摘要：Tests show that a growing number of animals have the flexible, problem-solving thinking we once thought of as our own. It's time to treat creatures with more respect

CALL it human curiosity, but it is natural to wonder what a pet is thinking, or to ponder, as philosophers and latterly consciousness researchers have, what it is like inside the mind of a bat or a bird or an octopus. We are inching closer to cracking the secrets of animal minds – and they aren’t what we expected.

From Snowball the dancing cockatoo to sheep that can recognise celebrities, there are plenty of examples of animals doing clever things. Nevertheless, such antics could be mere party tricks, not a manifestation of something resembling the “general” intelligence that allows us to think our way through life’s challenges.

In fact, many biologists have long assumed that animals don’t do much thinking at all, acting mostly on instinct instead. The idea was so ingrained that our curiosity didn’t extend to testing it – until recently.

Obviously, you can’t put animals through human IQ tests. Nor would we necessarily want to, given that those tests provide only a limited and selective view of intelligence. But with a bit of ingenuity, you can devise a battery of tasks appropriate for a particular species.

“We search for intelligent life elsewhere, but there is more on Earth than we imagined”

A growing number of animals are passing such tests. These include creatures with tiny brains, such as mice, and others, like ravens, that don’t even have the brain structures we usually associate with intelligence. Clearly, humans aren’t alone in possessing a flexible, problem-solving sort of brain – or indeed attributes that build on that, such as culture.

So we should be careful what traits we describe as uniquely human. But equally we should be careful not to anthropomorphise too much: no one can even be certain that other people think in the same way they do, let alone animals.

These findings raise intriguing questions, such as how animals achieve what they do without language. And they provide further grounds for seeing our relationship with the wildlife around us more as one between equals. Much time and effort goes into searching for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but it turns out there is far more of it here on Earth than we imagined. We must value it for what it is.