Our Ideas About Animal Intelligence

Frans de Waal has a new book, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? Right on point, as that is the better question than "are animals intelligent?" or "how intelligent are animals?" and such.

The following excerpts (with my editorial comments) are from an interview with the author, which I recommend reading, if not his books as well.

“What if instead, this whole business is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours?”

I have been aware of this problem for years, and our anthropocentric ideas that animal “intelligence” is to be measured against or compared with ours. That is way off track. (I wrote about this years ago and will post more of that to this blog in the coming months.)

“We need to become more focused on those animals than ourselves, and not necessarily make every comparison with ourselves the most informative.”

Exactly.

“...each species is different and each species depends on what they do and what they need to know. It's very hard to say which one is smarter, and that sort of comparison is not even relevant.”

Precisely, yes.

“This movement I feel puts humans in a different perspective and uses animals as a sort of mirror in some sense. I think it has a profound effect on how we look at ourselves and our place in nature.”

YES!

May all beings be well and happy, free of suffering and the causes of suffering.