15 animals that are probably smarter than you

We humans take a lot of pride in our brains and our supposed ‘dominance’ over the other creatures on Earth. But the animal kingdom is full of brainy creatures who would surely blow even the smartest humans away with their intelligence and skills if we gave them the chance. Case in point: think dancing, cheating and sleight-of-hand are human inventions, exclusive to Homo sapiens? Think again. Get ready to marvel at some of the smartest animals on the planet – some of which will surprise you!

There’s a reason dogs are man’s best friend. Not only are they adorable, they’re also very smart. They have emotions, they learn tricks, they recognise their owners, they can sense others’ feelings – and that’s not even all of the clever things dogs can do. According to Live Science, they’re as smart as a two-year-old child. “The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a two-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20% in intelligence can learn 250 words,” says the Live Science article. “While dogs ranked with two year olds in language, they would trump a three- or four-year-old in basic arithmetic, [Stanley Coren, a canine expert and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia] found. In terms of social smarts, our drooling furballs fare even better.”

OK, we know dogs are smart, so make sure you know how to train your puppy.

Besides being able to mimic humans, parrots can solve puzzles based on logical reasoning. According to Live Science, these parrots are as smart as a three-year-old child. “Parrots can draw conclusions about where to find a food reward not only from clues as to its location, but also from the absence of clues – an ability previously only seen in humans and other apes. “It suggests that Grey parrots have some understanding of causality and that they can use this to reason about the world,” study scientist Christian Schloegl, a researcher at the University of Vienna, told Live Science.”

Unsurprisingly, chimpanzees are one of the most intelligent animals on this planet – next to humans. Similar to how humans inherit their intelligence from their mothers, a chimpanzee also greatly relies on its genes for intelligence. “They can learn words, play with objects, and mourn the deaths of their friends,” says National Geographic. Genes determine about half of the variability in chimp intelligence, while environmental factors determine the other half, according to primatologist William Hopkins, of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Chimps also have their own way of making life a little easier. “Chimps are known to make and use tools for simple tasks like opening fruit and nuts. In fact, studies have shown some of these primates to fashion spears to hunt smaller prey and long branches to dig for termites,” according to health and wellness expert Caleb Backe.

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Although chickens can sometimes have an unintelligent rap, they are actually very smart. In fact, they can even differentiate certain shapes and colours. According to Melissa Caughey, author of How to Speak Chicken and A Kid’s Guide to Keeping Chickens, in one study, chickens were clicker trained to peck at one of four different shapes, such as a circle, square, triangle and rectangle. They would always pick the right shape out of the grouping, regardless of how the shapes were arranged. “When their particular shape was removed, the chickens looked quizzically for it and wouldn’t peck at the other shapes. When the correct shape was reintroduced, they pecked at it as taught.”

In case you’ve forgotten, elephants have incredible memories. They’re able to recall specific routes to watering holes over incredible stretches of terrain and over the span of many years – and they never forget a friend, either. In 1999, an elephant named Shirley arrived at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. Immediately, a resident elephant named Jenny became animated and playful. It wasn’t love at first sight; Jenny remembered Shirley from when they performed briefly in a circus together – 22 years earlier.

See if your memory is as good as an elephant’s with these Incredible animal facts part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Honeybees have evolved what we call ‘swarm intelligence’, with up to 50,000 workers in a single colony coming together to make democratic decisions. When a hive gets too crowded in springtime, colonies deploy scouts to look for a new home. If any scouts disagree on where the colony should build its next hive, they argue their case the civilised way: through a dance-off. Each scout performs a ‘waggle dance’ for other scouts in an attempt to convince them of their location’s merit; the more enthusiastic the dance, the happier the scout was with her location. The remainder of the colony votes with their bodies, flying to the spot they prefer and joining in the dance until one potential hive reigns #1 bee disco of the neighbourhood.

Dolphins are often cited as the second smartest animals on Earth due to their relatively high brain-to-body size ratio, the capacity to show emotion and impressive mimicry of the dumb apes who research them. Now, findings from the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi suggest dolphins may also be the second-sneakiest animals on Earth. When dolphins at the Institute were trained to pick up litter in their tanks and exchange them with trainers for fish, one dolphin named Kelly discovered a way to cheat the system. By hiding scraps of litter under a rock in her tank, Kelly discretely tore single sheets of discarded paper into multiple pieces, then turned them in one at a time to maximise her fishy reward. Kelly’s clever deception, it seems, was no accident – researchers say she did it all on purpose.

True prison-breakers of the sea, these tentacled creatures have proven time and again their talents for popping lids off screw-top jars, compressing their bulky bodies through slit-small holes, and climbing impossibly out of aquarium tanks to their freedom. Otto, a German aquarium octopus, was even known to throw rocks at the glass and spray water at overhead lamps to short-circuit the annoyingly bright lights (on more than one occasion). Add to their rap sheet the innovation of assembling shelters from coconut shells, and there’s no denying cephalopods will one day be our overlords.

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If you’ve ever second-guessed yourself while trying to remember an online account password, know that you have stooped to sub-squirrel intelligence. According to a Princeton University study, grey squirrels are capable of remembering where thousands of nuts are buried – for months at a time. They’ll even use subterfuge to trick would-be nut takers; in a 2010 study, squirrels who knew they were being watched dug fake caches for their nuts, making a show of digging holes and patting them over with dirt while hiding their precious nuts under their armpits or in their mouth until they could find a more suitable hiding spot elsewhere.

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You might not think of rats as the smartest animals, since humans are continually using them for experiments. But did you consider that the reason we use them is because they’re smart, and can handle the puzzles we throw at them? They can memorise routes (hence, the mazes), even though their eyesight is far, far less acute than ours is. And their problem-solving skills are on par with those of dogs, despite their brains being much smaller. Equally impressive, a Harvard Business Review study found that “even though the rat brain is smaller and less complex than the human brain, research has shown that the two are remarkably similar in structure and function.”

Pigs may as well be man’s best friend, according to a 2015 paper from the International Journal of Comparative Psychology. Like dogs, pigs have been shown to understand emotions, demonstrate empathy, solve mazes, learn simple symbolic languages and, most adorably, make best friends. As some of the smartest animals in the world, the youngest pigs even put our youngest humans to shame. In an experiment where wee British piglets had to use mirrors to divine the path to a hidden bowl of food, piglets as young as six weeks old learnt the concept of reflection within a few hours – a milestone that takes baby humans several months to grasp.

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Here’s another of the smartest animals that you probably have the exact opposite impression of. Pigeons, despite their comically ‘clumsy’ walking style and seemingly vacant stares, are not as bird-brained as you might think! In a complex German study, pigeons were shown 725 random black-and-white images one at a time. They were able to differentiate between the images in an identification game that, according to Psychology Today, would give most humans trouble. We’re not saying that the next time you shoo a pigeon it’ll remember your face for all eternity, but you might want to be careful just in case!

What the heck is this thing?! Well, it’s a genus of spider whose undeniable intelligence is about to turn up the dial on your arachnophobia. (Luckily, they pose no danger to humans!) There are multiple species of Portia, which are native to Southeast Asia, parts of Africa and northern Australia. And their hunting tactics show clear evidence of problem-solving abilities – if one technique doesn’t work, they’ll give something else a try, altering their method if something works on one species of prey spider and not another. They’ve earned the nickname ‘eight-legged cats’ because of their skilful, intelligence-driven hunting. Sometimes they’ll take hours upon hours to stalk a single prey spider, perching on its web and moving so slowly that they don’t cause any reverberations that might clue their prey in.

Not only can crows recognise faces to differentiate between predatory and benign species, they also understand basic physics (like this lab crow who mastered water displacement to manoeuvre a treat within reach), have been known to change entire migration patterns to avoid farms where crows have been killed in the past, and may even memorise city garbage routes so they can snag food droppings on garbage collection day. Talk about some of the smartest animals! Cool, calculating, and known to harbour a grudge, crows shouldn’t be compared to gangsters, per se, but we do feel obligated to remind you that a group of them is called a ‘murder’.

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Source: RD.com

• Melissa Caughey, author of How to Speak Chicken and A Kid’s Guide to Keeping Chickens
• Caleb Backe, health and wellness expert for Maple Holistics