I can understand why cats and dogs are smart since they don’t have to be on survival mode every day.
What I don’t understand is why are pigs smart? And why are sheep dumb if pigs are smart? They are in the same height in the hierarchy of needs.
In: Biology
The more skill required to survive, the more intelligence you need.
A hunter has to be able to outsmart its pray. Social animals need to be able to communicate. Foragers need to be able to solve problems of how to get their food.
Herd animals on the other hand, like sheep, need to be able to find grass. That’s about it. They don’t need to be smart to survive, they just need to find grass and run faster than the slowest member of their herd.
On the reverse, look at rats. Small animal that eats basically anything it can. Yet, incredibly intelligent because before humans started leaving trash everywhere, they needed to be able solve problems to find food. They needed to avoid predators, while navigating terrain and also being fairly social animals that communicate.
Basically, animals are as clever as evolutionary pressure has required them to be.
A perfect example of this is Koala’s. They’re one of the dumbest animals on the planet. They quite literally have smooth brains. If you take the leaves they eat off the tree and put them on the floor, they don’t understand it’s food and will ignore it, even when hungry.
But that’s because they don’t need to be clever. They’ve evolved where practically nothing hunts them and nothing eats their food supply (because it’s poisonous as fuck and they’ve specifically evolved to eat it, despite how little nutrients it actually provies) so there’s no competition. There’s no evolutionary pressure that allows the smarter ones to thrive and the dumb ones to die. They just stay dumb and keep surviving.
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