Had a research project where we studied the apes at the zoo. Had to pick one and spend an hour observing it. I picked the orangutan. Big male that was sitting up against the glass. I had a backpack with me and he was super into me just pulling stuff out, flipping through pages of books, showing him how the pencil clicked and stuff. It really felt like sitting down with a person from another culture or something, more than any animalĀ
I used to volunteer at the Philly zoo and was watching the squirrel monkeys, it was just me in the observation room. I took a chapstick out of my purse but I noticed that I had a furry audience when I was digging through my purse and their faces changed/looked intrigued when I pulled out the chapstick.Ā
Going forward, I would bring a paperbag and throw in random crap. Utensils, office supplies, and i went out and bought some baby toys...and they would see me w the bag and gather at the branch nearest to me and almost talk among themselves whenever I'd pull something out of the mystery bag!
Years, ago, I had an orangutan at the San Diego Zoo ask through the glass to see what was in my purse. I pulled out chapstick and it ran its fingers across its lips, so I put the chapstick on. I had a package of gum and it pointed inside its mouth, so I chewed some gum. I pulled out a brush and it stroked its head, etc.. Really cool encounter.
Not to be one of those people who anthropomorphizes everything like it's a Disney movie, but I really do think we've only scratched the surface of understanding just how smart a lot of animals are.
Sounds like it knew exactly what those items were for, probably from watching other zoo-goers over the years.
I feel like anyone who had had a particularly intuitive dog might have an idea, but I agree. Animals , especially social ones, are way smarter than we think.
My incredibly derpy husky/German shepherd mix knows what day of the week it is, if it's Saturday and I grab my keys and put my shoes on he hops in my car, if it's the work week he goes to the dog run. I love how excited he gets when he realises it's my day off
There's a story about some sharks in the Caribbean who figured out that divers with certain pieces of gear (typically polespears) were looking for invasive lionfish. The divers of course sometimes fed the sharks some of the lionfish so they stuck around the dive groups.
Then the divers found that the sharks started to tap the polespears with their noses/heads and then swim to the reefs. When they looked at where the sharks went, it turned out that the sharks were VERY good at finding the lionfish and were signalling to the divers there was a lionfish in a specific place and then telling them to come and spear it, with the hope that the diver then gave them some of the fish.
Dolphins in Brazil have been famous for doing similar- they drive fish into shore where the fishermen wait along the shore in lines with long nets. They catch what swims into the nets trying to escape from the dolphins and then sort the fish for size/type. Of course the dolphins wait and anything that is too small or the wrong sort gets thrown back into the water and they help themselves.
I have pet rats & obviously we know they are smart, but I read that they struggle, at least when young, to conceive of us as a whole being. I mean, we are massive to them! So I don't think they always quite get that our face is our face etc. Plus they aren't visual creatures & have poor eyesight. I hold my rats up to my face occasionally & look them in the eyes & while they are younger they just wriggle to get down, no interest. But my rat Moog, and one I have at the moment, Eek, both had this epiphany seemingly where they realised, and they look me back in the eyes. Moog is a people-rat so he would do it for ages, Eek is too busy so he will do it for a bit then ask to get down. For something so small to suddenly realise you have eyes too & you are looking at them is pretty cool, a bit like the mirror test I think (which apparently they don't pass). Oh, it was so funny the second time I did it to Moog, I stuck my tongue out & he was so startled he bit it šš¤£
I had a really smart dog when I was growing up and she reminded me of Oy in The Dark Tower. She didn't talk but I never doubted she understood every word I said.
hahaha just imagine humans paying for tickets to watch a guy pull random surprises out of a bag and then thats it. thats the entertainment. that would be amazing
When I was younger and I would hear stats like this I would think āpsh a 6 year old? big deal!ā But now that I have a 1 year old kid, itās fuckin crazy how smart she is already. She was already smarter than the dogs 3-6 months ago, in terms of just like, raw reasoning ability. Now sheās talking, sheās like, working on shapes and the sounds different animals make ā¦ even my Dutch shepherd isnāt half as smart as she is even at 1. Itās nuts.Ā
It ultimately comes down to individual differences.
I had two birds.
One was remarkably intelligent, it mimicked the phone to get my attention, solved complex puzzles, and even spoke without any training.
The other... well, it fell off the top of a doorframe and got stuck in a crack, flew straight into a screen door, and failed to catch an ant on the wall.
No, definitely not.
Toddlers aren't able to care for themselves or others, or even be remotely functional.
All apes, including humans, develop very similarly in the first two years. After that the different species develop into their respective specialisations. But all fully-grown Primates are more intelligent and capable than a human toddler.
In the German Empire different Scientists had the hypothesis that you could raise Gorillas into good Prussian citizens.
So they took Gorilla newborns and put them into good bourgeois prussian families with newborn Humans. The experiment was a failure. While the Human and Gorillas always developed a very close brotherly bond and the Gorillas were overall more skillful, it turned out that it's simply impossible to teach them to dress themselves, table manners and other essentials of modern civilised life.
The experiments were all stopped when the siblings turned 6.
Went to the Indianapolis Zoo for the eclipse, and one of the big males with the face pouches did this. Singled me out of a group of people (bushy red beard maybe, idk) and wanted to see everything I had. My hat, sunglasses, watch, bracelet, ring, bag, inside my bag, water bottle. He'd point at them and then tap ot the location on his body to make sure I knew. Like I held up my arm and tapped my watch, he tapped his other wrist harder, so I held up my other arm and tapped my bracelet, and he pointed at it and then tapped lighter and pointed again. People around thought it was the coolest thing ever (which, yeah it was cool).
One of the keepers seen this little back and forth and told me that's the reason he doesn't wear his watch and wedding ring at work anymore
If I ever retired rich, I'd spend the rest of my life dealing with orangutans and rehabilitating them. It isn't fair what we've done to their habitats. They are amazing creatures.
thanks so much for that reference. I now have it lodged in my head.
Coworker just walked by and was like "are you humming Disney's jungle book?" and i was mortified to discover that not only was it in my head, i was humming it.
Seriously, I think that all of human history after about 12,000 years ago is just a chain of "OMG, look what we can do!" followed some time later by "... oh no, what did we do??".
Agriculture, cities, weapons, armies, empires, exploration, machinery, technology, plastic... We're just surprised picachu face all the time.
Bonobos and Orangutans are such incredible creatures. Human greed is the worst cancer on this planet. Genocide all the other species, just to make sure we have infinite quarterly profit growth.
And it's not most humans. It's a very specific, relatively small subset of humans with all the money and all the power--most of us are pretty decent and just want to live our lives.
This very specific and relatively small subset of humans all have names and places they frequent.
Okay fair enough, there are definitely some wild and scary microbes on this planet that could qualify as well lol. Also non microbes too, prions are TERRIFYING.
I recently watched a new video of the guy on YouTube who knows like 60 languages. He visits some bonobos in a research centre and actually talks to them in bonobo ālanguageā and they play with him and acknowledge him as a bonobo!
So this is something I am very passionate about, so I hope you don't mind if I soapbox from this comment.
A lot of vegetarian and vegan food options use palm oil, and while I will not entertain comments like "that's why being vegan is stooopid" bc I don't fuckig care about opinions like that, I will acknowledge that being vegan or vegetarian is not necessarily synonymous with being friendly to all animals or their habitats. Be mindful of the products you buy for this reason. I'd rather buy actual dairy products from farmers and cows I know (bc I have that privilege) than destroy the homes of an endangered species.
Capitalism makes compassion hard, but not impossible.
Unless you're in charge of all your direct food sources through farming things yourself, there really is no winning.
We buy a quarter cow once or twice a year from a local hobby farmer who only processes a few head each year. Best beef I've ever had. Local pork and chicken are a bit harder to come by around here because they go so fast.
You also have to clear a lot of land to farm corn, soy, palm, etc. and soy processing takes a ton of water, as well as almonds and lots of other water-hungry crops.
There is no environmental winner in a capitalist society.
You have to clear vastly more land to feed animals. Like it's not even close. Do you think the amazon is being cleared for soy beans that humans eat? No, it's all going towards beef.
Saying that you have to clear land to grow the bare minimum food to feed humans is a comically bad argument.
Ideally only local goods they can grow themselves or barter for. I used to intentionally grow stuff that my old neighbor didn't (he did a lot of tomatoes and different peppers, I did a lot of lettuce, kale, broccoli, and herbs) so that we could always trade each other. Even just a few plants of things like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and stuff like that usually gives you a tonnnn of fruit. Unless you can and preserve it yourself, you'll find yourself just looking for people to give it to, lol.
Not everyone has the privilege of space or time to do stuff like that, though.
Socialism doesn't mean primitive utopia. You still need industrial scale farming to support the population, it can just be less harmful without the financial incentive affecting politics as much, or possibly at all, so you don't get things like cash crops or subsidizing the meat industry to hell and back.
Borneo, sweet Borneo. If you wanted a snack, you just reached up into a tree and plucked it. Not like here. Oh, no, sir. Some hairless jerk had to go and invent money.
I know that capitalism is the current bad word in circles, but the overexploitation of animals and natural resources have been going on for centuries, if not millenia, well before capitalism was even a thing. This isn't a capitalism issue, it's a human issue.
I read a comment by a zookeeper once, he said if you accidentally leave a screwdriver in a gorilla cage, they will inspect it and figure out that it's not food and ignore it. If you leave it in a chimp cage, they will use it as a weapon. If you leave it in an orangutan cage, they will hide it and figure out how to use it to escapeĀ
We're neither after all. There have been peaceful and violent human societies for as long as we existed. The fact that we currently live in a world of turmoil, does not mean peace doesn't exist, or that humans are bad per se.
Violence is actually at an all-time low in human history. Although it may not seem like it, the 24 hour news cycle gives the false impression of more violence & turmoil than there really is.
Steven Pinker wrote an excellent book on this topic called āThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declinedā
Iām looking for the story now, but iirc it was a legal acknowledgement of the emotional capacity of an orangutan. They arenāt āhumanā but they are emotionally intelligent enough to require human-like rights? I think it surrounded mothers being separated from babies too ā¦ Iāll update if I find it.
I think it's about how she was kept alone, as in the only orangutan, in a zoo enclosure. And the ethics of that were in question so they moved her to a sanctuary.
The kid part is true but she abandoned her kid so tue zoo staff raised it. They kid was later reintroduced and she treated her kid as a playmate, which I found interesting.
He didn't start out as an orang-outan though. He discovered that being one has certain advantages for a librarian so he refused to be transformed back into a human.
I had to look this up because the last I read orangutans were considered the least intelligent of the great apes, and the only one that doesn't consistently recognize itself in the mirror.Ā Looks like there have been some updates, which is interesting.Ā I really find it interesting that self-awareness is not necessary for intelligence.
The physical signs of intelligence include: tool-making and use for problem-solving; insight and memory of space, time mental maps, and classification; concepts such as simple arithmetic and mirror self-recognition; and plan in advance innovate. The social evidence of orangutan intelligence includes deception, coalitions and alliances, mediation, reconciliation, consoling, empathy, intentions, imitation, teaching, culture, and language.
They are natural learners who will copy any human behavior they see. There's a group of Orangutans that wash themselves in the river with soap they steal from people's houses. They learned it by watching humans bathing. It's also known that they can figure out how to use and steer a boat if they see a human using oneĀ
I remember a video I saw years ago from a wild population where some guy had fallen into a pool of water or something and was struggling to get out, and an orangutan wandering by was like "bro that's dangerous there are snakes in there, here take my hand and I'll pull you out". The guy, I recall, did not take it up on the offer of help, because I think he was a researcher of some kind and didn't want to physically interact with them for various reasons, but it was a sweet and kind gesture. Like, they know shit.
e: I guess it was just a series of photos, now I look
They're the most social and intelligent great apes besides humans. To the point where animal shelters sometimes give other animals access to their area. Since the organgutans like the social interaction, and often play with the other animals like a human would a pet.
Not all animals in zoos came from the wild. Modern accredited zoos get their animals from breeding of captive populations, and taking in animals that canāt be released to the wild. I was a zookeeper in my former career and all the animals at the zoos I worked at were basically rescues. Illegal pets that had been surrendered or seized, injured wild life that could not survive on their own, etc. None of the animals I worked with who had been wild previously were taken by the zoo or collectors for a zoo. All of them had been illegal pets. Donāt even get me started on the assholes who want these creatures as pets!
There was one species I worked with that was actually saved from extinction by zoos. The Scimitar horned Oryx. Went extinct in the wild but a captive collection was able to be bred to higher numbers, then released into the wild. Was wildly successful and now there is a wild population again. Look it up for yourself.
Sure there are abusive and terrible zoos still. But they are not all equal. I believe it was Disney safari park, and the San Diego zoo that saved the scimitar horned oryx but am a bit rusty on that detail so feel free to fact check me. The zooās I worked at were often abusive to the keepers but we loved the animals and took poverty level pay and working in all the elements just because we loved caring for the animals so much and we took our responsibilities very seriously. The keepers I knew are some of the most compassionate, caring, hardworking, and dedicated people Iāve met. Zoos also play a crucial role in conservation and connecting people with animals and nature they would otherwise never be aware of. People will only save what they care about, and they will only care about what they know and understand.
In a perfect world maybe all creatures could exist freely in nature, but we donāt live in a perfect world.
Oh yeah, but considering how little we care about our environment, they're probably much better off that way sadly. Can't wait until we start being more responsible for our fellow earthlings.
That's exactly what I think about it. Every time I see such "cool" posts about the fun with apes in zoos I am just disturbed and sad. Caging these highly intelligent animals is a crime.
They made me stop going to zoos, the last one I went to had them into a too small enclosure and they seemed so depressed. Maybe I was antropomophising but the enclosure was depressing.
I can't remember what culture (Indonesia?) but there's myths that orangutans can speak but don't because they fear they'll be put to work. More than happy to be corrected on this lol
I don't remember where I heard it, but I once heard someone say that orangutans are way smarter than people because they figured out how to not pay taxes.
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u/SomethingAbtU Mar 03 '25
Orangutans always seem so wise, like they know the secrets of the universe.