What is the smartest animal? "The man!" many would answer. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, is not so sure that in his new book "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?" (Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?) He illustrated a number of cases in which animals have turned out to be smarter than us.
What is the smartest animal? "The man!" many would answer. It is not so, as Frans de Waal, primatologist of Emory University explains, that in his new book "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?”(We are smart enough to know how much they are intelligent animals?) illustrated a number of cases in which animals turned out to be smarter than us.
According to the scientist, the reality is much more complicated. There are hundreds of animals with surprising intelligence and in some cases superior to that of man.
Index
CHIMPANZEE
- chimpanzee, for example, they can easily beat humans by recalling a set of numbers displayed for a split second. Better than us in mathematics then. But not only. De Waal describes a female chimpanzee named Kuif who learned to feed her cub with some sort of bottle and she knew she had to take it out when the baby needed to burp.
Dandy, another young male chimpanzee described by de Waal, was intelligent enough not to reveal the location of some buried grapefruits while in the company of others of his own kind. Hours later, left alone, he found them and ate them.
OCTOPUS
And there are also the octopus who can learn to open bottles. But we must not think of intelligence in the strict sense. Dogs and horses are able to recognize the nuances of body language that we do not notice.
READ also: THE 10 SMARTEST ANIMALS IN THE WORLD
BATS
Other species manage to do things that we do not even imagine: i bats they know how to map space through echolocation, A kind of Sound biological. They emit sounds into the environment and listen to echoes bouncing off different objects.
BIRDS
- birds for their part, the complex mechanisms of flight and landing dominate. Even less noble creatures like the ticks they surpass us in one particular capacity: to identify mammals through the smell of butyric acid.
The intelligence of each species has been designed for specific tasks, so it is useless to make comparisons.
SQUIRRELS
“It is definitely unfair to ask one squirrel to count to ten, if the count is not quite what life has required of him ”, writes de waal. But he has a great ability to memorize places, precisely because he lives in the forest and he needs them.
Our mistake is that of analyze animal cognition starting from a strictly human definition of intelligence.
An anthropocentric vision that does not allow us to grasp the beauty of the diversity of species that populate this world.
READ also: DOLPHINS, DOGS AND ELEPHANTS ARE AS INTELLIGENT AS (AND MORE) OF THE PRIMATES. BUT THEIR WAY
Francesca Mancuso
