Animals that can tell a Monet from a Piccasso. Animals
that can deliver the finest drugs to your doorstep? Or, animals that can
save up ammunition to shoot you down when you least expect
it? They all exist, and today you’ll see why. 10. Ants Ok, so
first of all, we should say that measuring intelligence is hard enough in
humans, never mind in animals, and there is no scale available
that could tell us accurately just how smart a certain animal
species is. Nonetheless, scientists have observed animals enough to know
how good some are at problem-solving, how they use tools, or how
self-aware they are. So, with that in mind, let’s just look at animals
that regularly pull off things that seem human-like in their cleverness.
Let’s first talk about ants. These little critters are sometimes called
the world’s smartest insect, although other folks might say hold on
there, what about bees. It’s true, bees are also smart, but we
love ants so much we are going to talk about them. The average human might
have in the region of 90 billion brain cells. Conversely, the ant may
only have about 250,000, which isn’t much, but in terms of brain
mass, ants do actually have quite large brains. It’s not about size,
though, as the saying goes, it’s what you do with it that matters and
ants do a lot of cool stuff. Just imagine being the size of an ant and
trying to get around, without the ant version of Google Maps. They
seem to always know exactly where they’re going, despite not really
knowing the territory around them. That’s because they use a bunch of
navigational cues. For instance, they look at the panorama around
them; they look at the position of the sun, or how light are forming
around them. They think about contours, smells, wind, what the ground feels
like beneath them and they even count steps. So, they take in all
that information, and then they figure out the best way to a certain
place. But what if you are a sadistic kid, and we know some of you
have been one, and you just picked up an ant and took it to another
place that it's never been before, say, 100 meters from its
buddies. That’s a long way for an ant. For sure, if it could speak, it would
call you a not very nice name, but it could still probably get back
home. Scientists in Australia did such an experiment, and they
found that the lost ant conducted what the scientists called a “systematic
search.” The researchers wrote, “The search pattern consisted of loops and
was centered on the position where the nest was most likely to be
located. At first, it covered a rather small area, but then
gradually extended outwards to cover a larger area.” Ants are more than
just good navigators, though. They are also quite good
at discriminating who’s healthy and who's sick. Researchers at
the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the University
of Lausanne found that when some ants get sick, the colony gets down
with a bit of social distancing. Basically, when the foragers go out
and collect food, they risk picking up a disease, such as a fungal
disease. The last thing a colony needs is everyone to get sick,
so they somehow detect which ants have this disease and reduce their
interactions with other ants. But the really special thing about ants
is how they work together, with scientists calling the whole group one
big super-organism. They use pheromones to communicate via smell, so
if during the day a predator is threatening the colony, ants can tell each
other by passing messages down a very long line. They might say something
like, “Hey John, it’s kicking off in the mound, let’s go help.” John
might be a forager and not a fighter, but ants often change roles when
needed. This teamwork makes them a force to be reckoned
with. As one scientist said, “An individual ant is not very
bright, but ants in a colony, operating as a collective, do remarkable
things.” With communication, including making noises and body movements,
they can solve pretty tricky problems. In one experiment, researchers took
a bunch of ants out of their natural environment and put them in a place
where the researchers had also put a bunch of honey, twigs, pine
needles, grains of soil, and also some non-natural things such as
bits of paper and sponge. The ants did a bit of communicating, and soon
they started using the soil to soak up the honey so they could move
it. They also started tearing off bits of sponge just big enough to carry
and then dipped them in the honey ready for transportation. Some ants
tested doing that with both the paper and the sponge to see which the best
was, and they figured all this out pretty fast. And we’re sure if the
ants needed to take any of that stuff across a big drop, they’d have
made a bridge out of themselves. Next we have an animal that might just be
down for eating our super smart ants, but is pretty clever itself.9.
Pigeons if we asked 100 of our viewers what their favorite animal
were, we doubt anyone would choose those poop-bombing pigeons who
vandalize our balconies every day of the week. They might not be the
smartest bird - we’ll get to them soon - but pigeons are a lot more
intelligent than you think. We can’t talk about pigeon brains without
mentioning war, especially the First and Second World Wars when
pigeons helped to save many, many lives. This wasn’t the first time
pigeons were used to carry messages during wartime, even the great
Julius Caesar used them to send home messages when he was fighting in
Gaul, but in the world wars, they were extremely important. The US
Army Signal Corps, for example, had 600 pigeons in WW1, and in
WW2, the British forces had a whopping 250,000 pigeons. So, what’s so
special about them? The answer is they can travel long distances, as far
as 1000 miles (1,600 km), and sometimes reach an average top speed of
around 100 mph (160 mph), and they can come back to the spot where
they left. Attach a little note to them and these guys are a handy
device in a war. In the world wars they flew so high it was hard to shoot
them down, and they got their messages where they needed to be in
quick time. As for how they do it, this is debated, but its though
they have an internal compass, and with that, they know where to go by
looking at the position of the sun, or looking at landmarks, the
stars at night, and perhaps by feeling out the force of the Earth’s
magnetic field. The latter is called “magneto reception”. As we
said, this is still being debated. They might even use low-frequency
signals to get where they are going. What’s not up for debate is how good
pigeons are at it, with them recently being used by gangs to deliver
drugs to certain places, including inside prisons, where they
might also occasionally deliver a small cellphone. Here’s a newspaper
headline from 2017, “Police shoot carrier pigeon dead as it flies drugs
into jail in ‘backpack’” That was in Argentina, but we found
similar stories from many countries. Try asking a sparrow or an owl
to do that and your heroin will end up a tree someplace. But
delivering war messages and the odd bit of prison spice isn’t their only
talent. One of the most famous pigeon studies involved the two
renowned painters Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet. What’s important to know
is that these artists had very different styles. Monet was an
impressionist. We are sure you’ve all seen his paintings of water lilies. Picasso
was known for the Cubist movement, with his often jagged paintings
looking a bit scary, such as his famous Guernica. During the experiment,
the pigeons had to peck a device, but they only got some food when
they pecked the device when a Picasso painting was shown to them. If they
tried pecking and a Monet painting was shown, nothing came out of the
device. They then learned which paintings paid out. It a short amount
of time, they didn’t even bother pecking when a Monet painting was
above the device, but what’s crazy is they soon started
pecking when they were shown Picasso paintings they’d never seen
before, and wouldn’t peck when they were shown Monet paintings they’d
never seen. Later, the researchers used other cubist
and impressionist artists and the pigeons showed they could
differentiate between those, too. Pigeons are very bright, as was proven in
2011 when some scientists at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New
Zealand, showed through a series of tests that pigeons could count from
one to nine. In 2016, a study using food rewards showed that pigeons were
able to learn between 26 and 58 words with real meanings and were
able to pick them out from among 7,832 words that were just
meaningless jumbled letters. It turns out that pigeons have excellent memories,
with The Guardian saying, “Memory test puts pigeons high in the pecking
order.” The article talked about another study when one
pigeon memorized 68% of 1,978 pictures, better than most humans could
do. As another study concluded, “The pigeon is one of the smartest,
most physically adept creatures in the animal kingdom.” So, be nice
to pigeons, because it seems they don’t easily forget a face. Maybe if you
got pooped on, you were a target. Next up is man’s best friend. 8.
Dogs Are dogs intelligent? Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. But on
other occasions, our mutts surprise us with their
intelligence- especially when food is around. As you all know, not
all dogs and dog breeds are blessed with the same brains, as can be
seen when a Border collie straight up follows all kinds of orders and
your Beagle can’t seem to get through one day without getting its head
stuck in a boot. But any kind of canine is pretty clever when it
comes to animal intelligence. After all, they can sense the sound of your
voice when they are in trouble or about to get a treat. They
might salivate at the lips when they hear the dinner bell strike and when
you are sad, they seem to know you need a bit of attention. Border collies
are said to have the best brains when it comes to following orders,
working things out, and generally getting things done. That’s why
they are employed as sheepdogs so often. It is because dogs have evolved for so
many years alongside humans that they have an extra-special ability
to read us and read what’s going on around us. Unlike most other animals,
dogs can often sense when humans are in a bad mood, but they
might also know if you have come across someone in the street and you
don’t like that person, or the person is a threat. They can
read situations and levels of tension, just because they are so familiar
with humans. Try looking for sympathy from a pigeon. It won’t
work, in spite of their great intelligence. Dogs also have one the best
noses in the animal kingdom, which is handy when some other
senses aren’t great. Dogs can be trained to find all sorts of things,
including that China white heroin that the pigeon brought into the prison.
They can also smell criminals who’ve been at a crime scene. Dogs don’t
have the best sense of smell among all animals, but they
are definitely in the top ten, especially when we are talking about
the bloodhound. These things with their 230 million scent receptors can
track a scent that has passed through a place as long as 13 days
ago and they can follow a trail for something in the region of 150
miles. Talking about distance, you might have heard that you can take a
dog many miles from its home and it can somehow get back. That’s true
because, like birds, they have a homing device, which is likely related to
the Earth’s Magnetic Field. Maybe the most famous story about this
involved “Bobbie the Wonder Dog”, who was lost in 1924 while the
owners were on a vacation in the US. Six months later, it was pawing at
their house door after walking in the region of 2,800 miles. Dogs
also demonstrate the ability to be cunning. As some scientists point out,
they use deception to get what they want. “Our pets can be sneaky
and manipulative when they want to maximize the number of tasty
treats they get to eat,” said one writer. They do this kind of thing to other
dogs, too, such as one dog will pretend that something is going on
outside of the house, and that leads the other dogs to go and have a look.
Meanwhile, the sneaky pooch takes the best place on the sofa. It seems
they also know when we are being deceitful. A study at the University
of Vienna used 260 dogs of various breeds for some
intelligence experiments. In them, someone who the dog didn’t know, a
kind of handler, would take the dog to look at two buckets. In one of
the buckets was a treat and in another was nothing. The handler told
the dog to go investigate the bucket with the food in it, just by pointing
and using language cues. When the dog pawed some paper above the
bucket it found the treat. Now a bond of trust had been formed. Then
in the next part of the experiment, the handler went out of the room, and
someone took the food out of bucket A and put it in bucket
B. The dog watched this. When the handler came back in and told
the dog to go to bucket a, it didn’t. It went for B. The dog knew
the handler was wrong. This might sound reasonable to you, but apes
and children under 5 are apt to follow whatever an adult tells them
to do in such situations. And that’s the thing with dogs; you
actually don’t have to be unreliable too many times for them to lose
trust in you. If you do prove to be unreliable that can lead to bad
behavior in the household. One researcher said, “Dogs have
more sophisticated social intelligence than we thought. This
social intelligence evolved selectively in their long life history with
humans.” If that’s not impressive, you need to know that some dogs
can learn a long list of words. Sure, you already know that your
dogs responded to the world “alkies” or “din-din” or something like
that, but some dogs know lots of words. You could say any of
345 words to a border collie named Betsie and she would run off and
try and find that very thing. 7. Cats we guess we have to talk about
cats since we’ve done dogs. In the world of pet ownership, there’s a kind
of snobbery in which cat owners perceive dog owners as
inferior, needy even, while they are far more independent, just as
their pets are. They scoff at dogs for being stupid and are always happy
to extol their cat’s many talents, which in any decent world would be
called doggish. But are they right in saying their cat is more
intelligent than dogs, which let’s face it, is an assumption
crudely based on things such as their cat doesn’t attack the
vacuum cleaner and won’t jump through a window to get hold of a fake
sausage? That daft doggie on average has about twice the number of
neurons in its brain than its feline counterpart. That matters. Neurons
are like processing units, so when you have more of them, you have
more brainpower. Dogs have around 500 million neurons and cats about half
that. As you already know, though, it’s not just about size or the
number of neurons. It’s more complicated than that, just as one
scientist said, “Small animals with absolutely small brains can be
surprisingly smart and large animals with absolutely large brains
relatively unintelligent.” For instance, an elephant is packing more
neurons than a human, but we don’t see any elephants sitting
around on the savannah discussing their latest developments for
self-replicating smart Nano robot weapons and talking about
the cosmic futility they feel every morning when they wake up
and go on Elephant Tube. Its how the brain is structured that
matters, what it's made of, and that’s complicated. Size can matter,
but we can’t just go on size alone. Back to cats. Some studies have shown
that while they can be clever little animals, they can’t keep up with
canines when it comes to counting things and identifying quantities.
Still, on the upside for cats, they have the ability to know something
exists even when it’s not there. Even when humans are really young,
they don’t have this ability, sometimes referred to as object
permanence. Dogs have it, too, by the way, but let’s focus on cats alone
right now. On the downside for cats, an experiment in 2009 showed
they had trouble with something rats or pigeons would probably find
quite easy. That was, they had to pull on a string and a treat came
out when they did so. But then they were faced with lots of strings, some
which led to a treat and others that didn’t, the poor felines were all
over the place. They just grabbed at everything. Stupid cats! As for why
cats don’t always follow orders, that’s not necessarily related to
being clever or being dumb, they just haven’t been as
domesticated as long as dogs, which is probably why they like to go their
own way. This can be a good thing when it comes to solving problems,
though. In studies with cats and dogs, both animals were asked to solve
some problems. It turned out that the dogs gave up faster and looked
for help from humans, whereas the cats were more prone to persevere and
complete the problem by themselves. Overall, though, we think dogs
are just that bit more intelligent. Now let’s talk about that big-brained beast we
mentioned earlier. 6. Elephants You already know that elephants have a
pretty massive organ in their heads. It’s smaller than the brain of a
sperm whale and a little bit bigger than an animal we’ll soon talk
about: the dolphin. But the thing we want to discuss here is
what kind of value do elephants get for their five kilograms (11 pounds)
of brain? They might not be able to develop weapons of mass destruction,
but they have some traits that show us they are pretty bright. For
one, they bury their dead in a ritualistic kind of way, and they even
mourn by the grave. Not many animals do that. In fact, elephants might
be the only ones besides primates and us humans. So, what does that
tell you about elephants? It tells you they suffer from grief and have a
certain amount of empathy. Elephants are said to have complex frontal
lobes, and with that, they have emotional depth, they rejoice when
meeting with old friends, and they don’t forget each other. When they come
across a carcass of a past friend, they know who it was and it saddens
them. As one researcher said, “They stop and become quiet and tense in a
different way from anything I have seen in other
situations.” Elephants aren’t alone in being so emotional, but they
perhaps stand out a bit among animals. They also have some wicked senses,
according to a study undertaken by researchers at the University of
Sussex in Brighton. They showed that elephants can hear a voice and detect
the age and sex of the person, but in some cases also the ethnicity. That
sounds weird, but it doesn’t mean any ethnicity. The study involved
researchers playing a recorded message to the elephants. The
message was the same, but it was spoken by members of two different
tribes: the Masa and the Kamba of Kenya. Importantly, the Masa has a
long history of hunting elephants. So, when an adult male from the Masa
tribe was heard talking, the elephants got scared and huddled
together, as if they were in danger, but when they heard the Kamba guy
say the same thing, they just chilled. When children or women from
the Masa tribe read the message, the elephants also didn’t give a damn,
because women and kids had never been a threat to them. Elephants
have used tools, too, such as sticks with which to scratch themselves and
blocks to stand on to get high hanging fruit. Some other elephants
have been seen plugging up a water hole with something they made so the
water couldn’t evaporate. As you know, it’s the use of tools that
makes us humans as unpopular as we are today in the animal kingdom. Tool
use is a good indicator of animal intelligence. Elephants can learn new
stuff, too, such as painting pretty pictures. Some people online have said
this isn’t true and there’s some cheating going on, but when the BBC
went to investigate the elephant was really painting. In fact, they’ve
been doing abstract paintings for years and it is very much real,
as you would know, if you lived in parts of Thailand. It’s not that the
elephants are necessarily being creative, but that they’ve learned a bunch
of strokes. They may even love painting. Every time an elephant named
Ruby heard the word “paint” at Phoenix Zoo she would get really
excited. Elephants have also been known to play musical instruments,
and when they do, they show that they can make an almost melodic tune
rather than lots of disjointed noise. One elephant band even finished
its songs with crescendos. They are truly amazing animals, engaging in all
kinds of play, showing self-awareness, having an outstanding
memory, and at times being able to mimic the noises of other animals,
including humans. One elephant in South Korea used a technique with its
trunk to make the Korean words: sit, no, yes, lie down. As for
problem-solving, elephants are animal Brainiac’s. They can take their time
solving a problem, and when one method doesn’t work, they switch to
another. They’ve been shown to work together when two elephants are
required to pull on a rope and in another experiment which
involved lots of buckets and lots of apples being thrown into
them, the elephants stood by and watched, and at the end
seventy-four percent of the time, they chose the fullest
bucket. Let’s now move on to an animal people love to eat but don't
like thinking about how it gets on their plate. 5. Pigs Poor pigs, man
they have a hard life. If you’ve ever seen what kind of conditions they
live in before going to the slaughterhouse and what happens at the
slaughterhouse, well, it’s something you can’t unknown once you’ve
seen it. We recommend you google it for yourself and get informed. It’s
truly horrendous, cruel, and terrifying, and that’s the lives of most pigs
in super developed nations or less developed
nations. Free-range is better than factory farm, but it’s still
a horrible life for the swine. When you see videos of pigs in factory
farms or slaughterhouses, you can almost feel their pain; hear the
pain in their screeching. Part of the reason why this is so hard to watch
is that pigs are very bright animals. It’s as if they are aware of
what’s going on and what’s going to happen to them. As if right before
they are slaughtered, they totally know. You can see that in
their desperation when they try to get away. Anyone that has kept pigs
will know they are really emotional animals. It’s obvious they feel
stress, joy, fear, confusion, and more. They have personalities, too, with
some of them being really friendly and some being a bit too
stubborn. Well, that’s when they are not wasting away in overcrowded
farms. If left to live a natural life, they form social bonds with other
pigs, and like some other animals we’ll talk about later, they form
hierarchies. That’s to ensure there is some harmony in the group, and for
animals, Pigs must hate those farms so much given that they have to
live in their own poop, because when left to their own devices,
they are really tidy and they choose a spot where everyone goes to
the toilet. They even decorate their living quarters, sometimes making
them pretty with flowers. The saying as dirty as a pig couldn’t be
more wrong. The only reason they like mud is to keep them cool and
not get sunburnt or keep bugs away, and they always make sure to use
things such as bark to wipe the mud off later. Pigs communicate using
a long list of grunts, and that’s why when things are bad all the
pigs suffer a kind of “emotional contagion”. But they can use this
communication for the good, showing in studies that they can work together
to solve problems. When that’s done, they sometimes bed down together
nose to nose, looking just like human lovers wrapped up in
bedsheets. According to one study, pigs were better at completing
cognition tasks than a three-year-old child and way better than any
traditional domestic pet. In another study, four pigs named
Hamlet, Omelets, Ebony, and Ivory played a video game with their
snouts and they did pretty well. One researcher told the BBC, “They're not
playing Minecraft - but that they can manipulate a situation to get a
reward is no surprise at all… When you look a pig right in the
eye, you can tell there's intelligence there.” So, pigs are skilled. They’re
compassionate. They’re sensitive, and they are just cool. Let’s
hope one day their existences aren’t animal hell on Earth. Now for
something you probably didn’t expect to see on this list. 4. Crows In
2019, the BBC asked this question: “Crows could be the smartest animal
other than primates?” The article started with a story about some
Oxford University scientists and a crow named Betty. Betty had
a problem. In her cage, down a little tube, was a bit of
delicious pig heart – sorry pigs – but how could she get at it with
just a beak and some claws? Betty thought for a while and suddenly
noticed that inside her cage was a bit of wire, so she grabbed hold
of the wire and then pushed it against an object, so it was hooked at the
end. She then went fishing for that heart and got it. Job well
done. Crows may have tiny brains, but they are compact, having on
average 1.5 billion neurons. It's those neurons that have made crows the
best at certain tests. They became the first animal outside of humans
to complete a task to secure some food floating in water at the bottom of
a tube. To get it out, they started picking up stones to displace the
water and bring the food to the top. Most kids can’t do this
until they’re about seven years old. Crows use tools in the wild all
the time. They mourn their dead and they are also self-aware, being
able, according to a 2020 study, to contemplate what’s in their heads. In
short, scientists measured their brain stimulus when they were asked
to complete a task. It was shown that the birds didn’t just
complete the task, but they were aware that they had done it. This
relates to what we call consciousness. Crows don’t forget people, either. In
another experiment, humans wearing masks tagged some crows and let
them fly off. Later, people wearing the same masks walked around and
the crows dive-bombed them, presumably because they didn’t much like
being tagged. Each crow chose the correct mask to dive bomb, rather
than just any of the humans. Crows might even be able to differentiate between
human languages. One study involved crows that were used to Japanese
people talking. The researchers played the crows Japanese voices on a
recording. They didn’t seem interested at all, perhaps because they’d
heard something similar before. But when the recording featured Dutch
voices, the crows became animated and seemed enraptured by the
voices. Crows are also sly. Many animals plan for the future, as you
can see when intelligent animals such as foxes, rats, and squirrels hide
their food. But crows take things a step further. Sometimes
they’re about to hide something and then they notice another crow is
watching them. Still, they carry on, pretending to hide the food.
They’ve actually hidden it in their feathers with the plan to hide it when
the other crow is busy looking for food that’s not there. If that
isn’t cool, crows also use humans to help them eat. Let’s say they have a
nut but can’t crack it. No problem, they just drop it in the street
where they know a car will run over it. They’ve even been known to
wait for the crosswalk sign to go green before they safely stroll
across the street to eat the cracked nut. Ok, now on to another of your
favorite animals. 3. Rats we should damn well know if rats are clever
because we certainly use enough of them for our experiments, from trapping
them in mazes to getting them hooked on drugs. Rats are said to be some of
the brightest animals on the planet, but again, they have very small
brains. A researcher was asked this, and she responded, “Even though the
rat brain is smaller and less complex than the human brain, research
has shown that the two are remarkably similar in structure and function.
Both consist of a vast amount of highly connected neurons that are
constantly talking to each other.” There’s the saying, you can’t teach an
old dog new tricks, but it seems with rats, you can always teach them
new tricks. They’re one of the best animals at performing tasks
humans have asked them to do, but of course, there usually has to be
something in it for them. If you give them a stroke after that,
they emit a noise that we humans can’t hear, but we now know that
it's rat laughter. If that doesn’t enamor them to you, studies have
shown rats sacrifice for the greater good. In those studies, some rats
chose to free other rats from cages rather than go for a food reward
and leave the other rats behind bars. They’re definitely smart animals,
but in one study in Belgium, they performed even better than humans.
The rats and humans were taught to look at certain ‘good’ and ‘bad’
patterns, and then they were given new patterns to look at and
were asked to say if they were ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They weren’t asked
as in talking to them of course, but directed to choose in another way. The
study leader, Ben Vermaercke, said the rats outperformed the humans at one
stage in the study when things got more complex. The rats just had
a better way of working things out. As one scientist said, “Although
rats may not approach cognitive tasks using strategies observed in human
subjects, they are frequently successful on their own terms.” He said
rats find loopholes to complete tasks that humans don’t tend to think
about. Ok, it’s time we talked about something that lives in the sea. 2.
Dolphins Sure, we could have gone for the big-brained whale and we
might have chosen the incredibly smart octopus, but in the end, we went
for dolphins. Female dolphins only give birth a few times in their lives,
but when they do, they spend a lot of time teaching their young. Those
youngsters grow up in a complex environment with many rules. To deal
with that, they need a complex brain, and dolphins have one, including a
large neocortex, a part of the brain associated with
intelligence. Dolphins, like elephants, engage in complex play, such
as making bubbles in the water and biting them for fun. They might even
help other species when they’re in trouble, which they’ve done
with humans a few times when the humans are looking like they’re in
trouble. Not many animals do that, which shows empathy as well as
intelligence. Dolphins are also one of few animals to pass something
called the mirror test, which could mean they are self-aware.
Basically, the test entails putting a mark on an animal when it is
unconscious or at least not aware of what’s going on. It then gets a
mirror shoved in front of it and if it notices the mark, often a red
blotch, it has seen the change and so is self-aware. As for
problem-solving, in one experiment a dolphin named Kelly was given some
fish treats every time she brought a piece of waste paper to a human.
She wanted more fish, of course, so she soon learned to get one piece,
hide it under a rock, rip it up, and take the humans smaller pieces
each time. That meant more fish. Dolphins are also really good at
passing on such knowledge using various sounds. They are
excellent teachers, as is seen when adults teach the young that if they go
foraging with a bit of sponge on their snouts they will get hurt less
when hitting various sharp objects. And if dolphins look like
emotional creatures, it’s because they are. For their size,
they have really big brains and a big part of that brain is something
called the Para limbic system. Scientists say this is why dolphins
can live in large groups and have complex relationships with all the members.
The ability to work together in groups is what makes humans so powerful,
but for most animals, it’s just not possible. Animals have to form
hierarchies and social systems to be successful otherwise you have total
chaos. It’s this collaboration that humans have that is the
reason you are watching this video right now. It took a lot of work
to get from the days when we were grunting at each other in caves to now,
which brings us to the number one spot on this list. 1. Primates which
primates do we choose since there are over 500 species, from ones only as
big as your fist to ones that look like King Kong? Some of them
live in trees in small groups and some live mostly down on the ground
in groups of around 15 to 150. It’s the apes, not the monkeys that are
the most intelligent primates. That’s namely orangutans and
chimpanzees, which actually have very different habits and lifestyles
while also being very similar. Chimps live in groups, and they have a
strict social order revolving around that dominance hierarchy we’ve
just talked about. Without this order, they wouldn’t be successful
at survival. But it does sometimes seem brutal when for what looks
like no good reason they beat up and rip apart a member of their own
group. That doesn’t seem like an intelligent thing to do, given that the
chimp you’ve killed could have your back one day. It also doesn’t look
great to some of the other chimps who might fear and distrust the
instigator of the beat down. Remember that a good alpha male
isn’t just tough; it is also fair and needs respect just as much as
fear from the group. It’s not always clear why chimps kill their own, but
at the end of the day, it has to be something to do with a problem in the
hierarchy. Some chimps sometimes need kicking out, and that usually
means a lot of blood being spilled. Still, they also show great
kindness, and they mourn for their dead. With primates, much time is
spent grooming each other, which shows you are a solid member of the
group. So, the love they show is as important as any violence. If there
was a Chimp social media platform, everyone would write:
Relationship: Complicated. But that just shows how clever they are.
They forage in groups and they fight in groups, sometimes showing battle strategies
other animals would not be able to come up with. If chimps have been
on a hunt and torn apart some poor monkey, they usually share the food
with the others who haven’t even been part of the hunt. How they
share also shows their cunning and kindness. It’s all part of a larger
scheme in the game of life. They are complex when it comes to
leadership, too. Some chimps rule with an iron fist and others are
fairer and do a lot more grooming. In some cases, the ones who’ve
been harsh get overthrown, so it pays to show some tough love, and
not just rule with the threat of violence. They use grunts and screams and
other noises to communicate and they use all kinds of body language
to put across how they feel. They “fish” for termites and ants using
sticks and stalks and after looking at how the older chimps do it,
they can learn how to use a rock as an anvil and smash a nut on it
with another rock or a tree branch. That’s pretty ingenious for an animal,
but all sorts of tools are used by chimps. They use weapons, too. At
Furuvik zoo in Sweden, one chimp didn’t much like the crowds upsetting his
peace, so he started throwing rocks at people. The zookeepers had no
idea where the chimp had got so many rocks, so they filmed him during
the night. It turned out that he collected rocks and made secret
ammunition piles, which he’d use when he knew visitors were coming
back. It’s not that unusual for chimps to throw things at people,
it’s just part of them wanting to look dominant, but what’s amazing
here is how this chimp planned his attacks the night before
or days before. They’ve also been known to construct makeshift
ladders to get out of their enclosures, building them first and taking
them out at night. We could add more, but you get the picture. These
animals are the closest we have to ourselves: the good, the bad, and the
ugly. As for Orangutans, they aren’t quite as unpredictable as chimps
so there’s little chance one would pull off your face for no obvious
reason. Orangutans are fairly timid most of the time, but that’s mostly
because they don’t live in hierarchies like chimps. Orangutans are
quite solitary and the males don’t bring up the young, although they will
hang out together from time to time and if push comes to shove, the
alpha will turn up and sort out a problem. It’s debatable if Orangutans
are more intelligent than chimps, although we know who we’d prefer
to spend a quiet afternoon with. They spend a lot of time chilling,
and when they go out foraging (they don’t often eat meat) they might use
any number of really complex tools. In some instances, they’ve been
seen to have not just tools, but have tool kits, with each tool used for
specific tasks. In captivity, they’ve even used things such
as hammers and saws, although they won’t be getting hired to fix your
deck anytime soon. They can match chimps in many ways, but they are the
first animal in the world to show they can manage gift exchanges
using something called “calculated reciprocity”. That’s basically you
thinking, well, he gave me a crap gift for Christmas so he’s
getting something equally rubbish back. Orangutans have their gift
exchanges weighed up. What’s more, they might be the first animal to talk
about the past. We know this because scientists observed orangutan
mothers when danger was passing by. She didn’t move or make a noise,
but when the danger had passed, she went over to her kids and in
orangutan speech said something like, “Watch out kiddo, that damn
clouded leopard is back again.” We should say that to conduct this experiment, the
researchers dressed up as the predators. All kinds of primates use a
special kind of hoot when danger is lurking, but what hadn’t been
seen before are animals waiting several minutes and then sounding the
alarm. That shows a good deal of consciousness rather than just a natural
instinctive reflex. So, we can’t say which is the smartest ape
because they’re all good at different things, and what they’re good at
relates to how they live, but we do like this bit of
information passed on by a zookeeper: “Give a gorilla a screwdriver and he
will sniff it, taste it, and then discard it. Give the screwdriver
to a chimp and he will sniff it, taste it, and then discard it. Give the
screwdriver to an orangutan and he will examine it, hide it, and at
night use it to disassemble his cage.” Well, a chimp might use it to stab
your eyes out, which we guess is also very human. That’s it for
today, now you need to watch, “What If Animals Went to World War with
Humans?” Or, have a look at “Why YouWouldn’t Survive a Town Full of Ants.”