From Science Daily:
Without having tasted a new juice mix before, an orangutan in a Swedish zoo has enough sense to know whether it will taste nice or not based on how he recombined relevant memories from the past. Only humans were thought to have this ability of affective forecasting, in which prior experiences are used to conjure up mental pictures about totally new situations. – Paper. (public access) Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, Tomas Persson, Rasmus Bååth, Katarzyna Bobrowicz, Mathias Osvath. Affective forecasting in an orangutan: predicting the hedonic outcome of novel juice mixes. Animal Cognition, 2016; DOI: 10.1007/s10071-016-1015-0
More.
But the average domestic cat can do that.
To prop up a failing thesis that human and animal minds are essentially the same thing, researchers make up ridiculously complicated theses, and then rush off to publish their supposed results. Do these people spend any time with animals when they are not at work?
Sorry, no sale. I am not saying that the orangutan is not intelligent. But can we get off this jag?
Or why not run every such claim by testing it with a few bored, overweight house cats.
See also: Furry, feathery, and finny animals speak their minds
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