Amazing animal stories, videos, news, current events, and more.
It’s been a couple of years since I posted anything new here at Animal Intelligence. It’s not that my interest in the subject has waned — if anything, I’m more convinced than ever about the intelligence of our non-human friends — but that my other blogs have taken all of my time. Lately, though, I’ve [...]
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Gorillas and humans use similar body language to communicate, reports the U.K. Daily Mail. Researchers at the University of Sussex studied a family of gorillas in a British animal park. Psychologist Dr Gillian Sebestyen said: “We shared 23 million years of evolution with great apes and then diverged approximately six million years ago. Gorillas have [...]
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When I was a boy, we had a Saint Bernard. Like all Saint Bernards, Charlie was a big, slobbery dork of a dog. Charlie was a good dog. We also had several cats, one of which was named Batman. (We named all of our cats after comic book characters.) Charlie and Batman were best friends. [...]
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Lynn sent me an item that’s been making the rounds as an e-mail forward. Though I’m reluctant to post something that I cannot properly credit, I’m going to do so. I like it that much. Terry Burns from Middleburg, Pennsylvania shared this photograph and caption with an unknown magazine: The text reads: Cashew, my 14-year-old [...]
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Can you jump over 100 feet in the air? Neither can I. But trap-jaw ants can perform the equivalent feat. With their mouths. This video (complete with protractor!) demonstrates these amazing insects in action, using their jaws to propel themselves great distances. From the YouTube post: This has to be one of the oddest (and [...]
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It has been a long time since I posted here. It’s not for lack of material. Animal Intelligence doesn’t have a lot of readers, but you few brave souls continue to send me good stories. For example, here’s a story about Yosuke the Japanese parrort. When Yosuke escaped from his cage, he was able to [...]
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When I was a kid, we used to try to fool our dog, Hairy. We’d make a stuffed dog “growl” and “bark” at him. Hairy was always game, responding to the play with growls and barks of his own, but I’ve always wondered just what his thought process was. Did he understand it was play? [...]
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By far my favorite aspect of animal intelligence are the stories of interspecies friendships. A goat that hangs out with tiger cubs? A pig that befriends a bear? A moose and a tern who are inseparable? These sorts of things make my day. I want to believe that on some level, all animals are capable [...]
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Here’s one a couple months old. The 20 January 2008 edition of the Toronto Star reported on two new stuides about the brains of squirrels. First, from the journal Animal Behaviour (which sounds like something I need to be reading!), biologist Michael Steele at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania has been examining how squirrels cache nuts. [...]
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