Time out for thoughtful fiction.

Since, as Gareth Patterson pointed out, the perceived differences between human and animal are fiction--not based on actual facts--today I turn to a work of fiction that turns human/animal relationships upside down to illustrate how our perceptions work.

The movie, "Rat", is a Kafka-esque story that is also a very intelligent study of human nature. Pete Postlethwaite stars as a middle-aged Irishman who magically turns into a rat one day. The basic question of the movie is, How do people act and react to someone whose appearance of humanness has been removed? No one in the film doubts that the rat is the same person/personality that once was a man, but without his human appearance, he no longer is a person to any of them.

It's a very funny film, because it is so intelligent in portraying basic human nature. It speaks volumes about human/human and human/animal relationships.

Sometimes it's good to look at things from an inverted perspective, to better understand how things really are.

Language

Even though some cling to the idea that language is unique to humans, there has been a lot of proof over the years that it is not--a wide range of animals, from gorillas to bees, have been proven to have language.

Most studies focus on primates, because their methods of expression tend to be very human-like. That makes the study involving prairie dogs all the more remarkable, because the researchers not only were able to recognize the presence of language, but also decipher it, and show that prairie dog language involves nouns and adjectives and the ability to coin new, meaningful words.

I refer you to this page: Prairie Dog Language? because it not only describes the study and includes links with more detail, but it also deals with many of the objections and false explanations people raise to try to cling to the idea that language is unique to humans.

As always, I hope to receive your comments on this subject or any of the issues raised on that web page.

Inter-Species Friendships

In a comment to yesterday's post, we are introduced to the story of a strong bond of friendship between an elephant and a dog. Now this next may seem a strange statement for me to make, but I think it's safe to say that no one would raise an objection to the friendship these two animals enjoy.

But there is a vocal group of people who vehemently object to inter-species friendships when they involve humans and non-humans. They want to use our legal system to erect a wall that will prevent all contact between humans and all other forms of life.

This is incredible to me because it violates the basic nature of life--which is inclusive, not exclusive, and the basic nature of our spirits (no matter what species they may be in) which is to love. The web of life includes all creatures, and the more connections we experience, the closer we get to our true natures.

Don't we already have enough walls around ourselves, trying to shut out reality?

I return again to the statement that what we do not understand, we destroy. Separation is the enemy of understanding. The more contact we have, the more alive we all are, and will be.

I do think most people get this idea. http://www.interspeciesfriends.com/