The Smartest Animals on the Planet: Extraordinary Tales of the Natural World's Cleverest Creatures
Books / Paperback
Books › Nature › Animals › General
ISBN: 1554079659 / Publisher: Firefly Books, September 2012
Looks at animal intelligence from seven broad categories of cognition, including tool making and use, numerical ability, language learning, and learned social behaviors.
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Succinctly written and sumptuously illustrated with photographs and diagrams, this appealing book is sure to fascinate the general reader and inspire the science student considering a career in animal behavior or cognition. --Library Journal (starred review) This compelling book is from a world authority in animal intelligence and brings together the cumulative research relating to non-human "smart" species. It reveals how intelligent animals communicate, how they learn behavior, how they show feelings and emotions -- and for some species, how they use tools, count, and pick up a foreign language! Fully illustrated with photographs and step-by-step graphics, and drawing on data from historical and current experiments and observations, the book examines intelligence in the great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans), monkeys, and a surprisingly long list of non-primate species: sea otters, eagles, elephants, dolphins, lions, whales, parrots, honeybees, beetles, rats, woodpeckers, crows, and dogs. The book's chapters are: Comparing Animal Skills and Intelligence -- with each other and with humans Animal Tool Use -- in nature, in captivity, environmental adaptation Communication in Animals -- language, intention, meaning, alarms Imitation and Social Learning -- culture, observational learning Social Cognition and Emotion -- cooperation, altruism, empathy, deception Self-recognition and Awareness -- consciousness, mirror self-recognition Numerical Abilities in Animals -- counting, uses of quantity Animals and Human Non-verbal Language -- sign language, shapes, graphic symbols. This new edition's updates reflect the massive surge in research on animal cognitiion in the last 3 years -- in companion dogs, birds, insects, stingrays and mongooses.
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