Do Primates have culture?

Of course pirates have culture. What a silly question.

I'm only two pages into this thread, so I'll respond as I go on up. Hopefully I won't be duplicating later posts by others.

I was fortunate and had the chance to do some primate studies with Birute Galdikas, one of the three incredible women that Louis Leakey charmed into field studies of chimps, apes, and orangs. She's quite a lady, let me assure you.

Thomas alludes above to the Japanese Snow Macaques, a population which has been closely observed for decades (macaques are, apart from we humans, the primate ranging furthest from the equator).

In this population, one particular female's behavior has had quite remarkable consequences for the entire community. One component of their diet was seeds spread over the ground, but it is sandy ground. This female discovered that if a handful of seeds and sand were taken to the water, the sand would sink, leaving the clean seeds floating on the surface. I don't recall if the body of water was river or oceanic, but if river, it was close enough to the ocean for tidal flow to carry salt. Thus the next related behavior was carrying potatoes to the water, presumably for the salt flavor. These behaviors slowly passed throughout the entire community. Additionally, this band of macaques now enter the water simply for the sake of being in water. They are the only other primate known to do this. A lovely corner to that story is that the young were the fastest to join in on this new behavior, but the old fogies held off or never did partake.

At the time I did my primate studies, there were two ongoing experiments with primates and sign language. I don't recall if the anecdote which follows, told us by Galdikas) involved Koko or Nim Chimpsky (good name, yes?). The subject primate had been joined in her living area and training by another. They were observed signing to each other. That newcomer, on one occasion, took some food which 'belonged' to the first primate, who reportedly signed "You green ****!"

Research just keeps flowing in!!!!

Tool use confirmed in monkeys

Hard times may make tool use more important
UK researchers have collected the first hard evidence of monkeys using tools, Science magazine reports.
Cambridge researchers observed wild capuchin monkeys in the Brazilian forest using stones to help them forage for food on an almost daily basis.

Scientists have already known for some time that capuchins use tools in captivity, but have only occasionally observed them doing so in the wild.

But the latest findings confirm that the tool use was habitual, or routine.

The monkeys used tools for digging, for cracking seeds and hollow branches, digging for tubers (nutritious plant storage organs such as potatoes that often lie below the ground) and for probing tree holes or rock crevices.

They captured the monkeys on video in the Caatinga dry forests of northeastern Brazil.

Monkeying around

Digging was the most frequent type of tool use observed. The monkeys typically held the stone with one hand and used it to hit the ground quickly three to six times, while simultaneously scooping away the soil with the other hand.

In Science, Antonio Moura and Phyllis Lee write that the results suggest wild capuchin monkeys are far more skilled at understanding cause and effect than previously thought.

"We think these findings are extremely important for understanding the role of tools in cognitive evolution," said Mr Moura.

"I'm looking forward to returning to the field to try to specify more about the nature of the tools."

But the Cambridge anthropologists also propose that the monkeys may only use tools under certain ecological conditions, such as the long dry seasons of the Caatinga.

When food availability is stretched, using tools may be crucial, allowing the monkeys to obtain nutritional foods such as tubers that are otherwise inaccessible.

Antonio Moura observed the monkeys using tools a total of 154 times from October 2000 to March 2002.

The routine use of tools is well known in great apes such as chimpanzees. But making the step between these crude tools and those made by early humans required a giant cognitive leap.

Chimps can be shown how to strike flakes of stone from a "core" to use as cutting tools, as our early ancestors did.

But they seem unable to understand that making useful cutting flakes depends on striking the core at the right angle and with the right force - a skill that seemed to come naturally to even the earliest human tool-makers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4083517.stm


(BTW - heehee - I made a flint knife, with ease - though it was not very sharp - in Standley Chasm last week!!! All that reading of "Clan of the Cave Bear" and its sequels has not been in vain!)

AND - man, these capuchins ar eSOMETHING!

Did sharing evolve from group hunting?



The monkeys shared for mutual gain

The idea that co-operation during hunting led to the evolution of human social and moral behaviour has received a boost.
Another species of primate, capuchin monkeys, have been observed by scientists to pay one another for the work done in getting food.




Handling the delicate dynamics of group hunting has surely been a major theme in making human primates mentally what they are

Andrew Whiten

US primatologists discovered that, after a collaborative hunting effort, the monkey left holding the spoils willingly shared out the food.

Dr Frans de Waal, one of the team at the Living Links Center in the Yerkes Primate Research Center, said: "Tit-for-tat is essential in our economies, and even our morality emphasises how one good turn deserves another. Our lives depend on our ability to co-operate with one another and to reciprocate for the help of others."

'Really surprising'

Dr Anthony Collins, at the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania, found the results of the Yerkes study "really surprising".

"It's rather extraordinary that they were apparently sharing food spontaneously."

However, primate behaviour expert Professor Andrew Whiten, at St Andrews University, UK, told BBC News Online: "Capuchin monkeys are not our ancestors, so this study does not prove anything direct about the origins of our own preparedness to co-operate.

"But what it does show, interestingly, is that even in a monkey quite distantly related to us, there is a greater tendency to tolerate sharing of one's food with individuals who are prepared to help in getting it in the first place."

Professor Whiten says this provides a clue to answering the puzzle of how co-operation might have begun to evolve in tricky situations like group hunting, where several individuals help, yet only one ends up holding the prize.

"Handling those delicate dynamics has surely been a major theme in making human primates what they are, mentally," he said.

Large brains

Capuchin monkeys are small South American primates but have large brains. In the wild, they have been observed to co-operate during hunting to allow one individual to make a kill. That individual then shares the meat, and all the hunters get a meal.

Dr de Waal and his colleagues studied this behaviour in captivity by setting up an experiment in which the strength of two monkeys was required to pull a dish of apple slices into their cage.

However, the two monkeys were separated by a mesh, meaning that only one of them received the apples. Despite the fact that the monkey with the apples could have eaten them all with impunity, they nearly always shared through the mesh.

Sharing, caring or bribing?

One possible explanation for the behaviour could be that the monkeys have evolved an instinct that sharing is beneficial.

But Dr Collins noted that there are other potential explanations. For example, the monkey giving the food could be manipulating the other in order to ensure its future co-operation - a kind of bribe.

Research in chimps - the only other primates to have shown co-operative hunting in the wild - has suggested that sharing could be explained as getting fed up with being nagged, said Dr Collins. Some researchers argue that chimps share their food with those who pester them most persistently in order to get rid of them.

The Yerkes research is published in the journal Nature.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/702754.stm

And:

Chimp is counting champ


Ai has been practising her skills for over 20 years




A female chimp called Ai has learned how to use the Arabic numerals, 1 to 9, to represent numbers and her latest feat is to be able to memorise the order of five numbers.


It's a remarkable performance

Professor Andrew Whiten
"Ai's performance shows that chimpanzees can remember the sequence of at least five numbers, the same as, or even more than, pre-school children," said the Japanese researcher who led the research, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, in the journal Nature.

Professor Andrew Whiten, a primate expert from the University of St Andrews, told BBC News Online: "In one sense, as a chimpanzee researcher, I'm not that surprised. Every year we find something else that chimpanzees can do which brings them one step closer to us.

"But if you compare the performance of this chimp with what an average human can do, the chimpanzee is doing remarkably well."

Magic number

Professor Whiten explained: "We can remember a seven-digit number at first sight, our brain's 'magic number'. But here's a chimp remembering five - that's awfully close. And although their brain is large for a primate, it is only half the size of ours."

Ai is kept at the Primate Research Centre at Kyoto University. She was shown five numbers on a computer screen. Her task was then to touch each one in the correct order, but on touching the first number, the rest were covered.



Ai chooses the numbers in order




Therefore to perform the task successfully, she had to memorise all the numbers. And she did.

Ai got the fourth number correct 90% of the time, compared with the predicted 13% if she was guessing randomly. She got the fifth number correct 65% of the time, compared to a 6% random chance.

Pauses observed by the team showed that "Ai inspected the numbers and their locations and planned her actions before making her first choice."

Ai, 23, is no ordinary chimp. She has been learning linguistic and other skills at the Primate Research Centre since 1978. She is also a keen painter and has her own web site and e-mail address.

Professor Whiten believes that much remains to be discovered about the abilities of chimps: "We have only studied chimpanzees for a few decades, despite sharing the planet with them for hundreds of thousands of years - we're only just getting to know them."

Chimp treatment

And he believes this type of research should inform the way in which humans treat chimpanzees: "As researchers, our job is to show what chimpanzees can do and the ways in which they are similar to you.

"It's then up to the people who want to use them in medical experiments, or even eat them as they do in some parts of Africa, to decide how comfortable they feel with what they do."

He added that when a colleague showed a video of chimpanzee performances to an African village where chimps were eaten, one of the villagers said "I can't eat him anymore, he is too close to me".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/592192.stm

These are from 1999:

Chimps are cultured creatures

Different chimpanzee societies have different customs

Chimpanzees have been shown for the first time to have a culture as rich as humans.


The BBC's Sue Nelson: Chimps in Africa display a rich cultural tradition
The discovery shows that our closest animal cousins are even more like us than we thought.

A major study, involving seven chimpanzee sites across equatorial Africa and an international team of researchers, pooled a total of 151 years of chimpanzee observations.

It revealed remarkable differences in the behaviour of the chimpanzees in different groups.

Personal grooming

For example, each had their own distinct ways of grooming, gathering ants, probing bee hives for honey, cracking nuts and making threats. These are passed down from one generation to the next.



Chimps: A rich spectrum of behaviour
A biological definition of culture is the ability to pass on behaviour through social learning, as well as through the genes, so in that sense chimps now join humans as the only cultured beings on Earth.

"Chimp communities differ from each other not in just one behaviour, but in a whole suite of patterns," says the team leader, Professor Andrew Whiten at St Andrew's University in Scotland

"This seems much more like what we see in human cultures, where different societies vary in many ways, like their technologies, cuisines and manners," he says.

Culture clash

The team looked at 65 different behaviours, but ruled out differences in 26 of them as being the result of environmental or ecological factors. For example, chimps living in areas where many lions and leopards roamed slept in tree nests, not ground ones.

But this left 39 differing behaviours which were truly cultural.

In West Africa, a chimp will remove a tick from the fur of a friend, place the bug on its forearm, and crush it with a jab of the forefinger. But at Gombe, Tanzania, the parasite will be placed on a leaf before being squashed.

And chimps at one site in Uganda go as far as picking a leaf, placing the bug on it for inspection, and then either discarding or eating it.

Credibly cultural

Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Centre, Atlanta, US believes the chimpanzees deserve their place as cultured creatures.

"The evidence is now overwhelming that chimpanzees have a remarkable ability to invent new customs and technologies, and that they pass these on socially rather than genetically," he says, writing in the journal Nature, in which the study is published.

Professor Whiten believes the findings emphasise the "continuity of human nature and the rest of the natural world".

They also made more poignant the plight of chimpanzees being decimated by loss of habitat and the African appetite for bush meat. Professor Whiten said: "We are not just losing the chimpanzee. We are losing a diversity of chimpanzee culture."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/370807.stm

Chimps' language skills in doubt


Kanzi is reputed to be one of the LRC's brightest pupils

By Environment Correspondent Alex Kirby
Reports that apes have an innate linguistic ability and can be taught to communicate with humans have been questioned by several authorities on primates.

The reports say that chimpanzees and other apes at Georgia State University's Language Research Center (LRC), using a computer system attached to a voice synthesiser, have learnt enough words to make simple sentences.

The computer is a flat panel with hundreds of touch-sensitive squares, each bearing a symbol or image corresponding to a word in the animal's vocabulary.

Touching the square makes the synthesiser produce the appropriate word.

One bonobo (pygmy chimpanzee), Kanzi, can use the system to say: "I want a cup of coffee, please".

Another, Panbanisha, is said to know around 3,000 words.


Kanzi on his 'keyboard'
But Dr Tom Sambrook, of the Scottish Primate Research Group, told BBC television of his doubts that the apes' achievements signified all they appeared to.

"They can use language effectively to make requests", he said.

"But whether they're understanding what they're doing is a much more difficult mystery to disentangle."

Dr Sambrook was asked whether the LRC's work did not at least show that humans and great apes were closer than many people believed.

"I personally have no problem with being as close as possible to the chimpanzees.

"But if you look at their production of language, you'll find it's vastly different from the manner in which, for example, a child uses language.

Dr Sambrook quoted an earlier researcher's verdict: "Were a four-year-old child to use language in the way a chimpanzee uses it, we would consider that child disturbed."

Jim Cronin is director of the Monkeyworld ape rescue centre in Dorset.


Some chimps are said to "know" as many as 3,000 words
He believes that primates do have a rudimentary language ability, but is concerned the research at LRC does not offer much to the animals themselves.

Mr Cronin, speaking on BBC Radio Five Live, said: "What do the chimpanzees or orangutans ever get out of all this?"

"I look at all this research, and everybody says: 'Should the chimps have human rights?'

"They don't have any rights here at all. I would get a 400-pound pygmy chimp - three times overweight - who's been isolated, and wonder 'Is that cruel?'

"I hear about a gorilla who's been raised since 1972 on his own, in isolation, because it would seem that isolation's the key to being taught this.

"And I wonder who's barbaric here."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/403756.stm

Links:

http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/

http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/capuchins/

And - from 2003:

Monkeys show sense of justice

By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor


Monkeys have a sense of justice. They will protest if they see another monkey get paid more for the same task.

Capuchins: Cooperative and tolerant
Researchers taught brown capuchin monkeys to swap tokens for food. Usually they were happy to exchange this "money" for cucumber.

But if they saw another monkey getting a grape - a more-liked food - they took offence. Some refused to work, others took the food and refused to eat it.

Scientists say this work suggests that human's sense of justice is inherited and not a social construct.

Differential reward experiment

The research was carried out at Emory University in the US, by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, and is reported in the journal Nature.

"I'm extremely interested in the evolution of cooperation," Sarah Brosnan told BBC News Online.

"One of the most interesting areas is the recent suggestion that human cooperation is made more effective by a sense of fairness."

She wanted to find out if the human sense of fairness is an evolved behaviour or a cultural construct - the result of society's rules.

So she and her colleagues devised an experiment using capuchin monkeys.


Aware what the other one gets
Sarah Brosnan said: "I chose the capuchin because they are very cooperative, and because they come from a very tolerant society.

"We designed a very simple experiment to see whether or not they react to differential rewards and efforts."

Capuchins like cucumber, but they like grapes even more. So a system was devised whereby pairs of capuchins were treated differently after completing the same task.

"They had never before been in any sort of situation where they were differentially rewarded," she said.

"We put pairs of capuchins side by side and one of them would get the cucumber as a reward for a task."

The partner sometimes got the same food reward but on other occasions got a grape, sometimes without even having to work for it."

'A highly unusual behaviour'

The response was dramatic, the researchers said.

"We were looking for a very objective reaction and we got one. They typically refused the task they were set," Sarah Brosnan said.

"The other half of the time they would complete the task but wouldn't take the reward. That is a highly unusual behaviour.

"Sometimes they ignored the reward, sometimes they took it and threw it down," she added.


They never blamed their partner, say researchers
The researchers were not surprised that the monkeys showed a sense of fairness, but they were taken aback that they would turn down an otherwise acceptable reward.

"They never showed a reaction against their partner, they never blamed them," Sarah Brosnan said.

Commenting on the results, experts in the subject told BBC News Online that the idea of a long evolutionary history for a sense of fairness was an exciting one.

However, they added that they would like to see more research involving more than just the five subjects tested in the Nature study.

So does our instinctive feeling of fairness predate our species?

"It may well," Sarah Brosnan said, and further experiments are planned to see how extensive a sense of justice in the animal world is.

"We are currently repeating the study on chimpanzees, a great ape species, to learn something more about the evolutionary development of the sense of fairness.

"I suspect that there are other non-primate species with tolerant societies that will show the same behaviour."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3116678.stm



And just for fun:

Crows prove they are no birdbrains


The first animal to make a tool for a specific task?

The crow is putting our closest cousins to shame.
Experiments show the humble bird is better than the chimp at toolmaking.

British zoologists were astonished when a captive crow called Betty fashioned a hook out of wire to reach food.

It is the first time any animal has been found to make a new tool for a specific task, say Oxford University researchers.

They believe the bird shows some understanding of cause and effect.



Experiments with primates, who are much closer relatives of humans than birds, have failed to show any deliberate, specific tool making

Alex Kacelnik, Oxford University
"It is not only cleverer than we think in this particular direction but probably, at least in relation to tools, has a higher level of understanding than chimpanzees," says Alex Kacelnik, Professor of Behavioural Ecology.

The Oxford team stumbled on the discovery while studying the behaviour of Betty and an older male crow, Abel.

Both belong to a crow species, Corvus moneduloides, from the French overseas territory of New Caledonia in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.

Surprise snack

The researchers were testing whether the birds were able to lift food out of a vertical tube using either a straight piece of wire or a hook.

"The surprise came in trial number five when the male stole away the hook and flew to another part of the aviary," Professor Kacelnik told BBC News Online.



It is tempting to say that the bird used some kind of insight to access and solve the problem of extracting the food

Gavin Hunt, University of Auckland
He watched as Betty spontaneously bent a straight piece of wire and used it to retrieve a snack.

The researchers then repeated the experiment with just a straight piece of wire to see if it was a fluke.

Betty was able to bend the wire and get at the food nine times out of ten.

"Although many animals use tools, purposeful modification of objects to solve new problems, without training or prior experience, is virtually unknown," adds Professor Kacelnik.

He says experiments with primates, who are much closer relatives of humans than birds, have failed to show any deliberate tool making and human-like understanding of basic physical laws.

Animal insight

New Caledonian crows have been seen to make at least two sorts of hook tools in the wild.

Gavin Hunt of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, has studied them.

He said the behaviour of the young female crow was very interesting but not that surprising.

"It is tempting to say that the bird used some kind of insight to access and solve the problem of extracting the food, as humans often do in their toolmaking," he told BBC News Online.

"However, we need to carry out more experiments to see if this was the case."

Other birds have also shown surprising levels of ingenuity. The woodpecker finch of the Galapagos Islands uses a cactus spine to spear insects.

Pigeons have been known to recognise humans and letters of alphabet. Parrots, though, appear to be at the top of the pecking order.

Alex, an African grey parrot, hit the headlines in the 1980s. The bird had a vocabulary of 100 English words and was able to ask questions and make requests.

Full details of the Oxford University research are published in the journal Science.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2178920.stm


I love this thread!

December 8, 2004 Posted: 1534 GMT (2334 HKT)



Babs suffered from an incurable kidney condition.



ICurator Melinda Pruett Jones called it a "gorilla wake."

Babs' 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to approach the body, followed by Babs' mother, Alpha, 43. Bana sat down, held Babs' hand and stroked her mother's stomach. Then she sat down and laid her head on Babs' arm.

"It was like they used to do in the exhibit, lying side by side on the mountain," keeper Betty Green said. "Then Bana rose up and looked at us and moved to Babs' other side, tucked her head under the other arm, and stroked Babs' stomach."

Other gorillas also approached Babs and gently sniffed the body. Only the silverback male leader, Ramar, 36, stayed away.

Keepers said the display wasn't surprising.

"She was the dominant female of the group, the peacekeeper, the disciplinarian, the one who kept things in a harmonious state," Pruett Jones said.

Koola, 9, brought her infant daughter, whom Babs had showered with attention since her birth in August.

"Koola inspected Babs' mouth for a while, then held her baby close to Babs, like she loved to do the last couple months, letting Babs admire her," Green said.

Babs had an incurable kidney condition and was euthanized Tuesday. Keepers had recently seen a videotape of a gorilla wake at the Columbus, Ohio, zoo and decided they would do the same for Babs. Gorillas in the wild have been known to pay respects to their dead, keepers said.

"I had a headache for the rest of the day after all the tears I cried watching them," Green said.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/12/08/gorilla.wake.ap/

Just look at all the different human species, and you'll know right away that primates have culture.

Lol! We are all the same SPECIES, CI!

We just have differing plumage.

White, black, yellow, brown, and red; the human species are represented by five colors. Within those five colors are multitudes of cultures.

Here is something posted here about Prairie Dogs - no url, sadly:

Prairie Dogs Have Own Language
Fri Dec 3, 8:55 PM ET Science - AP

By TANIA SOUSSAN

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Prairie dogs, those little pups popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm. They have different "words" for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures.

They can even coin new terms for things they've never seen before, independently coming up with the same calls or words, according to Con Slobodchikoff, a Northern Arizona University biology professor and prairie dog linguist.

Prairie dogs of the Gunnison's species, which Slobodchikoff has studied, speak different dialects in Grants and Taos, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Monarch Pass, Colo., but they would likely understand one another, the professor says.

"So far, I think we are showing the most sophisticated communication system that anyone has shown in animals," Slobodchikoff said.

Slobodchikoff has spent the last two decades studying prairie dogs and their calls, mostly in Arizona, but also in New Mexico and Colorado.

Prairie dog chatter is variously described by observers as a series of yips, high-pitched barks or eeks. And most scientists think prairie dogs simply make sounds that reflect their inner condition. That means all they're saying are things like "ouch" or "hungry" or "eek."

But Slobodchikoff believes prairie dogs are communicating detailed information to one another about what animals are showing up in their colonies, and maybe even gossiping.

Linguists have set five criteria that must be met for something to qualify as language: It must contain words with abstract meanings; possess syntax in which the order of words is part of their meaning; have the ability to coin new words; be composed of smaller elements; and use words separated in space and time from what they represent.

"I've been chipping away at all of these," Slobodchikoff said.

He and his students have done work in the field and in a laboratory. With digital recorders, they record the calls prairie dogs make as they see different people, dogs of different sizes and with different coat colors, hawks, elk. They analyze the sounds using a computer that dissects the underlying structure and creates a sonogram, or visual representation of the sound. Computer analysis later identifies the similarities and differences.

The prairie dogs have calls for various predators but also for elk, deer, antelope and cows.

"It's as if they're trying to inform one another what's out there," Slobodchikoff said.

So far, he has recorded at least 20 different "words."

Some of those words or calls were created by the prairie dogs when they saw something for the first time. Four prairie dogs in Slobodchikoff's lab were shown a great-horned owl and European ferret, two animals they had likely not seen before, if only because the owls are mostly nocturnal and this kind of ferret is foreign. The prairie dogs independently came up with the same new calls.

In the field, black plywood cutouts showing the silhouette of a coyote, a skunk and an oval shape were randomly run along a wire through the prairie dog colony.

"There are no black ovals running around out there and yet they all had the same word for black oval," Slobodchikoff said.

He guesses the prairie dogs are genetically programmed with some vocabulary and the ability to describe things.

Slobodchikoff has also played back a recorded prairie dog alarm call for coyote in a prairie dog colony when no coyote was around. The prairie dogs had the same escape response as they did when the predator was really there.

"There's no coyote present, but the prairie dogs hear this and they say, 'Oh, coyote. Better hide,'" Slobodchikoff said.

Computer analysis has been able to break down some prairie dog calls into different components, suggesting the critters have yet another element of a real language.

"We're chipping away with this at the idea that animals don't have language," Slobodchikoff said.

Wow... Glad you're still adding to this thread, Deb.

Prairie dogs have "words" and the one for black oval is the same throughout prarier dog communities?

And GORILLA wakes? I can imagine that would be heart-rending.

I was hearing yesterday about crows having a similar witnessing & paying respects to the dead. It's just amazing.

The prairie dogs one has no damned url - so critiquing the research ain't possible - but it IS interesting, no???


Crows are SMART!!!

Crows are not only smart, they are crafty. I suspect some individuals have a highly developed sense of humor.

Lol - I agree!!!!!!

I will tell the tale of a crow and one of my cats when I get home from work!

Prairie dogs, crows, cats, and dogs make for interesting discussions about 'smarts' and culture. Gotta include the elephants too!

Cicerone

You are a racist. And what about hippopotamus? Why do you reject their culture?
I like hippopotamus. They are philosophers.
Not like those stupid prairie dogs, crows, cats and dogs, always running
and barking and watching.
Hippopotyamus do nothing except swim, eat, f (...) and sleep.
Respect the hippopotamus, man!

Quote, "They are philosophers." How so?