Animals' intelligence should be little surprise

Oh, the media were having a great time last week with the latest major findings in a study of animal intelligence. Here's a sampling of the headlines, "Capuchins Don't Settle for Any Monkey Business," "Monkey Business Includes Justice," "Monkey See, Monkey Angry," and "Monkey Business is Fair Play."

As you may know by now, researchers wrote in the journal Nature that when it comes to fair play, monkeys have sensibilities that are as highly developed as those exhibited by humans.

Sarah Brosnan, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta found that when she offered different rewards (one more desirable, one less so) for performing the same task to pairs of capuchin monkeys who know each other well, the monkey offered the smaller reward began refusing to perform the task. This was also the case if one monkey was given smaller quantities of the same reward.

In other words, monkeys are just as cognizant as humans of when they are getting, er, short-changed and monkeys, like humans, have a keen sense of fairness. Brosnan told reporters, "We showed the subjects compared their rewards with those of their partners and refused to accept a lower-value reward if their partners received a high-value reward." She added, "It's the first time a sense of fairness has been found in any nonhuman, at least to our knowledge."

My question is, what took you guys so long? On the one hand, it's a laudable advancement that science is finally beginning to catch up with and chronicle animal intelligence and sensitivity. On the other, given mankind's long history with animals (dating back millennia in the cases of dogs and horses) it is rather pitiful that we are just now documenting primates' senses of fair play.

Are animals human? No, of course not. Does that mean they don't have feelings, they don't feel pain, they do not suffer when we harm, torture and kill them for our own purposes, whether for food or research or display? Just as emphatically, the answer is no.

One of the most touching scenes I ever saw on television was contained in a documentary about a researcher who had raised an orangutan from infancy.

When the primate was full-grown, authorities deemed him to be a "wild animal" and ordered him moved to the Atlanta Zoo. But while he lived with the researcher, she had taught him to sign. He was fluent in sign language.

When she went to visit him, she came upon an obviously despondent creature living in a cage, not the jovial guy she had raised as part of a family.