Name: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
Rating: 3.625 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9780393246186

Frans De Waal

From world-renowned biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, a groundbreaking work on animal intelligence destined to become a classic.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Since our experiences are so unlike like a lions, we would be unable to understand him. 

Iris Adi

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. 

Frans de Waal

What separates your mind from that of an animal? Is it the ability to design tools; a sense of self; or the grasp of past and future? In recent decades these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence, offering a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we've underestimated their abilities for too long.

Jamieson

“Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.” 


if you love animals, you'll probably love this book I love animals and I really liked this book. It was so interesting to read about all the different tests and case studies of animals and animal cognition. This book is so easy to follow, it goes along chronically to explain the history of the study behind animal cognition and as it goes, gives lots of real life examples and stories of animals that were studied. I found these stories SO interesting and some of them were genuinely mind-blowing. It is amazing what animals can do and I never realised a lot of it until I read this book!

As mentioned, this was really easy to read and I didn't think it was dry at all even though it's a non-fiction. I enjoyed it alot and I also listened to some of it on audiobook which is also good!

"People often assume a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with our own intelligence at the top. But what if it is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours? Would you presume yourself dumber than a squirrel because you're less adept at recalling the locations of hundreds of buried acorns? Or would you judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed"--Dust jacket flap.

Marie Rogowski

Scientifically well written and very informative. Without former in depth knowledge on this particular field, i now believe to have a good overview over the most relevant aspects of it. But its looong...

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

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