Animal Intelligence

Lynn forwarded a story from Fox News about bats who have learned how to sober up when they become intoxicated.

Bats often risk getting drunk off cocktails of alcohol that stew inside ripened fruit. And just as driving is dangerous for intoxicated humans, so is flying for drunken bats.
Now scientists find bats are savvy enough to [...]

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An Animal Intelligence reader (I’m sorry, I don’t remember whom) alerted me to a recent article in The New York Times about recent research into the brains of chimpanzees.

Chimps display a remarkable range of behavior and talent. They make and use simple tools, hunt in groups and engage in aggressive, violent acts. They are [...]

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Here’s an article I’ve seen in a zillion different papers. The most extensive write-up comes from The Sydney Morning Herald out of Australia:

A cat helped spare a family in the US state of Indiana from death by carbon monoxide poisoning by jumping on the bed and meowing wildly as fumes filled the home, the owners [...]

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The Associated Press reports that birds may be able to understand each others’ language. Randolph E. Schmid writes:

Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language — chickadee.
It’s not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that — interpreting the type of alarm [...]

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In response to the story of my office chicken, Canaduck forwarded a series of videos documenting the life of Hope, a chick rescued from a slaughterhouse. All of the text that follows is taken from the descriptions of these videos on YouTube.
07 Jan 2007
Hope is a broiler chicken found outside a slaughterhouse. He’s a runt [...]

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In the wake of the video I posted of my feral chicken, I had a couple of Animal Intelligence readers send me other chicken videos. First up is this video of two rabbits who are apparently fighting (I can’t tell — I don’t know much about rabbit behavior), only to be separated by two chickens:

What [...]

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Amanda sent a story of a cat who rides the bus. According to the London Daily Mail, a mystery cat has been hitching a ride for the past few weeks.

The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings — he then jumps off [...]

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Last summer a chicken appeared at my office.
I work in the country, on former farmland in rural Oregon. We’d just been granted the gift of feral kittens a few weeks earlier. They lived and romped and played in a shed on the back of the property.
One day a chicken appeared. Where it came from is [...]

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Nicole sent me another story, this one from last spring. It seems that an Israeli man made the mistake of moving a baby crow that had fallen from its nest. This made the chick’s mother angry, and she’s been terrorizing him ever since:

Badash’s nightmare began after a crow’s chick fell out of its nest into [...]

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The Internet Archive has an 18-minute video entitled Trailblazer in Space, which tells the story of Ham the Chimp. Ham was the first primate launched into space. According to the Wikipedia:

In December 1960 the four-year-old chimpanzee was trained to do simple, timed tasks in response to electric lights and sounds. In his pre-flight training, [...]

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Here’s another one for the “cute” category:

Or maybe there is some intelligence here. Are the otters expressing affection? Are they playing a game? The one most certainly goes out of its way to “re-connect” after they’re separated.
(I like how the one otter becomes “beached” midway through, but keeps on sleeping.)

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