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<\/a><\/p>\nFor over three million years, humanity, in all its evolutionary forms, has studied animals. \u00a0People study animals for several reasons. \u00a0First, animals are food. \u00a0The better you understand an animal, the better you can hunt it. \u00a0Second, animals are our beloved companions. \u00a0The human-animal bond is one of the most powerful bonds in the world. \u00a0Third, in the case of domesticated animals, they are both beloved companions and food.<\/p>\n
As people who live and work with animals every day, we find the article below very interesting. \u00a0We suspect the problem with determining animal intelligence rests with the IQ tests humans give animals. \u00a0Bison, for example, are extremely intelligent. \u00a0But a researcher who hides in the grass or trees with a camera rarely “gets” it, because he\/she never gets beyond the status of an observer. \u00a0In the eyes of a bison, anything that hovers at the edges of the herd, just watching, is suspicious. \u00a0That’s predator behavior. \u00a0That’s exactly what wolves and mountain lions do. \u00a0Understandably, bison treat “watchers” with caution. \u00a0The researcher is never allowed to get inside the buffalo circle of friends. \u00a0Our opinion is that if the animal doesn’t trust you, you will never really understand the animal’s mind–meaning its intelligence–because the animal can’t be itself around you. \u00a0It’s only when the researcher is considered part of the herd that bison feel comfortable enough to freely interact with each other, the researcher, and their world. \u00a0Jane Goodall demonstrated this principle many years ago with the Gombe chimps. \u00a0It takes years of being part of the animals’ community before a researcher even has an inkling as to how they really think. \u00a0<\/p>\n
In our opinion.<\/p>\n
The researcher’s opinion of people like us, by the way, is that we are too close to the animals–meaning emotionally blinded by our love for the animal–to be able to accurately evaluate their behavior. \u00a0Researchers say that people like us “anthropomorphize” our animals, which means we attribute human thoughts and emotions to our animals where they do not exist. \u00a0<\/p>\n
What do you think about animal intelligence?<\/p>\n
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