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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (47059)	7/25/1999 11:42:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Great, E!!! Now that we know that apes can understand -- and reproduce -- speech, we are going to have to admit that there is such a thing as animal intelligence and animal emotion, going way beyond "instinct." (This, of course, is something any long-time pet owner already knows.) In fact, animals (some of them, anyway) are probably even more intelligent than the story you cite suggests, as in the following passage: Duane Rumbaugh, the university's professor of psychology and biology, who is director of the centre, said tests suggested the animals had the language and cognitive skills of a four-year-old child. Now, if you were to release a four-year-old child into the chimpanzees' natural environment, and if you were able to prevent it from growing any older (in the interests of the experiment), just how well would it cope with the kind of challenges it would face? Well, I submit that it would not be able to cope at all (unless some motherly female chimpanzee took it under her wing); it would not be intelligent enough. In short, I believe we underestimate the non-verbal intelligence of animals, because we traditionally link all intelligence to speech. Fortunately, my animal psychologist brother agrees with me, so that if I am attacked on this score, I have an "authority" to run to for ammunition. <gg> Hurray for our beastie friends! Joan