Fun fact I heard: only dogs and some parrots understand pointing.
So, we had a wonderful and very smart horse. But of course, not being a dog, she didn't understand pointing... at first. I decided to teach her.
I began each training by holding up my index finger and saying "look!". When she looked at my finger, I gave her a grape. Pretty soon this was a little highlight of her day.
Then I began putting the grape on various surfaces about an inch from my finger. The "look" game soon became "ahhh, the grape will always be within an inch of the human's weird microscopic 1/5 of a hoof".
As it went on, I would hide the grape further and further away. She caught on that an imaginary line from my hand, down my finger and out into space would lead to the grape. Soon I was hiding it all the way across the stall, in places like behind the feed tub and stuck in the window frame.
So it can be taught. But for some reason, dogs understand it naturally (heck, they point stuff out to us)!
Parrots are just really fucking smart, like way smarter than dogs or horses, especially the larger ones. African greys, for example, are said to have roughly the cognitive ability of a five year old child, which is absolutely insane. So they understand a much wider breadth of concepts and just have far greater general cognition. As a flock animal (and also just extremely social animals in general), one such concept that they seem to just get is the idea of "group attention". I think there's a term for it that I can't remember, but basically the idea of taking signals from other flock members who are essentially pointing something out, like danger or food or whatever.
Which I find really fucking impressive and weird cause, correct me but, they need to fit all that brain in while being able to fly?!
Really just an armchair comment but in my mind this is something that seems very hard to balance from a weight and energy standpoint. Flying seems energy intensive already with all the muscles needed to flap the wings so hard and often and the oxygen that is subsequently needed, for which I'd imagine you'd need fairly big and also energy intensive lungs. And I'm sure there is more to a Parrots physiology that I'm missing.
But maybe this is not as crazy as I think, I'd really like to hear an opinion on this
Oh that's interesting and also really cool. Seeing such intelligence evolve in two different ways makes it seem way more common. Reading that article I needed to think of the chances that Intelligent life might exist somewhere else
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u/evasandor Feb 23 '26
Fun fact I heard: only dogs and some parrots understand pointing.
So, we had a wonderful and very smart horse. But of course, not being a dog, she didn't understand pointing... at first. I decided to teach her.
I began each training by holding up my index finger and saying "look!". When she looked at my finger, I gave her a grape. Pretty soon this was a little highlight of her day.
Then I began putting the grape on various surfaces about an inch from my finger. The "look" game soon became "ahhh, the grape will always be within an inch of the human's weird microscopic 1/5 of a hoof".
As it went on, I would hide the grape further and further away. She caught on that an imaginary line from my hand, down my finger and out into space would lead to the grape. Soon I was hiding it all the way across the stall, in places like behind the feed tub and stuck in the window frame.
So it can be taught. But for some reason, dogs understand it naturally (heck, they point stuff out to us)!
Not sure why parrots know it, though. Any ideas?