Same here. As someone who has spent his life around many animals, either as pets or in the wild or other contexts, it’s very plain that humans are surrounded by respectably sentient creatures. It always floors me whenever people are shocked at the complex thoughts, emotions, behavior and planning capabilities of non-human animals. It really just seems fundamentally obvious if you bother to interact with other creatures long enough. Heck, I’ve run into way too many people who refuse to even acknowledge that we humans are animals as well and I feel this innate arrogance persists to our detriment.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of people eat animals and so it makes them feel better ethically to see them as not having feelings or intelligence. Sometimes the animals they eat may actually be more intelligent than domesticated animals.

Human are there own folley thinking that they are the definition of intelligence. In years to come, we will realise how simple our physiology is, compared to the other creatures. Brain included.

"As if they are inferior because they don't speak English" is a pretty cheap shot; cows eat grass, what reason do they have for deep intelligence and thoughts, why would you expect a-priori that they must have such? It's sometimes suggested that human intelligence rose quite quickly from trying to outwit other humans; do cows try to outwit each other and slaughter other cow tribes to take control of their fields?

Another point is, other animals do dumb things - like videos of ducks walking over drains and the ducklings fall down the drain, or creature stuck in plastic sheet until it dies. Or creature does nothing while humans approach, kill, and eat it. It's hard to see examples like that and think "deep intelligence".

Emotions, yes - a lot of fear, pain, excitement, skittishness, visible in a lot of animal behviours. But examples of planning ahead, cooperation, tool using, they're so rare they make headlines like this article when observed.

Treating other people/animals as inferior because they don't speak "English" has been such a historically common theme that it's surprising you seem to deny it.

Nations bent on conquest and colonialism had been using those arguments to justify their actions for centuries. Not to animals but to other humans as well.

While it's mostly illegal to do so to humans now, it's still socially acceptable to do the same to animals.

We still don't know how human intelligence developed or the evolutionary pressures underlying our intelligence. Using that as an argument to summarily dismiss animal intelligence is a strawman at best, as is your other points - you could easily find humans which are literally dumb as a rock, does that have any bearing on the intelligence we're capable of as a species?

> "it's surprising you seem to deny it."

I'm not denying that people never treat other people as inferior because they don't speak English. I'm saying the reason people treat hamsters as inferior isn't "because hamsters don't speak English", and that saying that is as uninterestingly dismissive as saying "it's because hamsters don't wear makeup".

> "Using that as an argument to summarily dismiss animal intelligence is a strawman at best, as is your other points"

No it isn't. If cows have no reason to think thoughts to survive, do not compete with tricksy, planning, vicious cow-enemies on evolutionary timescale, display no visible deep thinking behaviour, cannot visibly communicate deep thoughts to other cows, to say "but they must have them because reasons" is not good logic. Me asking "why star a-priori with 'they must have them?'" is not a strawman or a summary dismissal.

> "you could easily find humans which are literally dumb as a rock, does that have any bearing on the intelligence we're capable of as a species?"

Your position is that "Some humans are stupid so cows are smart?" Really? Where's the cow Einstein, the hamster Beethoven, the Kangaroo Gandhi, where's the wolf whose face launched a thousand ships, or the beaver who added hydroelectric lighting to their damn? The intelligence humans are capable of as a species has taken over the world, it's bloody obvious, you can't miss it for looking - tool use, machine building, theorem proving, organising on a large scale, on a timescale which outlasts one lifetime while adapting to changing environments on a scale of hours to months not hundreds of lifetimes.

The presence of dumb humans doesn't undo that. The absence of all that surely does call into question the intelligence bears are capable of as a species.

You're proving my point.

> Where's the cow Einstein

The cow does not speak English

> the hamster Beethoven

The hamster does not compose in music notation

> the Kangaroo Gandhi

The kangaroo does not speak English

I don't really know how you fail to comprehend this -- people have been proven to underestimate or look down upon other people who don't share the same language or looks. Whether it be barbarians, people with different skin color, or generally of different cultures.

And you just reply with "it's OBVIOUS that animals don't possess the same level of intelligence, show me the cow Einstein". The GGGP's point is that studies on animal intelligence is only surprising with this attitude. I feel like you're just trying to appeal to common sense without actually addressing people's point. Don't forget who made the claim that '"As if they are inferior because they don't speak English" is a pretty cheap shot'.

I'll sign off here. You are free to presume that we're unreasonable idiots who don't even have a speck of your "common sense".

The cow also does not write equations, does not do media interviews, does not drive a motorcar, does not write letters to the cow government on the dangers of atomic warfare. The hamster does not play music, gather other hamsters around and share music, does not make musical instruments. The kangaroo does not rally the crowds for the salt marches. You don't need to speak German to hear Beethoven's music, speak Gujarati to see Gandhi's rally, or speak anything to obeserve humans solve problems on massive scales which no other animals do. It's not that the hamster doesn't write /musical notation/ it's that the hamster /doesn't make music for orchestras/ to note in any notation.

The disconnected lever fallacy is the idea that you can take the lever from a ship's bridge to your home, and then when you move the lever, expect your home to move like the ship moves. Without knowing about the engine. You're taking that idea even further - without ever seeing the ship move, and having no lever for moving it, assuming that there must be an engine but it's hidden by the lack of a lever. It's not the absence of lever which is so important, it's the absence of powered movement.

> "You are free to presume that we're unreasonable idiots who don't even have a speck of your "common sense"."

I'm not willing to assume that hamsters must, a-priori, be capable of the works of Beethoven because you think it's racist not to. English speaking humans are racist to Spanish speaking humans. That's /not the same/. You don't need to speak Spanish to observe that Mexico City is many orders of magnitude more than what hamsters can demonstrably do.

(I also take this the other way; seeing that animals show emotional behaviours and therefore have emotions. I don't think animals are rocks, it takes some intelligence to find food, mates, build nests. But that's not demonstrating high or human level intelligence because humans are capable of so much more. I think it equally bad that humans do/did surgery on human infants without anaesthesia arguing that they "don't feel pain" ( https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel... ) and ( https://www.google.com/search?q=open+heart+surgery+infant+no... ))

> cows eat grass, what reason do they have for deep intelligence and thoughts

This line of argument doesn't make much sense given that pigs are very intelligent and you'd probably say "pigs roll in the mud, what reason do they have for deep intelligence and thoughts"

> other animals do dumb things - like videos of ducks walking over drains and the ducklings fall down the drain, or creature stuck in plastic sheet until it dies. Or creature does nothing while humans approach, kill, and eat it. It's hard to see examples like that and think "deep intelligence".

I could say the same about most humans

> But examples of planning ahead, cooperation, tool using, they're so rare they make headlines like this article when observed.

This is true, but the way you go about making a case for it ain't it.

This line of argument makes sense given that humans use ~20% of our energy running our brains, and evolution is known for cutting out energy hungry things which aren't helpful for survival. Cows don't have cooked fatty meat as a ready supply of energy, they don't need to chase prey, they don't need accurate throwing of spears or organising groups to set traps. Why would they evolve whatever you think "deep thoughts" are?

And no, it doesn't help to say "given pigs are intelligent, then pigs are intelligent".

> "I could say the same about most humans"

Go on then, say that most humans are stupid therefore "humans are not intelligent". That will be a very productive line of reasoning.

> This line of argument makes sense given that humans use ~20% of our energy running our brains, and evolution is known for cutting out energy hungry things which aren't helpful for survival. Cows don't have cooked fatty meat as a ready supply of energy, they don't need to chase prey, they don't need accurate throwing of spears or organising groups to set traps. Why would they evolve whatever you think "deep thoughts" are?

This is a logical fallacy which requires "deep thoughts" to evolve the same way we did. As mentioned, pigs are considered to be intelligent and yet you didn't choose to address pigs but instead chose cows.

> And no, it doesn't help to say "given pigs are intelligent, then pigs are intelligent".

It doesn't help to say that. That's true. It's a good thing no one said that though.

> Go on then, say that most humans are stupid therefore "humans are not intelligent". That will be a very productive line of reasoning.

It's about as productive a line of reasoning as you cherrypicking cows.

> "As mentioned, pigs are considered to be intelligent and yet you didn't choose to address pigs but instead chose cows."

If you're going to start with a conclusion, "animals can be intelligent because pigs are intelligent, QED" where does that get you?

Why, exactly, are "pigs considered intelligent"?

And, note that I'm not saying animals are dumb as rock, there clearly is some level of intelligence involved in navigating the world, finding food, finding mates, avoiding predators, and a level of difference between say hamsters and elephants. What I'm contesting is something like "approximately all animals must have the same capacity of thought as humans because humans are animals", or the original statement more like "we shouldn't be surprised if tests show animals do have because we should have been assuming that all along even without evidence".

> "It doesn't help to say that. That's true. It's a good thing no one said that though."

fine, then I don't disagree with your statement that "pigs are considered intelligent" in the sense that "people consider pigs intelligent" but I disagree that they are intelligent in the same way that humans are, and the reason I disagree is that they haven't been proven to be such. Occam's razor, if they haven't been shown to have human-level capacity for (invention, language, music, mirror neurons, communicating abstract information, symbolic manipulation, arithmetic, planning, teamwork), then we shouldn't assume they have it unless necessary.

> If you're going to start with a conclusion, "animals can be intelligent because pigs are intelligent, QED" where does that get you?

It's in response to this

> cows eat grass, what reason do they have for deep intelligence and thoughts

Where does that get us? It gets us thinking about how does that line make any sense.

> Why, exactly, are "pigs considered intelligent"?

There's plenty of research on pig cognition and it's not like you'd take my word for any of it so why not google it for yourself?

Here, I'll even start you off with one: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c

> What I'm contesting is something like "approximately all animals must have the same capacity of thought as humans because humans are animals", or the original statement more like "we shouldn't be surprised if tests show animals do have because we should have been assuming that all along even without evidence".

Your objection was to someone else saying

> It continues to surprise me that humans are surprised at other animals having deep intelligence and emotions and thoughts.

This is not the same as

> approximately all animals must have the same capacity of thought as humans because humans are animals

That is you moving the goalposts.

> I disagree that they are intelligent in the same way that humans are

> if they haven't been shown to have human-level capacity for (invention, language, music, mirror neurons, communicating abstract information, symbolic manipulation, arithmetic, planning, teamwork), then we shouldn't assume they have it unless necessary.

Again, no one claimed that so you stating that you disagree is fine but who are you disagreeing with? I still don't understand why you feel the need to declare this.

When I was younger, I read many books by Henri Laborit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Laborit) -- his work is predominantly in French. As a surgeon and neurobiologist, he wrote a lot about the biology of behaviour. I can't find the interview anymore, but during an interview (also in French) with a Canadian journalist he quipped this: "L'homme est un animal, le problème c'est qu'il parle." (roughly: "Man is an animal, the problem is that he uses language.") And, so, I agree with the essence of your position. But maybe the problem isn't that humans are surprised that other animals feeling/thinking. Rather the problem might be that humans think they actually aren't animals to begin with.

It really shouldn't surprise you given the amount of humans that treat other humans like they lack deep intelligence, emotions and thoughts if they don't speak English.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? book by ethologist Frans de Waal: https://www.worldcat.org/title/are-we-smart-enough-to-know-h...

Agreed. Animals have their own understanding of the world, sometimes a lot more perceptive than ours.

Well, 1 out of 2 people has below-average intelligence. And the comments you see online vastly amplify the opinions of a small few.

Heck, not long ago you'd find a lot of humans saying this about other humans.