7. Anyone who has owned a pet dog has witnessed canine behaviour which
at times closely mimics human responses: being hopeful, being excited,
being sad, being afraid and so on. The null hypothesis here, it seems
to me, is that the animal actually has these states of "mind", rather
than that it is going through some completely different, separate,
unrelated process which merely closely resembles human emotional
states. To my surprise, as a fairly recent and reluctant cat owner, I
have seen my cats exhibit what appears to resemble such complex
reactions as a rapid survey of the surroundings to see if anyone
witnessed an awkward fall.

8. Outside of the remit of pet animals in human company, though,
mammals which live in social groups form a complex of often
hierarchical relationships: dominant and submissive members of the
group and so on. They perform patterned behaviours where different
members have different roles; hunting animals such as female lions and
wolves, for instance, cooperate, so that hunting parties contain
scouts, flushers, chasers and so on. Many group predators display
patterns of behaviour such as setting up ambushes. These roles are not
fixed but are interchangeable between members of the pack. This
demonstrates that the animals not only know of each others' existence,
but of their relationships, since for instance in felines often only
relatives cooperate. Elephants, wolf packs and so on may comprise
unrelated individuals, though. Particular members of the group have
expectations of the ways that others will act; cooperation must be
learned, and members that do not cooperate may be "punished" by biting
or by withdrawal of food. They also perform planned activities;
ambushes or driving prey towards a pre-placed fellow pack-member
indicates some form of awareness of the future. One cannot plan if one
does not remember past events and strives to re-create things that
have worked before; this indicates an awareness of time and of
modelling the behaviours of other animals, so that there are expected,
desired behaviours and unexpected, undesired ones, both in fellow pack
members and in the prey animals. This implies a considerable degree of
ability to form and maintain mental models of the behaviours of
unrelated individuals.

9. Many animals have been shown to make and use tools. Not only
chimpanzees in the wild, or finches in Gibraltar which use thorns as
probes and levers to get at otherwise-inaccessible food items. Crows
have been experimentally demonstrated to be able to improvise tools
from available objects to get at food items. In other words, tool use
is not always inherited behaviour or mimicry of others; the invention
of novel tools has been demonstrated, outside of the mammals.

10. Again in the Aves, recently, a well-known experimental African Grey
parrot named Alex died. Alex had been taught human speech; he was able
to identify a wide range of objects and colours by name in English, to
count up to five or more, to understand simple questions in English
and formulate novel answers in the same spoken language. He was able
to spell simple words out phonetically - "nuh, uh, tuh, NUT". He was
able to express desires in spoken words: "wanna nut, now", even when
this did not form part of the experimental dialogue. Many instances
have show that his utterances were not simply mimicry of those of his
trainers; he was able to construct sentences of his own, as well as
parse those of his trainers. This shows considerable proficiency in
manipulating an alien to him form of symbolic communication, very
considerably exceeding the abilities of chimps and gorillas in the use
of sign language. Video clips are available of conversations with
Alex; they compel most observers to complete re-assess the presumed
levels of intelligence of a bird with a brain the size of a walnut,
orders of magnitude smaller than a human's brain.