A couple of years back, I threw in the towel and started feeding the local raccoons dry dog food to cut down on their large-scale digging projects in the bird-feeding area, along with their periodic attempts to take the bird feeders down before I had a chance to. One of the positive effects of this (beyond saving the lawn) is the entertainment value of having raccoons around, including an albino one born this year who looks a lot like a possum but is indeed a raccoon.

The bolder ones know to walk up to me when I'm outside having a cigarette if there's no food on the ground and some of them have figured out what it means when I point and say 'Food!' if they've neglected to check a portion of the lawn.

I feel bad when I see one hit on the road as well, though around here they don't really have any natural predators other than the occasional large dog, so their population is pretty big -- leaving cars as about the only population control they have.

Cheers, Jon

Tracie, our long-departed pet dog, manifested a lot of traits that spoke of intelligence. She seemed to have an understanding of human vocabulary being able to fetch things asked of her: splippers, socks, ball without assiatnce from us.

She would also undestand things like "wanna go out?", "wanna play?", "wanna eat?", etc, etc, etc. We tested her several times by delivering these queries to her point-blank with, level voices, and no hand gestures.

While I was always impressed with how well she understood us (she would often detect when my Dad would come home tired from work and lick the back of his hands or sit her head on his lap) the thing that floored me is when I realized she had dreams.

I don't know why I would have thought otherwise but I noted a few times how she got animated in her sleep: beating her tail, baring her teeth, whining. She even had rapid-eye movement. I had to wake her a couple of times because her dreams seemed to be very unpleasant. She woke with the same kind of disorientation that I noted in people.

I've heard it said that many scientists consider these manifestations antropomorphic projections on the part of dog owners. Phooey on that!

Years ago my college biology teacher told the class that scientists (not sure which ones) had declared that the thing that marked human intelligence higher than animals was that we use "tools": we take something other than what it was intended and use it for something else.

But then, he said, it was pointed out that chimps take sticks, rip off the leaves, and use them to get termites out of mounds. And ants use leaves as bridges. And so on.

So then the definition of tool was changed: two or more major modifications are made to an object, to then be used in a different way. So the chimps would have to not only take off all of the leaves but also radically bend or alter the stick for it to count as a tool.

"So" I said "whenever we find an animal that meets our definition of tool-making, we change the rules so that they don't qualify?"

"That's right," he said.

Sure is nice being at the top of the pile.

Not too long ago a friend sent me a video of a crow that was put in a room with some food at the bottom of a bottle. The crow took a wire and very deliberately bent it so that it could hook the food and drag it out of the bottle.

Crows also do the "car as nutcracker" trick.

I recommend a story by Chad Oliver entitled King Of The Hill. It appeared in an sf anthology edited by Harlan Ellison called Again, Dangerous Visions, and no doubt elsewhere by now.

I consider myself an animal lover...but man, racoons give me the heebie jeebies. Maybe it's the hands.

No doubt, animals in general are smarter than we give them credit for. Except maybe for my cat...but even she has her moments.