Hi
Is it passible to speak of an animal’s
I look forward to your feedback.
Chimpanzees strongly outperform humans on short-term memory test. I’m unaware of tests showing arithmetic skill, but perhaps there are some.
Chimps certainly do trade in the wild; indeed males have been observed paying females for sex!
In one interesting experiment two monkeys were happy to do simple tasks for cucumbers, but when one monkey got grapes, the other now-underpaid monkey started throwing the cucumbers back at the researcher and rattling the cage. In some cases the grape-receiving monkey would refuse the grapes until her friend started being paid in grapes also.
Thanks septimus. I’m not limiting my interest in animals math/arithmetic skills to chimpanzees (if they do indeed have them). It can apply to birds like crows.
When you’re considering chimpanzees, don’t forget to look at bonobos, who are much more social than P. trogolodytes.
Clever Hans was a horse with remarkable mathematical ability, or so it seemed.
Some dogs have been taught to ‘count’ in a sense, to be able on command to pick out a specific small number of items, but I don’t recall any indication this is any more than simple memory training, that they have any concept of numbers or arithmetic.
It’s pretty tough to evaluate animal cognition because of the communication limitations.
…And, in cases like Clever Hans, because of communication being too easy. Yes, proper experiment design can control for that, but it’s definitely something that you need to be careful of.
Apparently bees can do arithmetic.
Chimps and bonobos will sometimes barter for sex, with females offering sex in exchange for food or grooming.
Chimps can be trained to barter food items (i.e. trading cucumbers for grapes or vice-versa), but most of them have to be trained for it. While there are some rare exceptions, most chimps won’t barter food naturally. They might trade food for sex, but they won’t trade food for food.
Chimpanzees can be easily trained to understand the concept of tokens or “money” of sorts, and they can be trained to trade those tokens for more valuable tokens. So they can be trained to understand basic trading. It just doesn’t come naturally to them.
Some birds, like parrots and ravens, can also be taught to barter.
If you want to compare animals with humans, keep in mind that we are born with very limited math skills. Our brains are hard-wired to recognize none of something, 1, 2, maybe 3 or 4 (I forget exactly where it ends but it’s somewhere around there), a “few”, and “many”. Beyond that, everything else we do mathematically is learned.
A couple of ( somewhat humorous) anecdotes about animals and arithmetic:
Maybe 30 years ago I read a National Geographic article about giraffes and counting. Wildlife scientists were studying giraffes in the wild, but couldn’t get too close, because the giraffes were afraid of humans,and altered their natural behaviors, even when the humans hid behind camouflage. So the scientists tried something new, that involved counting.
Instead of trying to hide behind a camouflaged blind, 4 men openly walked into the area, so that the giraffes could see them.Then one of them hid behind the camouflage, and the other three openly walked away. The giraffes saw that “all” the intruders had left, so they resumed their normal giraffe-behavior. The article said that the trick worked when 4 men walked in and 3 left. But when they tried it with 3 men walking in, and only two walking away, the giraffes remained fearful and changed their behavior due to the remaining intruder.
The conclusion was that giraffes can count to 3, but not to 4.
And I remember reading zoologist Desmond Morris’s nature books. He describes the “counting” behavior of mother cats when taking care of kittens.
The mother prepares a quiet and safe spot to give birth, and stays with the kittens there for a couple weeks. Then, when the kittens are a little more independent, she leaves them briefly to find and prepare a new nesting area.Then she goes back to the original spot, and moves her kittens to the new area.She walks back and forth, carrying them one at a time with her mouth.Then, after the last kitten is safely deposited in the new nest, she goes back to the original nest, and looks around one last time, apparently to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anybody. So apparently a cat can’t count well enough to know how many babies she has.
Thank you all. Very helpful.
Irene Pepperberg claimed the African Grey parrot Alex could count up to six. This wiki has more information about animals and their ability to “count”. (It also explains the difference between arithmetic, counting, and “sense of number”). Alex also had the distinction of asking questions - something apes trained in sign language don’t do.
I’ll just point out that Clever Hans actually was clever - clever when it came to reading human body language, not in arithmetic.
I am delighted to learn that there are some Social Justice Monkeys out there, fighting the good fight. Of course they could also have been doing that to avoid getting clobbered by the other monkey, but I like my version better.
We feed our dogs two-course meals, in an effort to stop them from wolfing their food down too quickly. If we give them the first serving and then delay putting out their second helpings, they will inform us in no uncertain terms that they are capable of counting to two!
Kobal2, just remember that we are monkeys, and so everything that we do is an example of monkey behavior, and it’s no surprise when other monkeys are similar to us. Why does a monkey act a particular way? Probably for the same reason that a human would act that way.
Yesterday in one of my kindergarten classes for 4 to 5 year olds, I was having them look count the number of objects and say that in English.
At the end, I started with ten and took one away at a time. They don’t have the math skills yet to simply count backwards, and would have to recount the objects each time until we got down to five or four and then they could do it without recounting.
I read the first part about this on NPR site, but they didn’t say about the second part were the grape-receiving monkey would refuse the grapes. Do you have a site for that?
True!
Our older dog has evidently taught our new puppy to tell time. It’s some combination of Clever Hans and confirmation bias, I’m sure, but they seem to know what time it is, down to the minute, when it comes to meals.
A researcher mentions it in this video at about the 1:00 mark. He observed it only with chimpanzees, not other monkeys.
Thanks for finding that. Interesting that it’s only with some chimpanzees, which makes sense because not all humans have that degree of empathy, either.
Somebody mentioned an anecdote about kittens - when the litter was old enough, they started giving them away. after two or three out of eight or so, apparently the mother could tell something was wrong but did not know what.