Intellipets

One of the most useless pieces of information to emerge this week has been the finding that a 2 day old chicken is more intelligent than an average 5 year old. Having had considerably more chicken friends than I did humans at the age of 5 I would probably have concur that they were pretty intelligent. Certainly I could not jump a 6 foot fence, trot off up the kitchen path and have a nose around the kitchen as one of the family's brood was given to doing from time to time. I'm sure my mother welcomed the company though I'm equally certain that, had my father been around at the time, the adventurous, feathered friend would have had received an early introduction to the oven.

It has taken Christine Nicol, Professor of Animal Welfare at Bristol University 20 years of research to come to this startling conclusion. Surely, anyone who has ever witnessed the carnage on the streets of Newcastle any Friday night would take less than 30 seconds to deduce that a 2 day old chick is considerably more intelligent than most humans in their early 20s.

According to her research hens can navigate using the sun by the age of 2 weeks. They also exhibit skills including numeracy, self-control and structural engineering from a couple of hours old – skills that it takes a human several years to learn.

Come on – get a life! No wonder so many people want to go to university. Maybe some kind benefactor would care to sponsor my 10 year program to study the origins and potential uses of ear wax.

Despite growing up with a veritable menagerie of pets I would no more wish to have a pet as an adult than rollerskate to Mars. There is something distinctly unnerving about watching supposedly intelligent human beings repeatedly saying “who's a clever boy then” to their pampered pooch who has mastered the art of lifting a paw (to shake hands?) retrieving a stick or barking what may vaguely pass as an aberration of the word “sausages”. You could argue that many animals enhanced sense of smell and/or hearing is a superior form of intelligence though it would take more than the ability to lick your own genitalia or crawl through a cat flap barely larger than your head to convince me that a pet was MENSA material. My neighbour's dog barks continuously from 5.30 in the morning until 11.30 at night without any prompting, does that mean he can tell the time or is it simply that he only knows how to make a noise (a vain attempt to attract the attention of an absent owner).

Last year a dog act won Britain's Got Talent - What a sad indictment of the state of the nation and a slap in the face for those entertainers who spend years traveling around the circuit with their act trying to make a living.

If dogs are so clever why do they spend so much time chasing the postman or their own backside? They are not beating their tails in time with Vivaldi's '4 Seasons' they are simply wagging their tail because they are pleased to see you. Dog's do not sing, they howl because they find a particular sound irritating. Get over it, your pet is not a music prodigy.

The British are depicted as a nation of dog lovers so why does the term 'I've been working like a dog' conjure up an image of ill-treatment. The saying 'you pay peanuts, you get monkeys' will be familiar to many employees, it is not meant to be a compliment to monkeys, the inference being that they are not the brightest beasts in the jungle.

The way that many owners fawn over their pets is incomprehensible to me. Back in the days when I used to visit many of my clients at their homes there were certain people that I tried to avoid, not because I was afraid of their pet but simply because of the way that either the pet or the client behaved. 

I found it very difficult to conduct a sensible conversation with someone who was jumping up or down from his seat every 5 minutes to go to the kitchen to let their dog or cat  into or out of the house. Another distraction was having a couple of demented budgerigars flying around the living room while I was trying to explain an important point to a client. There was a feeling of trepidation when walking into a living room that followed a ticking off I once received for inadvertently sitting in 'Rover's favourite TV chair'. It wasn't as if there was a great deal of choice, there were only 2 seats in the room and the client was sitting in one of them. At least I did not sit on Rover, though I did get the impression that he was not overly keen on my presence in the house. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he was in charge of the remote control. I won't even go into the kind of programmes I expect that they watched together.

I have sat listening to clients talking lovingly about 'Roger', 'Arthur', 'Lily' or 'Little Elsie' being at the hairdressers anticipating at any moment to be introduced to a relative I was unaware of, only to discover them to be an old English sheepdog or something akin.

Whenever a client started a conversation about their beloved animal 'being human and not knowing that they are a dog / cat / rabbit / goldfish or whatever' I knew it was time for me to pack my bag and head for the exit. I knew that my task was doomed to fail and from that point on I might as well have been speaking to a sponge. Clearly they had already taken the bonding process too far. Your pet may display a few simple human traits, you may feel a certain empathy towards them, you may even consider them to be part of the family but there is no reason to go soft in the head about it.

I remember a solicitor friend of mine telling me that in one occasion he had to brief one of his clients at his home and found it incredibly difficult to concentrate because he had converted an elaborately carved 1930's style dining table into a chicken coop and there were a couple of chickens clucking throughout the interview. I don't suppose they threw to many dinner parties.

Scientists would argue that chimpanzees are intelligent. OK, they may be able to learn a few tricks by rote, just like a toddler. You can dress them up in kiddies clothes so that they look cute like a toddler but that is about as far as it goes. So they put a chimp into space - yes, they blasted him into space in a capsule, he was not flying the rocket himself.

If I was to make any acknowledgement of intelligence in animals it would probably have to be cats. Not that I particularly like them but at least I can understand what makes them tick. With the possible exception of killing the occasional rodent and making half-decent draft-excluders what purpose do they fill in life? If they are not sleeping then they are eating. They can normally be found lying in the sun or the warmest place in the house and don't like getting wet. They are natural scavengers and rely on cunning to ensure that they are fed and watered properly. There is a logic to their thinking but is this intelligence?

Friends have told me that horses are intelligent. Jockeys tell TV pundits that their mounts 'know their way around a particular course', 'know when to lengthen their stride', 'are natural jumpers' or 'can sense when it is a big race' – it has nothing to do with them being prodded in their sides by the heel of a boot or slapped with a crop then?

Humans and animals have an inbuilt awareness of fear and pain that are essential tools for self-preservation. Most animals can sense when a person is apprehensive about them, they are also able to sense when their life may be in danger. Some animals are capable of displaying affection which may be perceived in a number of different ways, this is not intelligence, it is nature.

My father's advice was never to trust anything that had more legs than you, or was that his betting advice? 

 

In the unlikely event that I was given the opportunity to return to this planet as an animal which animal would I choose? I don't really know. I'm not sure that I would wish to return as a domestic animal. Wild animals are more appealing though if they don't have a load of predators they are probably on the endangered species list. I guess it would have to be a dolphin but I am in no hurry to exchange places.