Comments | polaris93: Felis faber

polaris93

Felis faber

Sep 07, 2010 13:49

10 Animals That Use Tools | LiveScience

I would add at least one other to that list: housecats.

It's clear that housecats are highly intelligent. They also talk, i.e., in the same sense we do, using vocal communication to transmit complex information among themselves as well as to other organisms, such as big, backward Homo sapiens, who rarely ( Read more... )

behavior, tool, intelligence, cats, science, psychology

Comments 8

hannahsarah September 8 2010, 06:14:54 UTC

That's really impressive! Most animals use tools as a way of poking things or prying them, but I don't know of too many who have grasped the concept of BAIT.

polaris93 September 8 2010, 06:22:16 UTC

If any could, it would be a carnivore such as a cat, or an omnivore which, like us, is a frequent fish/meat-eater. Such creatures are by nature strategists, who can come up with complex solutions to complex problems. Many birds are that good at it, too -- crows, ravens, bluejays, parrots, etc. Dogs which fall into the working-dog category often are, as well. And ferrets -- well, let's just say that if ferrets ever get the keys to the car, we're doomed. ;-)

hannahsarah September 8 2010, 06:31:14 UTC

Australian Shepherds are so smart, it's scary sometimes. Pugs are just plain manipulative. I have SO many stories, I could give James Herriot a run for his money.

polaris93 September 8 2010, 07:01:59 UTC

You might want to read the books written by Paul Corey, author of Do Cats Think?, Jeff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture. All of these describe incredible instances of what is clearly high intelligence in cats, dogs, and many other creatures. Another one you might want to check out is Lyall Watson, author of Elephantoms: Tracking the Elephant, who describes a meeting between an aging female elephant and a matriarchal whale on the coast of Africa that is one of the most moving things I've ever read.

jordan179 March 27 2011, 19:28:50 UTC

polaris93 March 27 2011, 19:50:05 UTC

Yes, they are. We do know that birds are far more intelligent than they "should" be based on what we think mammalian brains are like. The neurological architecture of the avian brain is much more compact and efficient than that of the general run of mammalian brains in terms of information storage and processing -- and that was very likely the case with theropod dinosaurs, too. In effect, that type of brain gets a lot more bang for the buck than the mammalian brain supposedly does in terms of cubic centimeters of brain.

But brain isn't mind, and we still don't know exactly how the mind links into the brain. In fact, scientifically speaking, mind is the last great mystery, really. A lot of physicists are beginning to say that unless and until we figure out how mind factors into the universe, we'll never get a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and they base that on what's known about the way the physical universe works, especially at quantum levels. We do know that long ago, plants harnessed quantum mechanics to make ( ... )

polaris93 March 27 2011, 22:04:36 UTC

I forgot to add that ants make tools. They're simple tools, used for simple purposes, but they are tools, and ants constantly improvise them. These include such things as tiny bits of stick used as pry-bars to pull away something blocking access to food of some kind, that sort of thing, but they do the job. Ants have also been known to use such tools to operate on nest-mates who have gotten injured in some way, e.g., using a bit of stick or metal to carefully remove a piece of wood or whatever that has pierced an ant's integument, easing it out by judicious use of the tools.

Like bees, ants are eusocial, forming superorganisms, or nests (bee superorganisms are of course called "hives"). It may be that the ingenuity, initiative, and intelligence we see in the behavior of ants or bees is actually somehow directed by the superorganism that is their collective form, but those qualities can be seen in both ants and bees, and in the case of ants, that includes making tools to do a necessary job on the spot and putting it to use with ( ... )

Re: Redistributed reflex processing polaris93 March 28 2011, 20:06:36 UTC

I'm impressed -- that's chimpanzee-level creativity, and from a creature with a brain far smaller in absolute terms. I wonder if cats have some sort of distributed reflex processing for bodily control far less centralized than our own, in order to free up more space in that little brain for cognitive thought? They certainly are smarter than they "should" be based purely on gross brain size or even brain-to-body ratio.

That seems likely. In fact, Rich and I have used just that idea in one of our background novels (the ones that got started as a collection of notes for Dragon Drive), Draco: The Star-Kings. In it, Paul Royer, co-founder and -owner of Royer Life Systems (along with his wife, Leah), who have moved to Providence, a world in the Xoth system (I can send you the files for that if you like), are in the business of creating biological solutions to biological problems, including such things as extremely effective regeneration and rejuvenation therapies (ultimately they, along with their friends, etc., live on indefinitely, ( ... )