Quick links: Animal thought

There’s a BBC article on whether animals are capable of imagination. It looks like they have limited powers of imagination, similar to small children. Most of the examples seem to be from other apes.

Also from the BBC is a piece on how dogs can understand situations from a human’s point of view.

Still on dogs, here’s an interview with a scientist who studies dog cognition. It covers the launch of his company to help people evaluate the intelligence of their dogs and, at the same time, benefit science. It’s also got a few questions on how smart dogs are, what people wrongly assume about dogs and a bit about the history of their domestication.

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Do non-human animals have culture and morality?

Dolphins (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Obviously if you’ve read some of earlier posts you’ll now I think some of them do. Not all animals of course but some of them. I tried to convince you with my post on animal intelligence, specifically focussed on intelligence in animals other than primates, but I’ve since heard some more stories which I think are useful for expanding on some of the points I made there. This time I will be using some primate examples, since hopefully you’re convinced there is intelligence in other animals, as well as expanding on dolphins.

Animal Intelligence

In my recent post on plant ethics I said that animals were of ethical concern because we have good reasons to believe that, like us, they are capable of thinking and feeling and so are able to suffer. In this post I want to share some of those reasons and hopefully convince you, if you aren’t already convinced, that animals are far more than just unthinking, unfeeling machines. Since we are so closely related to other primates I’m going to ignore those examples and rather focus on two other animal groups, dolphins and corvids (ravens and crows).