This book delves into the alien world of invertebrates. How can we possibly understand what it’s like to be a creature with three hearts? With a brain, yet most of it’s neurons are in it’s arms? A master of camouflage? It seems an impossible thing to imagine, yet Sy Montgomery manages it.
The beauty of this book is that you get to discover the wonder of an octopus through the author’s eyes. She was not an octopus expert when she started this journey. Rather, she starts it as a curious scientist discovering a new fascination and she brings us along for that journey. As she learns, so do you, and as she forms connections to new marine biologists an animals, so do you. Despite some extreme anthropomorphism, this book let’s you step into a new underwater world and try to wrap your head around a creature so different, and yet so similar to ourselves. If you’re interested in animal intelligence, marine biology, invertebrates, or just expanding your world view, I recommend picking up this book. Just a warning, be able to differentiate when the book is giving solid facts versus emotional opinion.
Overall Rating: 6 out of 8 inquisitive suckered arms
I think we should measure animal intelligence based on whether they know how to get high in the wild just from doing or eating crazy stuff. Like foxes eating a normally toxic mushroom or dolphins getting pricked by blowfish just enough to not die.
Flight attendant adopts stray dog that always waited for her return
German flight attendant Olivia Sievers often makes trips to Argentina on business. On one layover in Buenos Aires earlier this year, she made friends with a stray dog. She played with the sweet pup and gave him some food, so he stuck by her side.
Humans had enough trouble seeing other humans as human. We are not even remotely smart enough to know how smart animals are. We would have a huge existential crisis if we realised other creatures are as sentient and aware as we are.
Its also important to recognise that this is not just human ignorance, we all have a vested interest in pretending animal intelligence cannot ever compare to ours. How intelligent an animal is when compared to humans shouldn’t even matter, but it turns out it is much easier to exploit and kill animals if we pretend they are mindless automaton.
Apes’ abilities have been unfairly measured, throwing into doubt the assumed belief that human infants are superior to adult chimpanzees, according to a new study (published in Animal Cognition) by leaders in the field of ape cognition.
[Researchers] say it should come as no surprise that apes raised in institutions would not perform well compared with humans raised in western families, especially when tested with western cultural practices, for example, gestures such as pointing…
“Most studies, comparing apes with human children, for instance, have been poorly designed, with different relevant experiences given to each species, testing them at different ages in many cases, and then claiming to have found a difference in social cognition between humans and apes, but the species haven’t been treated similarly before or during the tests.
"These studies suffer from the same type of prejudice that once existed in studies of human intelligence, which started from a biased position of assuming northern Europeans were innately more intelligent than southern Europeans. We argue the same type of bias is apparent in cross-species studies…”
The researchers say it’s vital scientists realise that environmental experiences vary among humans (both between children and adults, and between people with different cultural experiences) and among apes (also from young to old, and between apes with different experiences).
"…To truly understand the abilities of each species, research needs to examine specific individual learning histories within specific ecological circumstances for both humans and for apes.
“We urge researchers to stop using fallacious research designs and reasoning in studies of comparative cognition.” (full article)
Story Article:
University of Portsmouth. “Environment, not evolution, might underlie some human-ape differences.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 15 July 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190715094847.htm>.
Journal Reference:
David A. Leavens, Kim A. Bard, William D. Hopkins. The mismeasure of ape social cognition. Animal Cognition, 2017; 22 (4): 487 DOI: 10.1007/s10071-017-1119-1
Whenever my parrot flips out and gets angry, I say, “Hey,” in this soft, comforting voice and then talk to him gently. He calms down within seconds.
I just got frustrated enough at something that I went, “ARGH.” My parrot said, “Hey,” all softly and sweetly like a dozen times over the next minute. It made me feel better instantly.
My parrot is better at conflict de-escalation than most people.
Whoa, shit. I guess this would be the post. This had like, 400 notes when it was clogging my activity the other day. I figured all the new followers were because it had reached a couple thousand or something.
Please don’t get a parrot; read this. The reason my parrot is like this is because I drop everything all day to make sure he is emotionally well. He treats me like I treat him. I treat him as if he’s as important and nearly as cognitively and emotionally complex as a human. I put myself in his shoes psychologically and make some adjustments for the kinds of urges and social behavior birds have. Doing anything other than that – underestimating his needs, underestimating his ability to think about the world around him and reach logical conclusions, underestimating his ability to recognize the inherent unfairness of our complete control over him – worked out VERY poorly. Following the advice of bird training books worked out very poorly.
The first five years or so that we had him, I did not do a good job of ensuring he was emotionally stable because I didn’t understand his needs or behavior as well as I thought I would after over a decade of owning smaller birds. I gave him food and water and toys and played with him, so I didn’t understand why he would act crazy. His personality was MUCH less gentle and my misunderstanding of him drove me to tears many times.
He only became the gentle bird he is because I quit thinking of him as inherently lesser and respected his cognitive abilities more. Parrots didn’t evolve to be intelligent just so they can solve puzzles in the wild, they evolved to be intelligent because social animals have to make inferences about the motives and feelings of other creatures around them. If you try to force them to do too much, or are impatient when you need them to go in their cage, or don’t let them out of their cage when they don’t perceive any good reason for it, or punish them for natural behavior, they recognize how unfair it is. They mistrust you, and dislike you, and they hold grudges. They start to perceive your behavior as petty and unreasonable, and when there’s some complicated human context they don’t understand, they think you’re unpredictable and are on-edge around you. They don’t care if they’re mean to you because you deserve it, and they’re right.
He only got to be this nice because I started asking myself questions: Would I want someone to do this to me? Would I feel comfortable going in my cage for no reason, or would I think that was bullshit and want an explanation first? Would I feel safe willingly going into a cage when a scary human is angry and too aggressive with me, or would that be the LAST thing that would make me feel safe? Would I like someone who talks whenever they want, but then screams at me when I make noise? Would I cooperate with someone who puts a blanket over my cage when I was just trying to socialize with them? Or would I be intensely depressed all the time and scream with anxiety and sadness and hate the very sight of them?
Those are things people do to parrots every day, and wonder why their parrots don’t like them or act difficult.
Now we are almost always very gentle in tone and demeanor with our parrot. We give him explanations when he has to go in his cage, and we apologize for it and tell him we don’t like to do it but it’s for his own safety, and we praise him effusively for cooperating. It doesn’t matter if he understands the content of what we’re saying, he understands that we respect him and we’re not putting him in his cage to be mean or controlling. He feels like he has some choice. And sometimes if he doesn’t want to go, we just let him stay out a little longer.
Please please please do not get a parrot. It is very hard to try to work out what conclusions a parrot has drawn from an interaction because it’s hard to erase all the human context we take for granted. Very few people have the patience to do that for an animal.
This post is a great example because my parrot used to be vicious toward me when I was frustrated. For years I didn’t understand why my parrot would get angry at me and try to bite me when I cried. Only last year I realized it was because years ago, I would start crying when he wouldn’t go in his cage and I had to force him. Naturally, his response to being handled more roughly was to bite, because put yourself in that position. You’d fight back too! So my crying was associated with those struggles.
He remembered that for years. Even though we’ve been great for the past couple years, as soon as I would start crying for some unrelated reason (usually writing something sad) his mood would change immediately. He thought, shit, here it comes, she’s gonna flip out on me and I haven’t even done anything wrong, I never did anything to deserve it before, she just doesthis! Because how could he possibly understand that I needed to go work on something all those times? And even if he could understand that, why would he think that justifies imprisoning him? Of course he wouldn’t. It isn’t fair. So of course his response to my crying was to get pre-emptively hostile; he wasn’t about to let me dick him around again.
The only reason I didn’t realize that for so many years was simply because it was so hard to get past how I thought about those things as a human. From my perspective, it had just been that I had to write and he was being too needy so I had to put him up. When he wouldn’t cooperate, I would focus on my frustration, on how irritating it was that I couldn’t even do a simple thing like write. But think about how good you feel when you’re needy and people shove you away, you know? It makes everything way worse.
After that realization, every time I cried around him I would stop and say, “Hey, hey, it’s okay, I’m not mad at you, you’re such a good bird, mommy’s okay,” and stroke his beak, even when he tried to bite my fingers because he was convinced I was going to start bossing him around. Only now can I cry around him without setting him off. I had to reassure him I’m not an unreasonable maniac who’s gonna start shit with him out of nowhere, because that’s exactly how he perceived me for so long.
And he wasn’t wrong to perceive me that way. He was accurate, and I was too ignorant and self-absorbed to recognize how tyrannical my behavior had been. Humans don’t usually label their own behavior as tyrannical. Every tyrant thinks it’s their right.
That stuff sticks with social creatures. And parrots are smart. They don’t have a the same sort of cortex like humans, but instead they developed an area of their brain that serves much the same purpose. Any higher intelligence that evolves from a different branch of life is going to have a brain that doesn’t look like a mammalian brain, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do the same things. It means it had to evolve from a different set-up, just like there are tons of different evolutionary models for eyes, or various organs. Different hardware can run the same sorts of software, and sometimes different hardware runs VERY similar software.
You can’t accept that parrots are cognitively advanced and separate that from its emotional applications. Yeah, my parrot can form new sentences that make sense and use them in context. My parrot sits around taking songs he knows, and making variations on them, and mashing them together where they sound similar. He works out spatial puzzles, and he figures out how to reach things he can’t.
BUT THEY ARE SOCIAL. THEY HAVE EMOTIONS. THERE IS NO FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN THOSE THINGS JUST BECAUSE HUMANS WOULD SURE FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE IF THERE WAS.
Parrots analyze you, they stew, they plot revenge if they’re angry. Back in the day, my parrot had some REALLY tricky ways of scoring a hit on me. For example, he would put on a nice demeanor, TOTALLY devoid of the usual parrot body language warning signs, ask for a kiss, then bite me. He would demurely put his head down to be preened, then bite me. He would drop a toy so I would pick it up, then he’d jump me while I was bending down, and bite me. And I was super sweet to my parrot 95% of the time, I even got frustrated less frequently than most people! Parrots, just like other intelligent social animals, sure as fuck use that intelligence for emotional reasons.
People underestimate parrots, not just cognitively but psychologically. As much as bird training books want to advise people to be more forceful, or use treats to train them to comply, that’s all cruel and manipulative and doesn’t foster a respectful relationship. They know they’re just doing something solely to avoid your anger, or to get food from you. They don’t mistake that for affection. They see that you can eat whatever you want and choose not to share things with them. They see that you make them jump through hoops the humans in the household don’t have to. They see that you (hopefully) don’t treat the other humans with the same impatience and hostility and forcefulness that’s directed at them. Those training methods only ever made my parrot worse. They’re not as stupid as we want to tell ourselves, and they won’t show empathy to someone who doesn’t have empathy for them, because why should they? At best, you can break their spirit. Many well-meaning decent people do not realize they have done this.
Which is one reason why so many parrots end up in rescues due to self-mutilation. Parrots literally kill themselves sometimes. Google it if you want to see horrifying pictures.
Seriously. You can’t get a parrot and expect it to behave the way mine does now. It almost certainly won’t. My parrot doesn’t behave this way because parrots are sweet and cool and want to love you, he behaves this way because I learned to be a less shitty human who respects that he has a rich inner life and does not exist to serve my happiness.
But the intelligence here?? This dog not only thought “bring a toy to friend to make friend happy,” but also recognized and brought the type of toy the kitten liked best, even though it’s not a toy dogs typically like! That’s some high social intelligence! There are grown-ass human adults who don’t grasp that!
Honestly, both dogs and cats can be more socially intelligent across differences than most humans. (Probably because they’ve lived with other species–us–all their lives?) They’re both sweethearts, too.
![[insert cat pic here]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f218e6e877019284014893c5933d968d/7e94a015092b72c2-34/s30x30u_c1/b0d48cfa095a12a2351524577234046dd7b49b50.jpg){kind=small}
