Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

A nice, passionate screed about humans' ego problems vis-a-vis animal behavior studies. It should really be called “Are We Too Fragile To Understand How Smart Animals Are?” Lots of fun anecdotes and summarized research studies, mostly chimp-centric but some good appearances by other species. I particularly enjoyed:
- Crows can recognize people and hold grudges FOR YEARS.
- Chimps have politics, e.g. no grooming session among males is ever neutral, it is heavily LOADED WITH POLITICAL MACHINATIONS and allegiance forming.
- Octopuses/octopi have brains in their arms wtf.
- Dolphins (or was it orcas? something) have special trills that are used as their own names (think Captain Von Trapp's whistling) - they call each other by their trills/whistles.

Basically, this book is a giant take-down of all our human-centric Medieval hang-ups that have permeated scientific research: all the contortions scientists do to keep redefining “what makes us human”, since apparently concluding that we are JUST ANIMALS is not an acceptable answer. I had a severe eco-conversion experience in the Serengeti a couple years ago, and suddenly the scales fell from my eyes and I looked upon my human siblings as animals, JUST ANIMALS, and it was a freeing/weird Maslowian peak experience. But you soon forget about it, once you're mixing around in urban environments again. This book was a hint of a reminder of that feeling: you stare at these bipedal hairless apes walking around with their fancy tools (i.e. nice headphones) and marveling at the fact that they/we think they're/we're so special. Or, as Frans de Waal would say, evolution didn't stop from the neck up - our cognitive abilities, our SELVES and egos, share many many things with animals. They are our brothers!!!