What do we really know about the minds of animals? Evidence of brain functions and responses show various animals do have minds as we might define them, argues an Economist article the newspaper has run on Medium. “No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other,” reads the piece. Animals do communicate too. The birdsong you hear is the marking of territory or a mating ritual. Santino, a chimpanzee in Sweden, used to hide piles of stones to throw them at visitors who annoyed him. “Santino could remember a specific event in the past (being annoyed by visitors), prepare for an event in the future (throwing stones at them) and mentally construct a new situation (chasing the visitors away).” The bottom line? “Animals might well think in ways that humans cannot yet decipher because they are too different from the ways humans think — adapted to sensory and mental realms utterly unlike that of the human, perhaps realms that have not spurred a need for language.”

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