Animals are people – A statement of the glaringly obvious

It always fascinates me when supposedly intelligent people use a series of trite observations to simply confirm their belief in their own alleged intellectual superiority. This even happens in science, where I was appalled to hear someone recently doing a series of dissertations on "How animals think".

As usual, everything was all about instinct. Animals were given no credit whatsoever for their ability to handle unusual or difficult logical situations. Interestingly, there are quite a few people who analyze other people exactly the same way. Hack psychologists are a case in point. The ability to understand basic behaviour is extrapolated to claim the ability to understand all behaviour.

So in this healthy, cliché-happy intellectual environment, animals and people are effectively categorized in exactly the same way. These observers apparently don't acknowledge any form of intellectual behaviour in anything or anyone except themselves.

This is what I call "expedient behaviorism." A series of assumptions are made, and all facts are duly neutered to fit those assumptions. Human intelligence definitely should be questioned on all levels, but to assume that it doesn't exist at all, and that other people are incapable of higher logic is pretty bizarre.

Maybe this is one of those elites I keep hearing about. I have yet to hear a word of intelligent conversation out of any of them, let alone an interesting concept, but after all, the human race has only been around a few million years or so in its present form. Something might happen.

On the subject of animals, however, this level of insularity is inexcusable. The average infant can see animal behaviour more clearly.

For example, isn't communication supposed to be a manifestation of intelligence?

• Who make more effort to communicate, human or animal?
• Which has the more developed sensory system, human or animal?
• Who is more likely to have something to communicate than whom?

Human behaviour towards animals is basically conditioned into a series of incredibly simplistic almost ritual behaviors. If you asked Einstein . "Who's a good boy?" and said "Fetch", would Einstein have had much opportunity to mention the theory of relativity?

Given that we are attempting to explain this to "expedient" behaviorists, I'll translate this into a language sufficiently dumb to be understood properly.

If you reduce the quality of communication, you reduce the ability to communicate.

If you do not credit the other party with the ability to communicate, you're not likely to get much information, are you?

There are so many incidents of obvious animal intelligence, recorded for centuries, in fact millennia, that nobody able to read should be in any doubt whatsoever about the intelligence of animals.

The idea of requiring things which aren't human to think and act like humans in order to be considered intelligent is so absurd as to be beyond farce. A cat is a cat. What use is it to the cat to pretend to be a human being?

This is called the "subjective intelligence". Any form of intelligence needs to use that intelligence in accordance with its own situation. A cat, therefore, needs to be a cat. A dog isn't very likely to benefit from acting like a paunchy, psychologically constipated, middle-aged human academic. There is no particular need for these endearing characteristics.

Although paunchy, psychologically constipated, middle-aged human academics do look adorable chasing sticks and other metaphors, they’d make lousy, inefficient dogs. It's a matter of opinion whose intelligence is being insulted more, the animals or the human beings supposed to put up with this sloppy, sophist-Neanderthal thinking.

Reality doesn't run on rails, and this epic of facile pseudo-thought should now end. The apparent absolute failure of so many highly qualified idiots to recognize basic manifestations of intelligence serves no useful purpose. Science doesn't require any more clichés. It requires proper study of subjects by those prepared to admit that the subjects require adequate scrutiny.

Science isn't about what we know. It's a survival mechanism, related to what we don't know.

While they're at it, behaviorists might even like to consider the possibility of human intelligence. It'd explain a lot, wouldn't it?