The Intelligence and Feelings

 of Animals


The Times Weekend, Mar. 2, ‘98. Reporter Lucy Pinney. 

"...Certain Horses had been trained to pull full carts of sugar beet unsupervised between fields and a farm house. "This was clever enough in itself. However, the owner was astonished that when the horses were completely out of the control of humans, they would apply human logic and (on the narrow access road) always give right of way to whichever animal had a full, heavy cart, which would have been hard to pull through the mud next to the road."

"...Cows on a particular dairy farm "go to the correct pasture by themselves each morning and go in for milking at exactly the right time without being called. They also answer to their individual names . . . and when they see anyone in a brown coat standing in the yard, they hide because the vet wears a brown coat and they’re deeply suspicious of his motives."

 

 Prof. Stanley Curtis, an animal scientist says that: "pigs can carry out complex tasks such as learning sequences of coloured switches. ... They can also relearn a sequence quickly if it is changed. And they can be faster than chimps at certain tasks." Professor Curtis also said pigs have twice as many cries as chimps and he added that he could "see the day when we would use synthesized calls from computers to engage in conversations with them in their own language." (Ref. Evening Standard, June 5th 1996.)

The Times, 2-3-’98: "Sheep are expert at escaping from any kind of fencing. They are also highly skilled, not only at tracking a person trying to walk undetected through a field and anticipating his next move, but at identifying him whatever disguise he may be wearing."

Sheep also respond to their name as shown on British breakfast television when at a sanctuary a sheep called Trevor came running over from amongst the flock after his name was called.

The Daily Mail, 23-5-’95. From "When Elephants Weep" by Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy. "A gander called Ado, whose mate had been killed by a predator, stood silently by her partly eaten body which lay across their nest. In the following days he hunched his body and hung his head. His status in the flock plummeted since he did not have the heart to defend himself against attacks."


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