polly want a quiz?

Peter points us to this story of an African grey parrot who lets you know when he's sick of standardized testing:

"He'll generally perform with almost perfect accuracy for about the first maybe 12, 15 trials, and then he just does not want to do it … he'll sit there and he'll preen, or he'll give me all the wrong answers in a row, which takes a lot of intelligence because he's avoiding the one correct answer," the Professor said.

"If he's giving me six wrong answers in a row, you know he's avoiding that seventh answer carefully.

"So you know he knows it, because by chance he couldn't do that."

The empirical evidence for varieties of animal sentience grows every day. I'll quote myself:

It's a credit to humans' basic anthropocentrism that this--the idea that other animals might be as wily, deceptive, and crafty as we are--comes as a surprise.

The research is being put to practical use as well.

"I've been working with a colleague, Diane Sherman, who's in Monterey at New-Found Therapies, and she's been adapting our training procedures for work with autistic children, with very good results," Professor Pepperberg said.

"She's helped these children immensely. None of the children have reached completely normal stages, but all of them have progressed significantly."

Peter remarks,

How's that for a great intersection of humanity? On the one hand, we're finding that a bird has an impressive level of intelligence, on par with a human child. On the other hand, we're taking that knowledge to help human children who have a cognitive disability. It's an odd triangle of intelligence between an adult human, a disabled human child, and an intelligent parrot.

See also...
animals are smarter than you think
eat, crow
the crows seem to be calling my name