Collection 2: "How Smart Are Animals?" by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent

Her feat was truly impressive—understanding that Andrea needed help and performing the tasks necessary to save her.

Some scientists would say that, while Villa certainly is a wonderful animal, her behavior was unthinking, perhaps an instinctive holdover from the protective environment of the wolf pack, where the adult animals defend the pups against danger.

After all, dogs evolved from wolves, which are highly social animals.

They would say that Villa just acted, without really understanding the concept of danger or thinking about what she was doing. Up until the 1960s, this view of animals prevailed among scientists studying animal behavior. But nowadays, a variety of experiments and experiences with different creatures are showing that some animals have impressive mental abilities.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people readily attributed human emotions and mental abilities to animals.

They are ready to call upon the “Clever Hans phenomenon” whenever an animal seems to be exhibiting intelligent behavior.

The SOI (Structure of Intellect) test, for example, evaluates five main factors of intelligence: cognition (comprehension), memory, evaluation (judgment, planning, reasoning, and critical decision making), convergent production (solving problems where answers are known), and divergent production (solving problems creatively).

The SOI (Structure of Intellect) test, for example, evaluates five main factors of intelligence: cognition (comprehension), memory, evaluation (judgment, planning, reasoning, and critical decision making), convergent production (solving problems where answers are known), and divergent production (solving problems creatively).

The SOI (Structure of Intellect) test, for example, evaluates five main factors of intelligence: cognition (comprehension), memory, evaluation (judgment, planning, reasoning, and critical decision making), convergent production (solving problems where answers are known), and divergent production (solving problems creatively).

Many pitfalls await the scientist trying to interpret animals’ behavior and make inferences about their intelligence. One is inconsistency. An animal might breeze through what we consider a difficult learning task and then fail when presented with what seems obvious to us.

Many pitfalls await the scientist trying to interpret animals’ behavior and make inferences about their intelligence. One is inconsistency. An animal might breeze through what we consider a difficult learning task and then fail when presented with what seems obvious to us.

Sometimes the difficulty lies in the perceptive abilities of the animals. The animal may have the mental ability and the desire to solve the problem but is unable to make the discriminations being asked of it.

The more carefully he listened to the calls and watched the gulls’ reactions to them, the more complexity and variety he found in both the calls and the responses.

Keeping all these concerns in mind, we can list some factors of intelligence that might be measurable or observable in animals—speed of learning, complexity of learned tasks, ability to retrieve information from long-term memory, rule learning, decision-making and problem-solving capacity, counting aptitude, understanding of spatial relations, and ability to learn by watching what others do.