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comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  3954 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: TED Talk: On the Intelligence of Crows [~10 minutes]

Must have been kb, I've not seen this till now.

When I was a kid, I really associated with Crows. I always felt a connection to them and (I realize this is nuts) I thought that if I had a "spirit animal" that it would be a crow. I had moments of huge significance to me as a teenager and there was always a flock of crows in our yard when they occurred. -I thought this was unique in some way but now I know that they're EVERYWHERE.... and they're smart. Betty making the hook to grab the meat was really cool. Dropping the nut in traffic to crack a nut?? -That's awesome. Seems really labor intensive for a small payoff, but still it's an incredible behavior that I hadn't heard about. -I really enjoyed watching this and I don't even mind that it does that "TED" thing where it presents some really cool findings and the extrapolates them to a crazy place in the matter of a single sentence at the end: "Crows doing search and rescue." -I'm not sold. Though crows picking up used and discarded cigarette butts and exchanging them for peanuts might be feasible.





user-inactivated  ·  3953 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well said.

Is there a moral issue with conditioning crows to go after cigarette butts? I sat in on a long conversation the other day wherein cows were moral agents and under the purview of virtue ethics it was wrong to take advantage of them.