How Smart Is This Bird? Let It Count the Ways
William van der Vliet
A pigeon performing a math test. When the bird pecks a shape, a box appears around it.
By JAMES GORMAN
By now, the intelligence of birds is well known. Alex the African gray parrot had great verbal skills. Scrub jays, which hide caches of seeds and other food, have remarkable memories. And New Caledonian crows make and use tools in ways that would put the average home plumber to shame.
Pigeons, it turns out, are no slouches either. It was known that they could count. But all sorts of animals, including bees, can count. Pigeons have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. In the 1990s scientists trained rhesus monkeys to look at groups of items on a screen and to rank them from the lowest number of items to the highest.
Read more at the The New York Times
Four-year-old stray becomes world’s richest feline after death of 94-year-old mistress
by John Hooper in Rome
guardian.co.uk
A black cat. Tommaso, a four-year-old stray, has become the world’s richest cat. Photograph: Alamy
Since the death of his 94-year-old mistress last month, he has become a property magnate — or perhaps mognate — with flats and houses worth an estimated €10m scattered from Milan in the north to Calabria in the south.
In a handwritten will, signed on 26 November, 2009, Tommaso’s mistress — the childless widow of a successful builder — gave her lawyers the task of identifying “the animal welfare body or association to which to leave the inheritance and the task of looking after the cat Tommaso”.
One of the lawyers, Anna Orecchioni, told the Rome daily Il Messaggero they considered several organisations without getting adequate guarantees of the cat’s future comfort and welfare. In the meantime, the old lady met a fellow cat-lover – named only as Stefania – in a park. “Sometimes I’d go to her house so my cat could play with Tommaso,” Stefania said.
As the old lady became increasingly frail, Stefania, a nurse, began to take care of her.
“She needed someone to help her move around, shower and eat. I looked after until the end,” she said.
Under Italian law, animals cannot inherit directly. But they can be beneficiaries if a suitable trustee is found. The elderly widow decided to entrust the cat – and his fortune – to Stefania.
Read more at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/09/italian-cat-inherits-fortune