David Stephens and Dack Anderson discussed the theory of short-term benefits as guide to animal feeding decisions. In a series of experiments conducted in an operant laboratory, blue jay birds were the subjects of the study. The foraging animals were tested in two situations namely the self control paradigm and the patch-use problems. The article details how natural selection among the foraging blue jays favour short term rules which result to long term consequences. The paper discusses how to combine time and amount in a suitable currency that mirrors the fitness consequences of different time/ amount sequences and determines the decision rules foragers apply to select the currency maximizing time/ amount sequence from a determined set of possibilities and investigating the relationship between decision rules and currencies. Foragers’ farsighted way in choosing is contradicted by laboratory experiments where the blue jays made short sighted decisions. The logic of farsightedness is best illustrated in the traditional studies of Stephens and Krebs (1986) where long term rate maximizing currency is infinite gain/ infinite time however this logic cannot be generally valid because food gained after starvation is not of any use thus the expression is too farsighted. Two groups of scholars presented an alternative to this proposal where the best rate is attained one at a time thus being short sighted (Bateson and Kacelnik, 1996; Baum and Rachlin, 1969) but Stephens and Krebs (1986) argued that when the maximum rate is taken from each chance, time may be exhausted on a mediocre alternative. The authors concluded that both long term and short term models presented are of extremes thus introducing a discount rate which measures the comparative loss of value in order to create intermediate term models. In this notion the long term model is determined when the discount rate is zero since the value of the gain is the same even if it was obtained early or late in a sequence but as the discount rate becomes larger the approach becomes that of the short term model. The discount rates are expected to be non-zero. According to the authors, the long term model is the most sensible because it provides a rational estimate of rate even in a restricted time horizon. It is farsighted enough to pass over bad options and rational discount rates are small. Short sightedness is evident in the notion that animals often make prejudiced decisions which was concluded in the self control experiment. In a self control situation long term rate model predicts that animals will choose Gain1 over inter-trial interval plus delay before the small amount plus post feeding delay over the second alternative which is post feeding delay over inter-trial interval plus delay before the large amount as long as the former is greater than the later with consideration to temporal rates such as delay to food, post feeding delay and inter-trial delay. However these temporal rates are not treated equally by animals according to experiments. Evolutionary models can accommodate small discounting outcomes but they challenge the predictions of self control experiments. The latter show that short term hindrances have large effects. Scholars interpret such d