What exactly does smart mean? I found a definition for “smart” on google that defined it as”:
“showing mental alertness and calculation and resourcefulness.”
A characteristic that humans attribute to animals across the board is instinct. Now, instinct is defined as:
“an inborn pattern of behavior often responsive to specific stimuli”
So, let’s compare these definitions and bounce them off of observations we may have made of both humans and animals.
Do animals display mental alertness? Anyone who has tried to sneak up on an animal for the first time has discovered that this is a difficult thing to do. Because of the lifestyle of non-domestic animals, it is imperative that they remain alert and ready to respond to attacks from other animals, opportunities to obtain food, and inclement weather (domestic animals may not have the same lifestyle, but many retain the alert-and-ready trait in the forms of playfulness and skittishness). It could be argued that this state of being on alert is not the same as “mental alertness”, but comes from instinct and is automatic, whereas being mentally alert requires a higher state of mind. However, as humans, our minds usually get in the way of being mentally alert with all of the over-thinking we do and the need to constantly entertain ourselves. Many who are mentally alert spend a lot of time emptying their mind through meditation. I think it is safe to say that mental alertness begets good instinct, and that it is hard to have instinct without mental alertness. How will you be able to “behave in response to specific stimuli” if you are not alert enough to notice it?
So, next let’s discuss resourcefulness. Do animals display this trait? Pondering their survival in the small areas of Earth that they have left to inhabit and the fact that they have survived on the Earth far longer than we have, I would say that they are more resourceful as a whole than humans are. Many animals have even adapted to the environments that we have created for ourselves (raccoons, squirrels, mice, and seagulls, for example), whereas we cannot even adapt fast enough to our own technologies and social structures to continue supporting them. We are having energy, water, and food crises in multiple areas of the world, while many animals live off of our trash.
The only trait that is questionable is calculation. But, I think that it is a trait that is present in some animals at specific times. Perhaps they don’t display it in the same avenues that we do, but, for example, how does a bird fly for the first time? One might say that they watch their parents, or go through trial and error, but what is that but a process of calculating their mistakes and making corrections for them? This may be more instinctual than the well thought out process that we humans think of as “calculation”, but as we grow and learn, we make mistakes and and correct them until certain processes become instinctual as well. And we have no real proof of how that learning process plays out in the mind of an animal, either; it’s not as if they can speak to us about it, which is not a question of their smarts but the way their throat, lungs, and mouth are anatomically distributed.
This has been a fun little demonstration, but to go back to the original question, are animals smarter than we think? Well, how smart do we think they are? Now that we’ve defined smart, I think that they deserve a lot more respect than we give them. As much as many people love them, respect is a much different thing.
And for that matter, how smart are humans? Many of us have lost our mental alertness, resourcefulness, and ability to calculate by focusing on over-thinking and trying too hard to be what we think is smart. In many cases, I think animals are not only smarter than we think but smarter and more practical than we are. Don’t get me wrong; there are both very smart humans and animals, and not very smart humans and animals. And all humans and animals have the potential to advance or decline to the other end of the spectrum.
But, generally speaking, my answer to this question is yes–animals are smarter than we think, because we do not grasp the definition of smart and we do not have an adequate perspective on what it’s like to be in their shoes.
