I understand you posters who feel some threads are too "mushy", and too far-fetched in terms of relating human feelings & capabilities to animals.



Understood - all the way. I was on the same side of the argument a few years ago.



Then I learned about an astonishing dog that had a working vocabulary of over 260 words. A gorilla has a working vocabulary of almost that much; so does a gray parrot that was studied for entirely different reasons.



Not simple understandings of words, but the ability to structure complete sentences, and to understand them. The parrot could tell her trainer what differed between colors, shapes or patterns, and understood at least 2 dimensions.



I kept two garters one summer of different species and food preferences. Housed in the same woody biome, they quickly became friends. I often found them snuggling together at various times.



When I cleaned their biome and put them, with branches, on my coffee table, I jokingly told them to stay there. They stayed on it and rarely dropped down. If they did, they stayed near the edge and allowed me to pick them back up. This occurred several times across many weeks. (They were released back into the wild later.)



I was astonished at how they related to me once fear & defensiveness was replaced with understanding & trust.



The more I hear of unique animal stories, even involving "lower" animals like snakes, the more I realize that humans don't understand the range of animal emotions nor intelligence. We are only beginning to understand those frontiers.

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