<p>I have crows who harass me until I fill up the birdbath, robins who get excited to see me and follow me around the yard ( waiting for me to dig up some worms), now we have evidence that fish use tools. </p>
<p>[Fish</a> Photographed Using Tools to Eat | Wired Science | Wired.com](<a href=“http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/fish-tool-use/]Fish”>Fish Photographed Using Tools to Eat | WIRED)</p>
<p>Well, people are animals and we’re intelligent. So I guess other animals’ possessing some degree of inteliigence isn’t so far-fetched. I mean, mice can solve mazes, right? Whoa!</p>
<p>I’ve read that dogs have the intelligence of a 2 year-old human and that they have a vocabulary of about 200 words. That sounds about right for my dog. He knows the difference between “hose” and “sprinkler.” :rolleyes: ;)</p>
<p>We have a squirrel feeder in our yard. It’s a little metal house that you nail to the tree and fill with peanuts, and the squirrels learn to stand on the ledge at the front and lift up the roof with their paws to take the peanuts out-- that way the birds can’t get them. When the feeder is empty the squirrels lift up the roof and let it slam down OVER and OVER and OVER until someone comes out with more peanuts.</p>
<p>When my female lab is lying in a place where the male would like to be, he goes to the front window and barks. She rushes to see what’s causing the excitement, and he rushes the other way to take her place on the couch.</p>
<p>Same dog had a tumor removed a couple of months ago, and the vet put an elizabethan collar on him so he couldn’t bite at the incision. He sat there, wagging his tale, not upset at all. Vet was amazed that Charley was so calm about it. It turns out Charley had a plan… we went out of the clinic and he walked over to the raised flower bed, struck the side of the collar against the bricks, and cracked the thing open.</p>
<p>I recently read a very good books that speaks to this issue; Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz. She is a Psychology professor at Columbia and studies ethology (the science of animal behavior)</p>
<p>I see evidence of intelligence in my own animals. In fact, sometimes I get outwitted!</p>
<p>Our dog is an expert at human behavior modification. She gets us to do what she wants, and rewards us with a wag of her tail.</p>
<p>As time has gone on, it has become clearer and cleared that intelligence is not unique to human beings and animals have their own form of intelligence.</p>
<p>For example, evidence has accumulated that birds,especially given their brain size, are intelligent. Crows and Ravens have been known to use tools, and stories about about things these birds do. The Woman who wrote “My Side of the Mountain” related a story about a Raven that had learned to say “Hello” in various tones, and would descend on a group of picknickers (it would never do so to a group without food) and yell “Hello” in various ways, to try and scare them off (and was often successful).</p>
<p>Usually these things are shrugged off as people seeing what they want to see, but this is via research. Among other things, Parrots have demonstrated the ability, not to mimic, but to learn to speak and also to use words in context, to express things. The most famous was Alex, the African Gray, who showed incredible intelligence. Besides things like using words in context and creating compound sentences and expressing emotion (my favorite line? To a visitor “poor irene is sad, she lost bracelet”). The most incredible thing was that Alex was able to learn the concept of phonemes, something experts said would be impossible for anything other then a human being. Alex demonstrated it unexpectedly one day, after frustrating the researcher, his owner had visitors to the lab and she was showing him off. Normally, after doing something, Alex would be rewarded with a nut, but she only had a brief time with the visitors so was in a rush. After doing something, Alex would say “Nut”, but his owner would say no, and he started getting mad. Finally, frustrated, he said “Ne-Uh-Te, Nut!” spelling it out phonetically (with the implication, 'hey, stupid, you don’t understand the word nut?" <em>lol</em>). Having a parrot and a lovebird, I can tell you even the 2oz lovebird is incredibly aware and intelligent (they estimate a parrot has the rough intelligence of a 6 year old child, though obviously in certain areas and not others).</p>
<p>Scientists claimed birds couldn’t have intelligence, that they couldn’t do what humans do because they lacked certain brain structures…until MRI and CAT and PET scans showed that the bird’s brains worked differently and did things in different places. </p>
<p>Most of the arguments against animal intelligence in my opinion is based in some sort of idea that only humans can have any kind of intelligence, make things, have emotions, etc, a lot of which seems to come from religious bias (misplaced I might add, I don’t see anything in the bible or elsewhere that says animals cannot be intelligent). Despite what idiots like Descartes and Spinoza said, animals are not dumb beasts that deserve only to be kicked.</p>
<p>We have an outside cat that just arrived at our house years ago and adopted us. I feed her in our garage. She wants her food bowl filled early in the morning.</p>
<p>So, she comes up onto our deck and sits directly under the bird feeder (frightening off the birds) until I come downstairs to the garage and fill her food bowl in the morning. </p>
<p>To add to all this, my dog wakes me up early to notify me that the cat is sitting on the deck! When I get up, he runs to the deck door and barks at her, then looks at me.</p>
<p>KKmama, our golden retriever does the same thing, only with us. She whines to go outside, and when we get up to go let her out, takes our place on the sofa.</p>
<p>We were having a rare steak perfectly cooked on the grill. Just as I sat down our young golden mix wanted out. Since I was closest to the door (about 3 feet away), I opened it. Before it was all the way open the he grabbed my steak off the table, ran between my legs and out to the corner of the yard. We taught him some manners after that.</p>
<p>I was adopted by an outside cat last year, which is funny because I’m not an animal person and particularly not a cat person, but Feisty is the most personable cat I’ve ever met. He shows up every day when I get home from work to have his dinner and a chat. He seems to particularly like me, go figure. When I sit on the front porch with him, I will speak and I swear he responds. Cracked me up last night. We are in the process of replacing our storm door, so we currently have a mahogany door whose entire middle is a single pane of glass. Feisty Cat knows that my evil, vicious dog can’t get through the door, so he parked himself in front of the glass, grooming himself and mocking the dog’s attempts to get through the window. I think he is a very sarcastic cat and I love that.</p>