Post by Princess Ember Mononoke on Jan 3, 2003 19:15:38 GMT -5
*cough cough cough* I missed out on this, so I want to say one more things, reguarding what Mushroom said about parrots.
In a university near where I live, there is a parrot named Alex who has been to taught to communicate. You give him an object and he can tell you its color, shape, and relative size to another given object. He can distinguish between "same and different", count, play the "what doesn't belong" game, and many other things. And he thinks beyond the range of what humans have taught him. Once, he was offered two balls of identical size and asked to say which was bigger. To this he responded "What, same!" and then, when asked again, "None." And he also doesn't take being told what to do lightly, and if he gets bored he will stop. Once, after a long day of showing off, he was asked which object ona tray was green. He proceded to name all of the objects on the tray EXCEPT for the green object, turned the tray over, and then turned his back on the astonished watchers.
And speaking of the whole "talking" thing: who says that animals DON't "talk" with or without vocal cords? No animals speak English, but it has been proven that wolves have a language of their own comprised of a combination of signs and sounds and dolphins have a language that could be even more complex than English, and THAT is saying something. Different species of birds and monkeys have languages that from what we know about them seem simple, but could in reality be just as complex as the more primative of human languages. One species of chimpunk even has thre different types of warning calls: air attack, big animal, and snake. One type of monkey has calls like those but also calls that distinguish between a threatening creature, a potentially threaening creature, and a non threatening creature. In areas where they have been exposed to humans, in the short time they have known about them they have developed two new calls "Friendly Human" and "Stranger Human".
In a university near where I live, there is a parrot named Alex who has been to taught to communicate. You give him an object and he can tell you its color, shape, and relative size to another given object. He can distinguish between "same and different", count, play the "what doesn't belong" game, and many other things. And he thinks beyond the range of what humans have taught him. Once, he was offered two balls of identical size and asked to say which was bigger. To this he responded "What, same!" and then, when asked again, "None." And he also doesn't take being told what to do lightly, and if he gets bored he will stop. Once, after a long day of showing off, he was asked which object ona tray was green. He proceded to name all of the objects on the tray EXCEPT for the green object, turned the tray over, and then turned his back on the astonished watchers.
And speaking of the whole "talking" thing: who says that animals DON't "talk" with or without vocal cords? No animals speak English, but it has been proven that wolves have a language of their own comprised of a combination of signs and sounds and dolphins have a language that could be even more complex than English, and THAT is saying something. Different species of birds and monkeys have languages that from what we know about them seem simple, but could in reality be just as complex as the more primative of human languages. One species of chimpunk even has thre different types of warning calls: air attack, big animal, and snake. One type of monkey has calls like those but also calls that distinguish between a threatening creature, a potentially threaening creature, and a non threatening creature. In areas where they have been exposed to humans, in the short time they have known about them they have developed two new calls "Friendly Human" and "Stranger Human".
