Really smart animals

Michael Gold

We’ve all seen animals perform tricks. That includes just about every animal on the planet.

For example, there are a number of companies that have trained animals for rent for making movies. Trained Animals is one of these companies. I guess one of the most memorable real animal in the movies was Bart the Bear. He appeared in the film. “The Edge” (1997), featuring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. The scenes where this bear was tracking (for dinner) three survivors of a plane crash in Alaska are so amazing, you really wonder how they got a bear to do those things. (A spoiler: the bear does not survive.)

But these stunts involve training any number of animals to do specific tasks. The training is actually very simple to understand. You encourage the animal to do some task. If the animal does anything close to what you want, you reward it with a snack. Eventually, the animal will do exactly what you want on command. All it takes are a lot of hours for each animal and stunt.

Some animals, dogs, for example, are quite easy to train. Others, like lions and tigers, take a fair amount of time longer (and the potential to lose a limb or two). Frankly, I would not want such a job. Some of these animals make an amazing amount of money. For example, the dog, Rin Tin Tin (there were actually a number of dogs who did this show), made about $6,000/week! A very high standard.

I wanted to write about animals that display near-human intelligence. Here are a few: One of my favorites is whale hunting. A group of them, say a half dozen, will submerge beneath a school of fish. They simultaneously exhale bubbles through their blowholes. The large amount of bubbles (they do this in a kind of formation – sort of a circle) they emit scares the fish into a clump of them in the middle of the rising bubbles. Then the whales attack, consuming perhaps a hundred pounds of fish each. When you think about this behavior, it is clearly intelligent. You wonder how the whales initially communicated with each other to work out their behavior.

My next example are monkeys. Eating termites is a favorite food source. So they have learned a hunting technique that would be a credit to a human. They take a branch off a tree, strip it of all leaves. Then using the stick, they insert it into a termite nest in a tree. The termites in the nest bite down on the stick. The monkey then removes the stick from the nest and eats the live termites off the stick. Sort of like having a Good Humor termite bar. Again, to me, this is remarkable intelligence. It is true that over 98% of the DNA in a chimpanzee is identical to humans. That’s because we descended from a common ancestor.

My last example are elephants. Elephants have been shown to display awareness. They have proven that an elephant can recognize itself in a mirror. Elephants mourn and remain in tightly knit family groups for life. Their brain is many times the size of a human’s, although not as well developed as ours. Elephants have been shown to communicate with each other with a large variety of sounds. It is clear to researchers that these sounds have specific meanings to the other elephants.

I know our own dog seems to understand both my wife and me. I know this human trait, ascribing human traits to our pets is not real. But I swear, when I look into our dog’s eyes, it looks like he can see into my thoughts. Scary, in fact.

It has also been shown that dogs can sense the moods of their human masters. So just beware that before you explode in a fit of anger, pay attention to where your dog is. It could very well approach you and bark, lick your face (to calm you down), or best of all, fetch you a cold beer from the fridge.