Devoted students of natural history appreciate the remarkable ways in which animals deal with their needs and challenges. Few today would dispute that we should consider animals to think, and have intelligence, even if it is not the same sort or degree as our own unprecedented human mind. Today we’ll think about how animals think. We’ll start with three videos on the topic:

Video: “Inside the Minds of Animals (Bryan B Rasmussen)” (5:12)

Video: “Like Humans Chimps Learn Behavior From One Another (Smithsonian)” (3:27)

Video: “What Animals Are Thinking and Feeling, and Why It Should Matter (Carl Safina)” (16:27)

Intelligence is not just a vertebrate thing, though. Every year we learn more about the smartness of octopus and other molluscs such as cuttlefish and squid. Here is a scientific review paper about personality, play, and thinking in these cephalopods:

Reading: “To Boldly Go Where No Mollusc Has Gone Before (Mather 2008)”

Works

Find animals again today, and try to understand their thinking. What are they looking for? What are they afraid of? What are their needs? Put yourself—to whatever limited extent we humans can—in the mind of an animal you are watching, whether it is a caterpillar or a chipmunk or a dog.

~Don’t forget to go out and observe at night~

THE DARKLING THRUSH

I leant upon a coppice gate,

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to me

The Century’s corpse outleant,

Its crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind its death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead,

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited.

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

With blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew,

And I was unaware.

-Thomas Hardy (1900)