Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are

but it remains endlessly fascinating, since behavior is, as the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz put it, the liveliest aspect of all that lives

Ludwig Wittgenstein, when he famously declared, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Some scholars were offended, complaining that Wittgenstein had no idea of the subtleties of animal communication, but the crux of his aphorism was that since our own experiences are so unlike a lion’s, we would fail to understand the king of fauna even if he spoke our tongue. In fact, Wittgenstein’s reflections extended to people in strange cultures with whom we, even if we know their language, fail to “find our feet.”4 His point was our limited ability to enter the inner lives of others, whether they are foreign humans or different organisms

I look at human cognition as a variety of animal cognition. It is not even clear how special ours is relative to a cognition distributed over eight independently moving arms, each with its own neural supply, or one that enables a flying organism to catch mobile prey by picking up the echoes of its own shrieks

In going over these developments, I will inevitably inject my own view, which emphasizes evolutionary continuity at the expense of traditional dualisms. Dualisms between body and mind, human and animal, or reason and emotion may sound useful, but they seriously distract from the larger picture.

but the two dominant schools of thought viewed animals as either stimulus-response machines out to obtain rewards and avoid punishment or as robots genetically endowed with useful instincts.

Almost every week there is a new finding regarding sophisticated animal cognition, often with compelling videos to back it up. We hear that rats may regret their own decisions, that crows manufacture tools, that octopuses recognize human faces, and that special neurons allow monkeys to learn from each other’s mistakes. We speak openly about culture in animals and about their empathy and friendships. Nothing is off limits anymore, not even the rationality that was once considered humanity’s trademark.

Greeting is a response to the appearance of a familiar individual after an absence, such as your dog jumping up at you as soon as you walk through the door. Internet videos of soldiers being saluted by pets upon return from abroad suggest a connection between the length of separation and the intensity of the greeting. We can relate to this connection since it applies to us as well. No grand cognitive theories are necessary to account for it. But what about saying goodbye?

But what about skeptics who believe that animals are by definition trapped in the present, and only humans contemplate the future? Are they making a reasonable assumption, or are they blinkered as to what animals are capable of? And why is humanity so prone to downplay animal intelligence? We routinely deny them capacities that we take for granted in ourselves.

The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”