Animal Intelligence

Today while scrolling through tumblr, I found a blog post that really made me think about this class. The post stated "It bothers me that the intelligence of animals is measured by how willing they are to obey the commands of a human." Though this is only an opinion, I thought it really highlighted the way humans determine if an animal is intelligent. For example, animals such Koko the gorilla are highly intelligent and are able to communicate using human language and symbols. However, researchers looked poorly on her intelligence because she was not able to hold a conversation that made sense. Here, the researchers are basing Koko's intelligence on her ability to communicate with humans and respond the way they want her to. However, no matter her ability to communicate with us, Koko is still highly intelligent compared to other gorillas. I believe that when we measure an animal's intelligence, we should base it on how smart they are compared to their own species instead of comparing them to humans. Humans believe they have a superiority over animals, so when we measure their intelligence compared to us we are always going to believe that we are the smartest.