Inside the Minds of Animals

Recently, I read an article in the "TIME" magazine, named "Inside the Mind of Animals".It is about how smart certain animals are, and also raising questions about how we treat them. is fascinating and an eye opener into the minds of animals. You never know what an animal is thinking of as it looks at you. It could well be studying human beings too?

Kanzi, a 29 year old bonobo, is very talkative. He can build thoughts and sentences, even conjugate, all by pointing. The paper sheets he points at, includes not just easy nouns, but also concept words, as well as grammatical elements, like: "-ing" and "-ed" which signifies tense. To Kanzi, Slow + Lettuce = Kale It takes a long time to chew Kale, so Kanzi named it accordingly.

Crows and other corvids excel at tool use, a function of both clever brain wiring and the bird's complex social structure.If creativity lives in the cerebral cortex, why are crows and jays, better tool users than nearly all non-human species.

Orangutans have a very strong sense of the difference between self and others,so they will preen at their own reflection. It is easy to study the brain and behavior of an animal, but subtler cognitive abilities are much harder to map.

Elephants are familial and appear to mourn their dead. If they find other elephant bones, they will gently examine the skulls. Many questions have aroused - Can they feel? Do they experience empathy and compassion? Can they love or care or hope or grieve? And what does that say about how we treat them?

So who is the smartest out of all? The great apes and cetaceans are the smartest, followed by the corvids. They are under the "very smart" rank. Social carnivores and herd animals are under the "sort of smart" ranks. Bivalves have no smarts to speak of; may well lack even consciousness.