Animal Intelligence

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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I am in awe over this newstory about a Siberian woman who shares her apartment with 136 cats. 136 cats!

I have four cats, and even they are too much to control. Every one of them is an individual being with a strong personality. How in the world could anyone cope with 136 of the critters.
This [...]

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People keep sending me animal intelligence links, but I haven’t found the time to post them. Instead, here I am on a Saturday morning posting a video of a cat in a bathtub.

Have you ever seen such behavior? Most of my cats hate water. I have one, Max, who will drink from the faucet, and [...]

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After yesterday’s story about drunken elephants, an Animal Intelligence reader pointed me to this video clip from the 1974 documentary Animals Are Beautiful People. In this scene, a variety of animals get a little tipsy from consuming fermented marula fruit.

According to the Wikipedia entry on this film, some critics believe this scene was staged. It’s [...]

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If I saw it on Digg, it must be good, right? The Presurfer writes:
These video clips are from the film, Daylight Robbery II, which aired on the Discovery Channel in November of 1995. It was produced by the B.B.C. and presented by Dr. Jessica Holm.
In any event, it’s amazing stuff:

We have a lot of squirrels [...]

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Nicole forwarded an amazing video. Christian the lion was raised by humans and then released into the wild. Watch the cat’s reaction when these people return to see him a year later.

After a year apart, after a year in the wild, Christian still recognizes his old friends and greets them with enthusiasm. Aside from [...]

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I’m back from vacation and eager to write more about animal intelligence. While I was gone, a couple of readers (this site has readers!) forwarded stories about amazing animals. I’ll share those in the coming days.
For now — and seemingly at random, I know — here are several clips of chickens who live with cats. [...]

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On strong recommendations from friends, my wife and I have been watching Planet Earth, the BBC nature documentary recently broadcast on The Discovery Channel. The cinematography is gorgeous, and I love the insights into animal behavior.
I can’t give the project unequivocal praise, though. The writing is sometimes uneven, and some episodes lack any real [...]

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Kruger National Park is the largest game reserve in South Africa. It lies nestled in the northeast corner of the country, next to Mozambique and close to Zimbabwe. The reserve is home to a variety of flora and fauna.
YouTube user Jason275 has posted footage captured by a group on safari inside the park. Beside a [...]

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I’m still here, and I do have more animal intelligence stories on deck. Unfortunately, this blog takes third place among my projects, so sometimes it languishes while I write about personal finance or about my daily life.
Just to tide you over, here’s a short video of “jellyfish all around”.

Naokiinoue, who posted this to YouTube, [...]

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Here’s another in a long line of videos where I’m unsure what I’m seeing. The person who posted this at YouTube wrote, “A tortoise in our garden defends it’s territory against invading cats.”

Is the tortoise playing? Is it angry? (I lean toward the latter.) Are the cats hurting it when they respond? It doesn’t look [...]

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I am not a vegetarian. I love meat. I do not consider myself an animal rights activist. I’m just a guy who thinks that animals are far more intelligent than most people believe. In fact, I believe that some animals — dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees — have complex societies and rich emotional lives. They have language. [...]

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Via AV Geeks, here’s the story of Squeak the squirrel, an educational film from 1957.

Shows how a gold-mantled ground squirrel at Crater Lake National Park has learned to solve problems connected with getting food. Illustrates how an animal can learn to find food that is hidden from view or out of reach.
This is [...]

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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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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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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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Will forward a video story about “the most amazing dog in the world”. This dog was born without forelegs — it has learned to walk erect in a bipedal fashion, just like you and me. Here’s some footage from The Montel Williams Show:

And here’s some footage from a local news station:

Thanks for sending this in, [...]

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Here’s an awesome article from New Scientist, and some video to go along with it.

In a revelation that destroys yet another cherished notion of human uniqueness, wild chimpanzees have been seen living in caves and hunting bushbabies with spears. It is the first time an animal has been seen using a tool to hunt a [...]

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This doesn’t show intelligence per se, but it is certainly curious behavior. Here’s Nora, the piano-playing cat:

What prompts animals to do things like this? I cannot believe it’s simply random. It’s certainly not instinctual. (I have friends who believe that all animal behavior is purely instinctive — a position I believe is completely indefensible if [...]

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If I’m not careful, this is going to turn from “Animal Intelligence” into “Cute Interspecies Friendships”. Here’s a dog that’s willingly taking care of some abandoned kittens.

I have no idea what is being said in Japanese here. As with many of these stories, this comes via frykitty.

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Here’s a piece of fluff (but a cute piece of fluff) — a Sumatran Tiger Cub from Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

Maybe I need to introduce a “cute” category.

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Here’s an old bit of news, one of the first things that really made me realize that, “Hey — animals are pretty damn smart after all.”
In the Brevia section of the 9 August 2002 issue of Science, Weir et al. report a remarkable observation: The toolmaking behavior of New Caledonian crows. In the experiments, [...]

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