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Crows Are Self-Aware Just Like Humans, And They May Be as Smart as Gorillas
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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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experiment proposal:
a population of crows in a shared space.
one crow is selected and brought to another area where the rest cannot see or hear what happens.
In the other area, the crow is placed into a box where a distinctive sound plays, and then a spurt of cold water sprays. Alternatively, something that is not injurious, but annoying and unpleasant.
The crow is then removed from the box and marked non-invasively somehow, such as with nontoxic washable dye.
The crow is finally put back into the same space with the other crows.
Another crow is then selected from the population, ensuring that it is not one that has been marked, and the process is repeated.
IS THERE a point at which the crows begin to respond pre-emptively to the distinctive sound that foreshadows the unpleasant stimulus?
If so, how long does this change of behavior take to manifest in individuals who did not directly experience the unpleasant stimulus?
The goal is to see if a crow will TELL the others about its experiences and what to expect, which requires the ability to communicate abstract and hypothetical information.
i would expect that if we performed this experiment on cats and dogs, etc, we would never actually see individuals from the general population learning to anticipate what's coming via abstract communication from their peers... but I do expect that such information WOULD eventually be taught to the entire community.
has such an experiment already been performed?
That’s a reasonable design. The result would be interesting and may raise more questions than it answers. That is a good thing.
I don’t think this design would conclusively prove they were engaging in abstract communication, but that would take many experiments of similar scope.
A sceptic could say the unconditioned group reaction was a result of social awareness of the reaction of the conditioned crows. Sort of a collective freak out based on the immediate reaction of the marked individuals.
Regardless, I hereby tender my application to be colony manager of the research group. Murder Manager is the title I would choose.
Maybe you could instead make it a puzzle type of thing, like "you have a set of 4 buttons, only 1 gives you a treat, and the crow can only choose 1 button". Then see what happens