Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?

摘要

Betty, a New Caledonian crow at the University of Oxford, needed a hooked wire to retrieve a bucket containing a treat. So she wedged a straight wire into a crack in the lab's table and bent it, creating the right tool. Sheba, a chimp at Ohio State University, was trained to collect up to four oranges and then choose a numeral―1,2,3, or 4―to show how many she'd found. Kanzi, a bonobo chimp at the Georgia State University Language Research Center in Atlanta, communicates with his trainers using symbols on a keyboard. He understands the difference between sentences like "Pour the lemonade in the Coke" and "Pour the Coke in the lemonade."