I've thought about getting a pet turtle or tortoise [1] because they are my favorite animal, but I found out that in order for them to be happy and healthy they need a lot more room than I could easily fit in my house. Either a very large aquarium or a very large area for them to walk around depending on the species, neither of which I can easily have in my house.
And I think a lot of animals are like that. Ultimately a lot of these animals evolved in areas that really aren't that "confined" in any meaningful sense, and forcing confines seems kind of cruel.
[1] To be clear, ethically, not one of those shady endangered black market things that you can find.
Totally agree on more rare/exotic animals though - they shouldn't be subject to unnatural conditions like this.
Now, even if we leave our doors open he prefers to stay inside the house with his little brother Vicente, another cat we adopted. We regularly make new toys and play with them.
Vicente has been with us since he was around 1 month old (now 6 months old) so he's way more curious about the outside. We are preparing to start walking them out though I have a feeling we will have to drag Ramón out of the house.
I wouldn't feel bad for confining your cats to your house! They are probably very happy :)
Not saying there isn't and somewhat offtopic, but if you apply this to LLMs those are much, much 'smarter' than all the animals people like to call intelligent (or something similar). If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of an LLM.
I really do feel we should be taking the current state of affairs as a starting point to recalibrate what counts as smart or worth 'protecting', whether it's our beloved animal friends or something inorganic. Simultaneously believing "birds are super smart" and "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" seems absurd.
Navigating your way to a location without colliding with anything. Finding food in the woods. Stuff that animals can do that we yet have AI be able to do.
This just seems obvious to me, but I've been around animals my entire life.
Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. That's bordering on cruel.
That all being said, every animal has it's own personality. So it's best to match them with an environment that fits their personal needs.
And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
One day Seven of Nine might be eaten by a raccoon but I’ve seen the GoPro footage, she has a blast every day of her life. As a side-effect benefit, she doesn’t play games with me because her entire world is filled with games she can play herself. We still sleep curled up together though :)
One of our cats has arthritis and before we got her treatment she didn’t like them, but she’s perfectly happy now.
Pretty sure cats love climbing things, and stairs are no different.
https://petapixel.com/2026/03/24/wildlife-photographer-of-th...
Then further down the page, "A sika deer carries the interlocked severed head of a rival male that had died after their battle". Nature, eh.
I’ll throw it back at you, maybe if you left that meeting you would find that it had less consequences than you are imagining.
We have some feral colonies set up in places like Miami and San Francisco, but not all species thrive in warm locations.
That said, my palm sized green cheek conure is rarely in his extremely large cage (it's 4 by 4 feet). Door is always open unless he's sleeping or we're out of the house. Usually he's with me on my shoulder when I'm working during the day and gives his "2 cents" when I'm in meetings.
Most parrots kept as pets prefer it locked for security reasons. He'll get anxious if it's not when he's trying to sleep.
I've seen a lot of terrible bird owners, but I also know plenty that enrich their bird's lives. My little conure has a surprisingly extensive vocabulary for a species not known for speaking.
He says "poo" when when he has to poop, "what's up?" when he greets anyone, "whatcha doing", "<his name>", "yeah!" (mimicking Little Jon), "stop" (when he doesn't like what we're doing), "good boy", "Love you" and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head.
He knows when we are leaving him when we say goodbye - the garage door opening - the car - the gate opening and closing.
During the day he sits in the home office with me and my office days he is around my daughter.
Most of the time he sits on the top or the side of the cage perching on wooden sticks.
Occasionally he will dismount if the gardening services are busy making a racket with the weed whacker and will walk to the bathroom and climb to the top of the shower.
The one cage is close to an outside gate so he will climb on the window or the gate itself during summer.
We also have 3 cats, but he just walks past them, and he talks and even scolds them in my voice.
I'm convinced that people that keep (uninjured) birds in cages are narcissistic sociopaths. This is based on the conversations that I've had with them about it. Life's too short to deal with people like that. I'm thankful for the indicator to avoid them, but I'm sad that it's at the expense of a bird.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Now I wonder if the decentralized organization / hub and spoke model octopi alone exhibit offers some advantage when it comes to problem-solving
It's no worse than inserting greek words (octopodes) into English language.
And are Octopi really better at problem-solving than a dog in general?
It may be due to myelin[1], or rather lack of it. Neurons pass signals along axons as a wave of an action potential[2]. It is a process involving moving ions through the cell membrane to change local deviations of electrical charge and it goes like a wave. The wave is pretty slow. It can be sped up by making axons thicker, and IIRC octopuses has some wildly thick axons you can see without a microscope.
Vertebrates learned how to create an myelin isolation on axons with small gaps, so ion exchanges happen only at these gaps, and between them there is other mechanism to transfer charges, I think it is just "normal" electric current in electrolyte. It is much faster. I'd bet that the slowness of octopuses is not due to neuron count, but due to outmoded axons.
It continually learns from the real world, as more and more neurons accumulate.
This layered learning may be an advantage in terms of compact representations.
No doubt, the human fetus brain learns much earlier than birth, or even from emergence of first neurons. But it isn't learning from the environment directly, or making survival critical choices, from first neural emergence.
--
Another octopus advantage maybe that it has relatively independent "brains" behind each eye, and along each leg. The distribution of brain in a way that reflects its physical distribution, might offer optimizations too.
We know humans benefit from partially independent spinal cord activity. This is suggestive evidence that the distributed intelligence of an octopus may be an advantage.
--
For exhibited intelligence per time, no other creature including humans comes anywhere close. They even learn "theory of mind", i.e. the ability to model other creatures situational awareness, ability to perceive, and likely responses to different situations.
To learn all that, without any mentoring or social examples, in the order of a year, along with their exotic body plan and amazing sensory configurations, would make the octopus a wildly implausible science fiction invention, if we didn't actually happen to have them living successfully in astonishing numbers, and pervasively in essentially all ocean environments.
It may have been enormous luck for us, that they live in an environment where technological progression would be very challenging.
The octopus is a very strong candidate for "smarter than humans", as an individual. If we equalize age, it isn't even a contest. If we normalize for lifespan, but equalize for lack of social mentorship, I expect they win decisively again.
(We often forget how much of our survival and progress is predicated on not being individuals. We have a species intelligence that is much higher than our individual intelligence. Since we as individuals gain so much from what is passed to us, we imagine that we would naturally know countless basic things, that if we actually grew up with people who did not know those things, would be far out of reach. Having people around to teach us things, allowed us evolve to be mentally lazy! Shades of current tool/dependency issues. The octopus has never had a crutch.)
--
There is no credible estimate of how many octopus individuals inhabit our oceans. But the number is in the billions at a minimum. Including young, it may be tens of billions or more.
Unfortunately they can't parent, as both parents die directly after reproduction. But octopus can learn from observing, so some kind of mentoring or modeling between individuals could be encouraged or arranged.
And perhaps animatronic or video animations could contribute? If it turned out octopus could learn from video, the potential experiments would be unlimited. Most of an octopus eye's field of vision, maybe all, is monocular.
One of my dreams is to have an octopus reserve and a parrot reserve. And breed and create situational and living contexts for both species, where both individual and social intelligences are brought to the surface and encouraged to flourish.
I view those two animals as the most and 2nd-most (peak, for their separating phylums/classes) alien intelligences on Earth. The octopus intelligence is a true alien from a functional perspective, in that our common ancestor only had a rudimentary nervous system. A bilateral marine worm, 600 mya.
Our common ancestor with parrots would be something like the Hylonomus, 320 mya. something like a primitive gecko.
The differences in managing the two species would be extreme. Water, air. Hermit vs. tight knit social bents. Extremely short generations vs. very long ones.
But both are highly curious and actively engage and bond with people, other creatures and artifacts they find interesting.
Short octopus lives would ironically, be an exceptional boon for breeding longevity. Not only would changes be very apparent quickly, but the short lifecycle makes breeding vast numbers, to implement a broad gene/morph search, relatively inexpensive.
We have 94 parrot genomes [0], and at least one octopus genome. [1] Octopus genes are as trippy as everything else about them.
My guess is with both creatures, a significant intelligence uptick could happen very quickly simply by mining their current very high diversity of genes, across large populations and numbers of sub-species. They are both ideal creatures in that respect.
The west side of Hawaii's Big Island had both an octopus lab and a parrot reserve. The reserve is still there. I was able to visit the lab twice before it was shut down.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36405343/
[1] https://scienceandculture.com/2023/02/geneticists-puzzled-by...
"Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication" was likely not uttered by Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s still a pretty cool expression. Anyway, architecture matters.
[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/07/19/fact-check-leonardo-da-...
And that doesn’t make any sense, unless there really is no configuration necessary
octopi bucking that trend is an example we need
This fits right into the ABC model of parrot psychology:
https://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_about_parrots/reference_lib...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Insects
When it first came out I don't think anyone quite knew what to make of that, and I'm not sure anything's changed since.
Research has shown brain size matters but not that much, we should look at relative brain size.
What do you mean by this? Surely this applies to humans too, we are animals after all. So what distinction did you intend to make?
With humans, performance in one cognitive test correlates with another and so on, generally. So, intelligence across domains.
Researchers test the same with animals. The issue being animals' intelligence being tied to their ecology. The dilemma being what is it worth for an animal solving a task that has no significance in its life. The other argument being if the animals' intelligence is closer/similar to human intelligence, we will find similar results in both.
They have interesting interactions with the hooded crows, tolerant of each other but still competitive over food. If a white tailed eagle enters they area they will together team up and attempt to chase it away.
They have complex social interactions with each. I've seen a younger magpie in a group get pinned down by a dominant one while several in the group pecked at its belly, because it ate out of order. They acknowledge even me, their neighbor, who occasionally leaves some winter food out for them.
Anyone who is fortunate to spend real time in or at the edge of nature, and takes the time to observe, should be humbled by the complexity and intelligence of the world around us. Some species stand out, of course, like the magpies.
Most of what we have created as the human race is best characterized as complication rather than complexity, when compared to the utter complexity of the natural world. In the era of AI I find it amusing that we believe we're approaching being able to construct a kind of real intelligence when so many can barely recognize, let alone understand, the "lesser" forms of intelligence around us.
Otherwise they would barely be able to eat or drink; their stomachs are far larger and can be far heavier than their brains.
Why would inertia need to be optimized? Think a little bit.
One of my all time favourite short stories, with or without intelligent parrots.
Time for me to read it again. This is the Arecibo story, don't miss if you haven't read it before.
"You be good".
Strangely enough, was having a lot of difficulty coaxing google to fetch this link.
I recalled (once I was reminded of the author) that I read this originally in one of his Anthologies. I strongly recommend to everyone who likes reading and thinking to buy both of his books!
But I did not want a summary (why massacre such a beautiful story *), and neither the later links (pretty bad visual presentation of the story), but the Nautilus link in particular.
I think that's where I had read it first on the web, by far the best layout compared to the other links.
Even a few years ago the Nautilus link used to be the canonical (first) result.
* If I want Michelangelo's David summarised, I think I would mention 'summary' explicitly.
I imagine an alternate world filled only with intelligent robots that are trying to create "biological-agi" from scratch and are supremely frustrated at the results, throwing neuron count and density at the problem without understanding the fundamental properties that actually create intelligence.
There’s something intrinsic to the structure of brains that seems to pre-encode a lot of evolutionarily useful content without a training phase.
I’d love to take a course on just this topic and what do we know about it.
They’ll have heard noises, experienced gyroscopic forces and gravity. But a calf being born and standing up within minutes to an hour is pretty neat. Same with vision, going from no sensory input to seeing.
Apparently piglets have full motor control in 8 hours after birth.
As I said, I would love to have the time and go back to school to learn way more about all of this. Nature and evolution are pretty amazing.