Proposition 8, the Supreme Court and Chimps

"All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hope."– Alexandre Dumas

This post is related to animal intelligence and dedicated to Alpha. He generally takes the position that animals are smarter or more intelligent than we know. He also told me that dogs laugh and he sent me articles to substantiate his belief. Hopefully, he will add his research findings to this post.

According to a 2007 study, a young male chimpanzee outperformed Ben Pridmore a British memory Champion .Ayumu, on a touch screen, could recall a random series of numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares. Ayumu outperformed Ben on this task and was declared the winner. That chimpanzee did a super job on that task.

Prior research concluded that an elephant was incapable of using tools. Current research, with elephants was conducted by offering them a long stick while food was placed outside their reach. The purpose was to see if they would use the stick to retrieve it. The researchers knew that elephants used their trunks not only to reach food but also to smell and touch it: and as a result they have this unparalleled sense of smell. The animal, the elephant, knows exactly what they are doing as far as food is concerned. For them, vision doesn’t play a primary role in that experiment. So when an elephant picks up the stick its nasal passages are blocked .The elephant needs its ability to smell so it’s no wonder that, in these experiments, didn’t use a stick to get the food.

Research at the National Zoo in Washington presented a different problem to Kandula a young bull elephant. In this experiment, the researchers placed fruit high up above the elephant enclosure just out of the elephants reach. Inside the enclosure were several sticks and a sturdy square box. This young bull elephant ignored the sticks but after a while began kicking the box with its foot. He kicked the box many times in a straight-line until the box was right underneath the branch.  Kandula then stood on the box with his front legs. This enabled him to reach the food with his trunk. This elephant used the box to get the food. Does this mean that elephants can use tools?

Monday and Tuesday Alpha and I ran the trail. Each trail run was approximately 8 ½ miles. On Monday, we ran the Dead Truck and Maine Bar loop while on Tuesday we ran the American Canyon and Dead Truck loop discussing and laughing about animal memory, Proposition 8 and same sex marriage. I maintained that  choosing to have sex( straight or  homosexual  )  shouldn’t be  the basis for being discriminated against  and  that no one is discussing it in those terms.

To be continued