Dispelling a misconception: Non-human animals as intelligent, cultured and moral beings
There are countless accounts and videos of animals doing amazing things and demonstrating great intelligence. However, we can never be sure if those are representative examples of animal behaviour or just once-off events. Furthermore, those are interpreted through untrained eyes and may not actually show a behaviour that people think it does. To try to avoid these issues, my goal here is to primarily rely on peer-reviewed scientific literature, ideally that which is publicly-available, but presented in a way that can be understood by all. To distinguish between scientific references and ordinary links, links to scientific sources are presented in the format [Author, year] based on academic referencing conventions.
A lingering misconception
I think that a large part of the blame for the misconception about the animal mind rests with the French philosopher René Descartes. He was of the view that animals are mindless automatons that neither think nor feel. In 1641, he wrote:
Seeing that a dog is made of flesh you perhaps think that everything which is in you also exists in the dog. But I observe no mind at all in the dog, and hence believe there is nothing to be found in a dog that resembles the things I recognize in a mind.
This sort of belief allowed Descartes to do things like throw cats out of windows and torture dogs. I also believe his views were likely crucial for the practice of vivisection. In order understand processes like breathing and blood circulation, dogs were restrained and cut open while alive, so that natural philosophers could observe their physiological processes. While that may have been very informative for medicine, it was a torturous death for the unfortunate animals.
One might hope that such beliefs are now a historical relic that has been abandoned. Unfortunately, this is not entirely the case and, in 2009, centuries after Descartes, the philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig declared:
Thus, amazingly, even though animals may experience pain, they are not aware of being in pain. God in His mercy has apparently spared animals the awareness of pain. This is a tremendous comfort to us pet owners. For even though your dog or cat may be in pain, it really isn't aware of it and so doesn't suffer as you would if you were in pain.
Given the high level of influence that he has, it's difficult to outright dismiss him as a crank.
Even organisations that work with animals may maintain this misconception, although that may be because it is convenient to do so. For example, in 2020, while supporting an ag-gag law, which is designed to prevent people exposing poor treatment of animals in agriculture, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture claimed that:
We simply do not know if animals are capable of reasoning and cognitive thought, therefore we cannot attribute human qualities of reasoning and cognitive thought on animals as the activists would like.
Together, these three examples illustrate how pervasive and long-lived is this misconception. The reality is that all three of the quoted statements are completely and utterly incorrect. The modern scientific view stands in stark contrast.
The modern scientific view
On 7 June 2012, several prominent neuroscientists and researchers from related disciplines, gathered in Cambridge, UK, for the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, honouring one of the most influential biologists. Francis Crick is probably most well known for his role in discovering the structure of DNA and for formulating the, often incorrectly stated, central dogma of molecular biology. The theme of the conference was Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals. At the end of the day, the participants signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. This short document summarised the scientific literature on animal consciousness and declared:
The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
When moving past the fairly obtuse wording, it was a statement that the scientific evidence supported, at least some, animal consciousness. Essentially, it invalidated the misconception promoted by the likes of Descartes, Craig and the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.
For several years, this was the best statement of the scientific consensus. However, on 19 April 2024, a new declaration, much clearer and more concise, was released—The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. This declaration states:
Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.
First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.
Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).
Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.
At the time of writing, the declaration had 578 signatures from those with the relevant expertise in science, philosophy or policy.
While science is not decided democratically, these declarations are a sign that the consensus of researchers is that the misconception of animals as unthinking and unfeeling beings runs contrary to the scientific evidence. Moving forward, I would like to look at some specific examples of scientific evidence of animal intelligence, language use, morality and culture as a guide for how to think about the many species with whom we share this planet.
Intelligence
There are many ways to think about intelligence and try to measure it. In this essay, I will be using intelligence as the ability to apply knowledge in different situations; more specifically, to use knowledge of how the world works to manipulate tools or cooperate in order to achieve a goal. Tool use is one of those traits which has traditionally been considered something exclusive to humans. But, over the years, this distinction has weakened and now it is just one more trait where humans are distinguished, not by kind, but by degree.
The mental territory we can claim to be “uniquely human” is shrinking at an alarming rate.
-Martha Gill, When dogs recall toys, and horses plan ahead, are animals so different from us?
Some of the best examples of tool use in non-humans come from birds. Many species, though mostly corvids, have been observed manipulating objects as tools and even solving more complex puzzles that require multiple independent pieces.
Back in 2002, there was a report about a female New Caledonian crow who bent a straight piece of wire into a hook to obtain otherwise-inaccessible food [Weir et al., 2002]. This was a special result because it suggested that the crow had an understanding of physics, could identify the need for a hook to obtain food and identified material that could be modified into a hook.
That was impressive but it was just a single object. Sixteen years later, a new study was published on compound tool construction [Bayern et al., 2018]. This time, the authors showed that the crows were able to combine dowel rods and empty syringes, neither of which were long enough individually to reach a food reward, into a longer tool which could reach the reward.
Even more recently, Goffin's cockatoos were shown to be able to use one tool (a stick) to manipulate a second tool (a ball) in order to get the ball to release a food reward [Osuna-Mascaró et al., 2022].
I said that tool use was evidence of intelligence and even said that these examples “use knowledge of how the world works.” That was not a chance statement, it was because birds do understand how the world works. One study investigated whether New Caledonian crows have an understanding of the physics of the world by subjecting them to a series of six tests about water displacement. In all trials, a food reward was out of reach of the crows unless they took specific actions. Those tests tested whether they understood 1) that a stone could displace water but not sand, 2) that objects that float will not raise the water level, 3) that hollow objects will not displace as much water as solid objects, 4) that you need to displace less water in narrow tubes, 5) that higher water levels can be reached more easily and 6) whether they could infer which tubes were connected by a hidden pipe. The results showed that, except for 4 and 6, the crows completed the tests with a performance above chance, indicating that they had a reasonably accurate mental model of how the world functions [Jelbert et al., 2014].
While there are many studies on birds, we should not get the wrong idea and think that other animals do not use tools or solve puzzles. There is a widely-used experimental design, the cooperative pulling paradigm, which tests cooperation in animals using tools. This test uses a mobile platform with a food reward that is out of reach of the animals. That platform can be moved forward to receive the reward by pulling on two ends of a rope. However, the rope is not fixed to the platform, so if an animal only pulls one end, the rope will slip free and the platform will not move. The reward can only be reached if two animals cooperate and pull both ends of the rope together. This requires intelligence to not only understand the test mechanism but also to cooperate with another individual to achieve the same goal.
This cooperative pulling paradigm has been studied in several species across the evolutionary tree and seen success in diverse species like keas [Heaney et al., 2017] and elephants [Plotnik et al., 2011]. We will focus on work done at the Wolf Science Center, a short distance from Vienna.
The scientists at the Wolf Science Center saw that wolves and dogs were both able to cooperate with a human partner [Range et al., 2019] and that wolves were able to cooperate, very successfully, with each other [Marshall-Pescini et al., 2017]. In contrast, dog pairs never managed to cooperate and solve the puzzle. What is also very cool, and emphasises their understanding of the puzzle, is that the wolves were successful in a delayed version of the test. In the delayed version, one wolf is released first, there's a 10-second delay and then the second wolf is released. Not only does the first wolf know to wait and not pull the string alone but you can also see how much slower it approaches the apparatus when it knows it can't be done yet.
The tools that animals can learn to use can be completely different from anything they would encounter in the wild. One of the best examples is rats learning to drive tiny cars [Crawford et al., 2020]. Not only can they learn to drive cars but they enjoy it too! Rats are probably not an animal that many people look at as being intelligent, but they are. That they can learn to drive shows how adaptable they are and why it's important to provide animals mental stimulation in their housing.
It's not only lab animals that have learned to use tools; this occurs in the wild and new examples continue to be found. Examples reported this year include sulphur-crested cockatoos in Sydney using public drinking fountains as their preferred source of water [Klump et al., 2025], chimpanzees in Uganda treating wounds with medicinal plants [Freymann et al., 2025] and orcas using pieces of kelp to massage one another [Weiss et al., 2025]. Together, all this shows that animals are intelligent enough to understand how the world works and are able to use that information, along with tools, in order to accomplish their goals.
Language
Communication is widespread among animals and can occur through vocalisations, body postures, scents and other actions. While it is possible to communicate with other animals, humans have long desired to talk to them through language, as evidenced in stories like Arthur C. Clarke's Dolphin Island. There is nothing wrong with this desire unless it leads us to disregard non-language communication and falsely think there is no way for animals to communicate their feelings. I would hope that most people with a pet will quickly learn that other animals can communicate when they want attention or food or to be left alone. Anyone who is caring for an animal should learn a bit about how it communicates. Interestingly, sometimes other animals, like cats, put in the effort to meet us half-way. Adult cats seldom meow at one another; meowing seems to be specifically directed to humans because we are otherwise not very good at understanding their preferred communication. Be more like a cat and make the effort to communicate better.
Can animals learn to understand or use language—a more structured form of communication with distinct words and grammar which is necessary for communicating complex ideas. There have even been some well-known, albeit controversial, cases of animals learning to use human language such as Koko the gorilla and Alex the African grey parrot. Some scientists even worry that the differences between how we study human and animal communication mean that we might be overlooking very important information [Cartmill, 2023], particularly the emphasis on an immediate response with animal communication.
Unless reading this paper led to a predictable response in readers (e.g., angrily throwing it across the room or immediately designing a new study), standard methods in animal communication would conclude that the paper had no meaning. Methods for determining meaning in animal signals are not good at detecting communicative acts with delayed reactions, acts that impact internal states rather than external behavior, or acts that are embedded within ongoing interactions and are difficult to isolate.
Behavioural and neurological studies have both supported the idea that dogs can understand human language. Chaser the border collie, previously covered on Flayrah, is one of the best examples. She learned the names of over 1000 individual toys, was able to infer the names of unknown toys (as seen in the NOVA video with Neil deGrasse Tyson) and understood common nouns as categories [Pilley & Reid, 2011]. In addition, Chaser could distinguish between prepositional object, verb, and direct object, i.e. she knew the difference between “take X to Y” versus “take Y to X”, and she formed mental images of the objects, allowing her to complete the commands even when the objects were not visible (or even in the room) at the time the command was given [Pilley, 2013]. This ability of dogs to mentally visualise an object based on hearing language was later confirmed by measuring the electrical activity in the brain [Boros et al., 2024] and was already described in a previous Flayrah article.
While dogs can understand human language, other animals may have their own form of language. By analysing a dataset of thousands of vocalisations during conflicts of Egyptian fruit bats, along with information about which bats were making the sounds and the context in which they were made, scientists found that the cries contained a huge amount of information. Using machine learning to classify the sounds allowed them to accurately predict the identity of the bat emitting the sound, what the conflict was about and the identity of the other individual in the conflict [Prat et al., 2016]. Since they could identify which bat was being addressed, it suggested that bats might have names for each other. While bats having names might sound strange, we've seen the same thing in dolphins. Dolphins have what is known as a “signature whistle” and this essentially acts as a name, allowing dolphins to address a specific individual [King & Janik, 2013]. (Dolphins have also been reported to attempt to mimic human speech [Ridgway et al., 2012].)
While not all of that is a clear sign of animals having their own language, it does show that animal communication is more complex than we often believe and that many animals can learn to understand language to a certain degree. With wider adoption of tools like FluentPet talking buttons and reports that orangutan vocalisations contain patterns which resemble features of human language [Lameira et al., 2024], more is sure to be discovered soon.
Morality
Some people might think that one of the differences between humans and other animals is that humans know the difference between right and wrong, whereas animals merely follow their base instincts. In the biblical story, Adam and Eve were forced to leave Eden after eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. More naturalistic philosophies identify human morality as an evolved property and expect that other animals will share aspects of our morality.
This certainly seems to be the case for Capuchin monkeys. This video comes from the famed primatologist Frans de Waal who gave a TED talk titled Moral behavior in animals. (If you do watch it, you will also see the cooperative pulling paradigm come up again.) In this experiment, two monkeys were kept side-by-side and given a task of returning a small rock to a researcher. When they completed the task, they were rewarded. The reward was either a piece of cucumber, which the monkeys are perfectly happy with, or a grape, which the monkeys much prefer. What they found was that monkeys were happy to perform the task for cucumber but would get upset if they saw the other monkey getting rewarded with grapes. This shows that monkeys have some sense of fairness and are upset by a situation where they are given a lesser reward for the same task [Brosnan & de Waal, 2003].
With the monkeys, we saw that other animals have a sense of fairness but, in that video, the individual was also losing out on a better reward, so it could have been a selfish reaction. What about morality when the animal has nothing to gain and, perhaps, even something to lose?
To see examples of that, we can turn to research done in rats. Rats display empathy and will take actions to relieve the distress of a second rat. This has been tested by having one free rat in a cage and one rat which is trapped in a smaller restrainer. The free rat, once it learns to open the restrainer, will quickly open it to free a trapped cagemate but will open an empty restrainer less often and take longer to do so. Not only that but, if there was also a restrainer with chocolate in it, the free rat would eat less chocolate than when it was alone and share the rest with its trapped cagemate [Bartal et al., 2011].
Finally, we return to work from the Wolf Science Center where they investigated whether dogs or wolves would perform an action that had no benefit to them but would benefit a partner. Specifically, the subjects had the option to press a touch screen with two symbols. One would reward a partner in an adjacent enclosure and the other would provide no reward. The subject who pressed the touch screen would get nothing in both cases. When they ran the experiment, they found that wolves press the button to give a partner a reward more often than when there is no partner [Dale et al., 2019]. Dogs did not show any preference for the buttons. This was taken as evidence that the cooperative nature of wolf packs makes them more willing to perform actions that help their pack mates while dogs do not have this sort of cooperative ability. (Recall also that dogs failed to cooperate with one another in the cooperative pulling paradigm.) Wolves did not press the button to help wolves that were from a different pack, showing that there is a social dynamic to this.
In summary, multiple species show some form of moral behaviour. That includes notions of fairness, empathy, a willingness to sacrifice for others and a desire to help other members of their social group with no direct benefit to themselves.
Culture
We all recognise that animals have behaviours but do they have cultures like humans do? Culture is not something that is instinctual, it is something which is taught and passed on through generations via social learning. It is something which is unique to a specific group... but not unique to humans.
There's always a risk that what we observe as cultural differences may actually be driven by differences in the environment, for example how much or what kind of prey is available. That's what makes this next study of our close relatives, bonobos, in the Democratic Republic of Congo so interesting. In the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, there are two groups of bonobos: Ekalakala and Kokoalongo. The territories of these two groups largely overlaps, meaning that both groups experience the same environment and prey abundances, factors which could otherwise explain differences between the groups. There's even mating between the groups, so they have limited genetic differences. However, there is a marked difference in their hunting preferences with the Ekalakala group preferring to hunt anomalure (a type of flying squirrel) and the Kokoalongo group hunting either duiker (a small antelope) or Congo rope squirrels. The most likely explanation for the differences between these groups is cultural differences that likely persist as a way to reduce conflict over prey when the groups' ranges overlap and they are in regular contact [Surbeck et al., 2020].
Once again, a trait which was thought to be exclusively human—culture—has been found to exist in other animal species as well. While it may not have developed to the extent that it has with us, it is only a difference of degree, not of kind.
Conclusion
To sum up, we can say that:
- Animals can think and are probably more intelligent than you think they are.
- Several animals may be able to understand, and even use, human language, while some other animals may have their own version of language.
- Some animals may have a sense of morality.
- Some animals may possess cultures.
Furthermore, I believe this is just the beginning. The examples we've seen are not restricted to our closest relatives nor are they specific to any particular group of animals. We see these examples coming from all across the tree of life; monkeys, crows, rats, dogs, dolphins. While individual species may lack some traits, it seems appropriate that our default assumption is that other animals possess these traits unless there is a reason to doubt that. The idea that animals could think or feel was once dismissed as anthropomorphism; mainstream science now accepts that humans are not unique in these respects.
You might note that many of the studies I cite here have only been published in the last 10 years or so. This is not only because those are the easiest to find, it's also because few people were asking these questions until recently. In several of these studies, the animal subjects are even named. This is something very new. When Jane Goodall began her studies of chimpanzees in the 1960s, several scientists objected to her naming the chimps. Now naming animals is commonplace and even described as "vital."
As research continues and more scientists look for examples of high levels of animal intelligence, tool use, language, morality and culture, I believe they will find it. There is sufficient evidence to show that the misconception about animals that has been with us for centuries is no longer tenable. It is our duty to share that evidence until the misconception has been dispelled from every mind.
Further reading
The Emotional Lives Of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy ― and Why They Matter, Mark Bekoff, New World Library, 2024
Kindred Spirits: One Animal Family, Anne Benvenuti, University of Georgia Press, 2021
A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion, Matthieu Ricard, Shambhala, 2017
Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, Arik Kershenbaum, Viking, 2024
This article was adapted from two presentations of the same name. The original version was prepared in March 2021 and presented at FURSAverance, an online South African furry event held to keep people's spirits up during covid times. It was later updated and presented in March 2025 at Gdakon, a Polish furry convention.
About the author
Rakuen Growlithe — read stories — contact (login required)a scientist and Growlithe, interested in science, writing, pokemon and gaming
I'm a South African fur, originally from Cape Town, who spends most of his time in Europe. I'm interested in all sorts of things, particularly science, furry and some naughtier things too!
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