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Stone-Throwing Chimp Back In the News With Better Plan
sciencehabit writes "Three years ago, a stone-throwing chimpanzee named Santino jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that non-humans could plan ahead. Santino, a resident of the Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, calmly gathered stones in the mornings and put them into neat piles, apparently saving them to hurl at visitors when the zoo opened as part of angry and aggressive 'dominance displays.' But some researchers were skeptical that Santino really was planning for a future emotional outburst. Now Santino is back in the scientific literature, the subject of new claims that he has begun to conceal the stones so he can get a closer aim at his targets—further evidence that he is thinking ahead like humans do."
And yet we still keep him, and his relatives, in a cage.
He isn't just planning ahead, and then coming up with a new plan. He's being deceptive.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
How wonderful that our imprisonment of these creatures is causing them mental and emotional problems resulting in behavior that is so useful for scientific study!
Instinctual behaviors are not considered planned behaviors. This is a unique display from the chimp in question that other chimps don't do, so it is not instinctual. Previous questions were if it was perhaps a learned behavior or that the initial gathering and stockpiling was unrelated to the use of the rocks to throw at zoo visitors. The fact that he seems to have recognized that he has a better chance of successfully attacking the visitors by portraying peaceful action and concealing his weapons gives much more evidence that this chimp is capable of advanced thought and planning.
Well yeah, if humans threw stones at people we'd put them in a cage too called "jail"
Usually the way that works is you throw the stones first and then get put in a cage. Not the other way around.
Your honor, I'm a chimpanzee. Your scientists saw me stacking stones and then hiding them and so they sent me to law school. Your world frightens and confuses me! When someone sends me a text message on my iPhone I wonder, "are there tiny people inside typing it?" I don't know. But I do know this: when someone like my client slips and falls on the sidewalk in front of a public library, he is entitled to two million dollars in compensatory damages and two million in punitive damages. Thank you.