Talking Dogs Were Goal of Nazi Research

Nazi scientists attempted to breed an army of educated dogs that could read, write and talk. "In the 1920s, Germany had numerous ‘new animal psychologists’ who believed dogs were nearly as intelligent as humans, and capable of abstract thinking and communication," writes Cardiff University historian Jan Bondeson in his new book Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities. 

Scientists envisioned a day when dogs would serve alongside German troops and perhaps free up SS officers by guarding concentration camps. Hitler set up a Tier-Sprechschule (Animal Talking School) near Hanover and recruited “educated dogs” from throughout the country.

Teachers claimed a number of incredible findings. An Airedale terrier named Rolf became a mythic figure of the project after teachers said he could spell by tapping his paw on a board (the number of taps represented the various letters of the alphabet). With that skill in hand, he mused on religion, learned foreign languages and even asked a noblewoman, "Can you wag your tail?" Perhaps most outlandish is the claim by his German masters that he asked to serve in the German army because he disliked the French. Another mutt barked "Mein Fuhrer" when asked to describe Hitler.

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Don't Scoff at Animal Intelligence

Last night I read a spiritual writer discussing why animals don’t believe in God. My immediate thought was, How do you know what animals believe or don't believe?

Then this morning I found an article much closer to my own suspicions, dealing with a recent symposium entitled “Animal Smarts,” where attendees learned:

• Monkeys can perform mental math.
• Pigeons can select the picture that doesn’t belong.
• Some animals plan for the future.

"I suggest we humans should keep our egos in check," Edward A. Wasserman of the University of Iowa said last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He said that, like people, pigeons and baboons were able to tell which pictures showed similar items, like triangles or dots, and which showed different items. This is the definition of a concept, he said, "and the animals passed it with flying colors."

In the last 20 years there has been a major revolution in the understanding of animals, added Nicola S. Clayton, a professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge in England. Animals not only use tools, there is evidence that some of them save tools for future use, she said.

"Planning ahead was once thought to be unique to humans," Clayton said. "We now know that's not true."

Click here for the complete Associated Press article.

Scientists Prove Honeybees Can Count . . .

I was a hobbyist beekeeper for several years in Vermont and Oregon ~ managing at the most about a dozen hives ~ so very little I hear about the intelligence of bees amazes me. One of the reasons I kept them was to study their astounding little brains, about the size of a grain of sand.

Now scientists in China and Australia have proved conclusively something any bee watcher already surmised:

Bees can count.

Scientists from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, and the Australian National University in Canberra launched the recent study by first integrating two species of bees ~ the European Apis mellifera, and Asiatic honeybees, A. cerana ~ into interracial colonies. 

In case you’re unaware, bees normally kill bees from other species, so this in itself is significant.

They then determined that the different bees have dialects specific to their own species. Their familiar “dances” to communicate information had different wiggles and durations. Eventually, the Asian honeybees were able to decode the dance of their European sisters.

Scientists then trained the European honeybees to find food by flying down a tunnel marked with colored stripes. They placed the food by the fourth stripe and the bees regularly returned to that stripe to get their reward. 

When the food was removed, the bees still stopped at the fourth stripe.

Then the scientists varied the spacing of the stripes and even replaced some with unfamiliar markers. Still, the bees consistently passed the same number of markers to approach the former site, demonstrating they could count up to four, regardless of spacing or color of the markers. To the bees, it was the numeric identity that mattered.

So once again we find that the creatures with whom we share Earth aren't so stupid after all. The big lesson here needs to be learned by you-know-who.

The honeybee studies were detailed in the journals PLoS One and Animal Cognition and written up on LiveScience.com. 

. . . And Cattle Have An Internal Magnetic Compass

Herds of cattle tend to align themselves along the earth’s north-south magnetic lines, as do deer, according to researchers who used Google Earth to study about 8,500 cows in 308 locations around the world.

“Google Earth is perfect for this kind of research, because the animals are undisturbed by the observer," Sabine Begall, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and coauthor of the study detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, told Live Science.

Rearchers pointed out that learning the importance of magnetic direction could help us better understand, for example, the effect of having cattle barns facing one direction or the other, especially in milk production. Perhaps east-west facing barns could have negative effects on the milk cows.

The data on about 3,000 deer came from direct ground observations and photos in the Czech Republic. Researchers also examined fresh beds left by resting deer in the snow, where the animals had sought shelter deep in the forest away from the wind.

Both cattle and deer faced a more magnetic north-south direction rather than geographic north-south, the researchers said. Birds, turtles and some fish migrate along magnetic directions, and some other creatures such as rodents and bats have internal magnetic compasses.

"Our first idea was to study sleeping directions of humans,but there are too many constraints," Begall told LiveScience. "So, the idea arose to look for other large mammals like cattle.”

Click here for the Live Science article.