The Brian Lehrer Show

The amazing Emilie Conrad calls us humans "the arrogant biped" - of course animals are smarter tnan we are - because they use their whole brains and all their senses, probably some we ahve lost ourselves - dogs can diagnose cancer in ways our logical left lobes can't imagine, but Emilie Conrad has managed to study animals and discover healing protocols for spinal chord injury light years ahead of officialdom, just by using her senses and living in her body. (Easier said than done, and she's very intelligent)

Great sound clip! Too funny!

It's also sparrows and squirrels and more, oh my!

How smart are humans, to only be catching on to this now?

They used peanut butter to make Mr. Ed's lips move.

The blue jays steal the peanuts I Ieave on my window sill for the squirrels. But they always say thank you, they let out a squawk and then take the peanut and fly away. If they stay there a continually squawk that means I have to put more nuts out. Sure, they don't pay for them.

This is interesting and I belive it is useful and accurte to a degree but it is also totally antrhopocentric. I think in a way it is reducing the 'language' and 'logic' and 'habits' of animals to human terms. We look for a pattern that we as humans can understand but we can never really get out of the human-centric understanding. Animals are irreducible to humans.

While this work by scientists apears to be altruistic or respectful I think it is precisely the opposite. This is a reduction of the animal to human terms; another apporpriation of the'other' to our own culturally biased understanding. This should not be taken too far because we become blind in our scientific understanding to broader interpretations.

i remember reading somewhere about the issue of bushmeat, and that chimps under the threat of being killed for it by humans, will beg for their lives. sad. [because of us, that is.]

I understand that humans find mates by looking for certain successive abilities, such as being the most dominant in the group, or the most intelligent, are there any qualities or successive abilities that animals (such as birds) will look for in another mate? Or is it first come first serve (or survival of the mightiest?)

I had a cylindrical bird feeded that was supposed to be only for tiny birds. For minths, the blue jays tried and failed and then one discovered that he (or she) could hold on to the perch and tip himself upside down, reach his bill in the hole and the seeds would pour into his gullet. The others watched and soon they all knew the trick.

http://goveg.com/amazingAnimals.asp

I just love the animals.

My sister-in-law's parrot, Larry, mimicks lots of sounds that the family makes - from the "pop" of a soda can opening, to her 11 year-old's scream of fun, to a "cough" and saying "what?". I've heard Larry make these sounds and it's amazing. What are your thoughts on the parrot's ability to understand us and why does it imitate us?

I'm moving to Chicago tomorrow and my dog Heidi (she's a rescue) seems really depressed. Should I be concerned or is there something I can do to "help" her?

Thanks!

- Kiran Max Weber

On many Science shows we see a school of fish swimming near a shark. This shows at least to me that they can sense when a predator is in predatory mode, i.e. looking for a meal versus when that predator is leisurely passing by. The fish don't just propel out of the camera view at the mere sight of a shark so they seem to know how to read the intentions of the shark. This has been demonstrated with several species of fish and one sees a different when that shark looks for food.

Another time, I saw three crows in my neighbor's oak tree. One had a large piece of bread and he was watching the others. He waited them out and, after they left, he flew down and pushed it into a pile of leaves. He did it carefully and pulled the leaves over in serveral moves. Then he flew away. I went over and it took a long while for me to find the bread, it was so well hidden.

Well, I think we have to start interpreting the "human terms" as animal terms... that our actions are part of a larger picture rather than projecting our behaviors on to other species. We are animals. We always have been. We evolved out of a natural environment, and therefore we fit within that world. Rather than imposing on the "other" our human concepts, we're understanding that our human concepts came out of that larger reality. Why shouldn't we be able to understand these things as they are if we're animals as well?

Criticizing the "arrogance" of humans and saying that there is the animal world and the human world is to detach ourselves from the world we're a part of. We're just one species among many.

A recent NOVA on animal intelligence was such a great show. It showed how great apes can learn language, and by that I mean understand English and sign language.

How animals have different ideas of what's concrete. In one experiment, researchers used a clear box with useless taps to open up a box with candy in it. The apes skipped the taps and just went for the box, but human children followed the adult "teacher" and tapped the same way

If scientists recognize that dogs (for example) are significantly more intelligent than they previously thought, does that also confer a greater emotional intelligence? Don't they then lose the moral authority to use them as subjects in experiments to test medicines and cosmetics?

Neither are humans reducible to human terms, but, inescapably, they're the only terms we have. The very charge of anthropocentrism is the greater anthropocentrism because by denying the drawing of similarities between animals and humans you're also denying the drawing of similarities between humans and animals. We are as much like them as they are like us, and the varieties of self-congratulatory humanism amount to a kind of self-mythologizing category error. We're all animals.

Well, Hal, you're assuming that the scientists showing animal intelligence are the same ones who are testing medicines and cosmetics on them. I doubt this very much.

It is interesting that we are surprised that other living organisms, plants included have developped seemingly "intelligent" strategies for survival.

It is a necessity for life to have intelligent strategies whether inline with our understanding.

The argument that we think of "ourselves as above" has always been ridiculous and only prove our religious aspirations.

Researching animal intelligence can only be restrictive as the mnemonics of understanding it is reduced to the one we can comprehend.

It is revealing animals do not devise experiments to test human intelligence. I guess they "are" confident in what they know.

I hope the research will help those animals that are mistreated, abused, bullied, enslaved, and mercilessly killed by us so very intelligent human beings.

In keeping with Frank's message above--

People who mistreat animals, in addition to having a lack of empathy for other creatures, often use the excuse and faulty reasoning that animals don't think and feel; thus, it's OK to do what we want with them.

The research at least proves that animals think and think intelligently, which comes as no surprise to many of us.

Thinking beings (and let's assume "feeling" beings, as well)--mmmh . . . that does throw a rather different light on our "right" to use animals for our own needs, doesn't it, making such treatment seem an awful lot like slavery?