Close-up nature: non-human animals that seem to imitate our behavior, attribute human actions and thoughts to them may be imaginative, but we can undo…

Videographer Judy Lehmberg from Sunday Morning.

Ive been thinking and reading a lot about non-human animal intelligence lately. One thought that continues to go through my head is the meaning of the word anthropomorphic. The more I think and read, the more I feel that there is a word that shouldnt exist.

Anthropomorphic, from Anthropos (human) and Morphe (form), means attributing human actions and thoughts to non-human animals. Fine. Except who developed from whom? No other animals have developed from us. We, Homo Sapiens, are just 200,000 years old and one of the new children on earth. We didnt develop directly from wolves, elk or elephants, but they were here first. It is therefore logical that our thoughts and feelings developed later than those of another animal.

And since we share a lot of similar structures and DNA with other organisms that were here first, it is logical to assume that our brain has evolved in a similar way and has some of the same intelligence and emotions. We should be talking about gorillaopomorphic or chimpomorphic or even animalmorphic, not anthropomorphic. They dont imitate us; we emulate them because they did it first.

The more time I spend watching animals, the more people I see in them. We have all heard stories about elephants mourning their dead, including the absence of a family member. Crows and ravens can pull up long cords that are attached to a horizontal bar with a piece of meat at the other end. They pull the line up as far as possible, catch it with one foot and repeat until the bite is within reach. A chimpanzee was discovered in a Swedish zoo, who spent his early morning hours hiding stones behind trunks and haystacks he had created and later using them to attack zoo visitors. I guess he didnt want company! I saw a fox woman bury the remains of one of her babies after a badger killed and ate most of it. Ive seen bisons and moose mourn their babies for hours, sometimes all day, after a wolf or bear has got them. We once saw a bison mother who had given birth to a stillborn calf fending off wolves for hours until she was exhausted. She then suddenly left just to return with some of her friends as reinforcements. There are many, many other examples.

One of the reasons I was thinking about animal intelligence was a story I heard years ago about an orangutan in a zoo that kept coming out of its closed enclosure and letting the rest of the orangutans out with it. I believed this story because I knew that orangutans were smart, but I had no evidence that it was true until the animal keeper in charge told it on NPRs Radiolab.

Jerry Stones was the chief zookeeper at the Omaha Zoo in Nebraska in the 1960s. One day, some of his guards came to him and said all orangutans were loose and up in the trees near the elephants. They all ran to the orangs, lured them back to their enclosure, and then tried to figure out how they got out. Jerry was certain that one of the guards had forgotten to lock the closet door. Over the next few weeks, this happened several times with the same results. The guards swore they would make sure the door was locked carefully. Jerry threatened to fire someone. A few days after the last escape, one of the guards ran to Jerry and said, You have to come to see this. They sneaked over to the orangutan enclosure and watched Fu Manchu, the dominant man, fumble at the door lock. There was something in his hand, but they couldnt find out what it was. When they saw, they found that he had a piece of wire that he pushed into the slot between the door and the door stopper and skillfully guided around the door latch. Then he pulled on both ends of the wire and the latch pulled out of its hole. You were free!

Jerry and the other guards were amazed, but they still had what it takes to stop the orangutans and confiscate the wire. They later noticed that Fu Manchu hid the wire in the area between his lower lip and teeth.

He wasnt just using a tool; He used a tool that he had never been taught before and kept it for later use. I guess his only mistake was that he was too naive to watch out for people spying on him.

We know that an increasing number of animals, from Darwins finches to chimpanzees, are able to use tools. But here an animal hid a tool that he knew would lose if it was discovered, and planned to use it in the future.

Two of the Goodall chimpanzees: On the left, Glitter watches her sister Gaia dig for termites.

Many biologists who study animal behavior reject the idea of a non-human higher intelligence or emotion. I had a very respected college animal behavior professor who was a young, uneducated woman who had the audacity to go to Africa to study chimpanzees, and horror of terror! She also had the nerve to give them human names, like David Greybeard and Frodo, instead of Chimpanzee 1, Chimpanzee 2, Chimpanzee 3 etc. Of course, this young woman was Jane Goodall, who has contributed so much to our knowledge of chimpanzees and is valid today as the worlds leading chimpanzee expert.

I wonder what we would discover if we were smart enough to understand their language. And if we really are the smartest species, why are we destroying the earth through overpopulation, global warming, habitat destruction, etc.? Maybe we should learn from them.

Judy Lehmberg is a former university lecturer in biology who is now shooting nature videos.