Amplified Animal Aptitude: Difference between revisions
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** Squirrels are the chief rivals of rats for the title of "smartest rodent", as demonstrated by their phenomenal ability to outsmart the protections people use for their birdfeeders.
* Crows in Japan and California have been seen using passing cars to crack walnuts. They even go to traffic crossings and only deposit and retrieve the nuts when it's safe.
* Orangutans are notorious [https://web.archive.org/web/20110629165236/http://www.counterpunch.org/hribal12162008.html escape artists.] They've discovered how to scale electric fences, how to pick locks, and (possibly most importantly) how to hide efforts at the previous two things from zookeepers. Give an orangutan a screwdriver, and it will hide it, then dismantle its cage with it once you're gone.
* Reptiles. They may have smaller brains than mammals, but they're ''much'' more intelligent than we give them credit for. In the past, many attempts to gauge reptile intelligence came to the conclusion that they were [[The Ditz|incredibly stupid]], but it turned out that this was only because reptiles see and evaluate the world differently from the way we mammals do. You can't train a snake to do something in the same way you can train a cat, because you need to understand how a snake's brain and senses make it perceive the world. More recent studies, reflecting on this idea, have shown that, among other things, corn snakes are able to navigate mazes, monitor lizards engage in play behavior and can distinguish numbers up to six, crocodiles learn faster than lab rats with little conditioning, and leopard geckos have distinct personalities. Smart, indeed.
** In fact, many neurologists have begun to abandon the idea that brain size determines how intelligent an animal is. This should be obvious, because certain species of rodents have brain-to-body size ratios larger than that of humans.
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