Animals aren’t dummies. People on the internet, and especially Reddit for some reason, like to ascribe some really dumb and silly qualities to animals.
It’s probably because of the very flawed comparisons between animals and human children. Often we get told they’re as smart as 2-3 year old children, but that’s only comparing things like how many words they can understand or how many objects they can “count” or keep track of at one time.
Dogs and cats are very good at recognizing people and places, and dogs are especially good at recognizing human emotions both through the tone in our voice and our body language.
You won’t see a toddler successfully navigating city streets or deep woods, and they sometimes recognize the emotional states of others, though they are usually preoccupied with their own out of control emotions.
People overall judge animal intelligence based on what humans can do today.
Some wild animal won't make a computer or a rocket but go to their environment without any technology and they will be smarter, more resourceful and more capable of surviving than you are. This probably wasn't the case with our ancestors but today most people have lost survival skills and instincts.
I get that it's not dumb, and that animals are much smarter than people give them credit for. It's still cool to see animals successfully navigate unfamiliar spaces.
Stating my comment another way: seeing animals do clever things without being trained to is cool to see. Albeit, this video is a low bar for "clever" it still fascinated me in that way.
Last month I had to leave the door to my basement open overnight because the chipmunk who got in through that same door couldn't figure out that while he could see through the glass half, he couldn't walk through it...
Yeah dogs scent skills are incredible. I dog sat for my friends when they moved house and took her to the new house (shed never been) about 200m she sniffs that's start getting all excited and basically ran straight to the front door. Scent was the only thing we could pin it to
42
u/E_Dward 3d ago
Animals aren’t dummies. People on the internet, and especially Reddit for some reason, like to ascribe some really dumb and silly qualities to animals.
It’s probably because of the very flawed comparisons between animals and human children. Often we get told they’re as smart as 2-3 year old children, but that’s only comparing things like how many words they can understand or how many objects they can “count” or keep track of at one time.
Dogs and cats are very good at recognizing people and places, and dogs are especially good at recognizing human emotions both through the tone in our voice and our body language.
You won’t see a toddler successfully navigating city streets or deep woods, and they sometimes recognize the emotional states of others, though they are usually preoccupied with their own out of control emotions.