Beautiful blog post reviewing the cognitive capacity of multiple animal species. Their work focuses on #animalwelfare and #cognition. #cognitivescience #behavior #physiology
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnSg6o7crcHFLc395/the-welfare-range-table
@JulienDelpierre I recognize the moral hazard of eating pigs and chickens. They are incredibly intelligent, more than we would want to give them credit for as food stock. I have my excuses, not worth boring people here. But we can certainly push for humane treatment of animal stock.
@JulienDelpierre this is a wonderful graphic. I wonder how humans, primates and crows would place in this chart
@timjohnclarke A limit to this kind of study is that we take ourselves as a reference. In other words, humans would check all the boxes. For crows and primates would most definitely score very high!
@JulienDelpierre yes, agree. Additionally, it is limited by out framing. I think it is unfortunate that the unknowns make it seem like they are “not evident”. Without taking the time to truly understand the graphic it seems that pigs are clearly have more that other animals… but the true interpretation is only that we can perceive pigs intelligence in those areas. There is a stark absence of “not likely”
@JulienDelpierre interestingly, the grey is not evidence of absence. It only really shows how much we don’t know yet about these animals.
@JulienDelpierre Very cool! It's interesting to even look at the number of colored blocks, indicating (I presume) which species have been studied more.
@JulienDelpierre perhaps if the chart were titled “the limit of our understanding of cognitive proxies” 🤣
@JulienDelpierre considering how small their brain is, bees really are incredible. Reading about bumblebees 'playing' a few days ago blew my mind.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222002366