It is time that humanity
understand once and for all that we are all creatures of this
Earth and as such are ALL deserving of respect and concern.
The
results of this study are not really news to those of us who
have known all along that Mankind is not superior to other
creatures on this planet. It is however, a wake up call to all
those who have for so long believed and lived their lives
behaving as if they are God's gift to this planet.
With the revelations made here can anyone honestly say that animal testing is humane or even ethical?
To
those who have always based their acquiescence to vivisection and
the like with the off the cuff statement....."They are just dumb
animals".
It
appears that the only dumb animals involved are the two legged
variety that believe themselves above reproach and entitled to
mistreat and torture other creatures under the guise of
superiority........
~Desert Rose~
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An
orangutan at the Leipzig Zoo uses a tool to explore a puzzle. In a
different test, this ape as well as three other orangutans and eight
chimpanzees remembered the details of a similar task for three years. Image: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
A single cue—the taste of a madeleine, a small cake, dipped in lime
tea—was all Marcel Proust needed to be transported down memory lane. He
had what scientists term an autobiographical memory of the events, a
type of memory that many researchers consider unique to humans. Now, a
new study argues that at least two species of great apes — chimpanzees
and orangutans — have a similar ability; in zoo experiments, the animals
drew on 3-year-old memories to solve a problem. Their findings are the
first report of such a long-lasting memory in nonhuman animals. The work
supports the idea that autobiographical memory may have evolved as a
problem-solving aid, but researchers caution that the type of memory
system the apes used remains an open question.
Elephants
can remember, they say, but many scientists think that animals have a
very different kind of memory than our own. Many can recall details
about their environment and routes they’ve traveled. But having explicit
autobiographical memories of things “I” did, or remembering events that
occurred in the past, or imagining those in the future—so-called
mental time travel—are considered by many psychologists to be uniquely human skills.
Until recently, scientists argued that animals are stuck in time,
meaning that they have no sense of the past or future and that they
aren’t able to recall specific events from their lives—that is, they
don’t have episodic memories, the what-where-when of an event that
happened.
Yet, several studies have shown that
even jays have something like episodic memory, remembering when and where they’ve hidden food, and that
rats recall their journeys through mazes,
and use these to imagine future maze-travels. “There is good evidence
challenging the idea that nonhuman animals are stuck in time,” says Gema
Martin-Ordas, a comparative psychologist at Aarhus University in
Denmark and the lead author of the new study. But trying to show that
apes also have a
conscious recollection of autobiographical events is “the tricky part,” Martin-Ordas admits.
To see if chimpanzees and orangutans have autobiographical memories
that can later be triggered with a cue (as were Proust’s by eating the
pastry), Martin-Ordas and two other researchers devised a memorable
event for the apes at the Leipzig Zoo. In 2009, eight chimps and four
orangutans individually watched Martin-Ordas place a piece of a banana
on a platform attached to the outside of a caged testing room. The apes
could get the treat only by reaching through a slot with a long stick.
The researcher then hid two sticks, only one of which was long enough to
reach the banana. The animals watched as she hid each tool in a box in
two different rooms. The chimp or orangutan observing her actions was
then released into the area with the hidden tools. They had to find the
correct tool, return to the room with the tempting banana, and use the
tool to retrieve the treat.
Each ape took the test four times. “We set it up to see if cues—like
Proust’s madeleine—would trigger a memory event for them,” Martin-Ordas
says. But instead of using a single cue like a scent or a taste, the
researchers offered the apes “a constellation of cues: me, the room, and
the specific problem,” Martin-Ordas says. They hoped that this
combination would act as a trigger—that whenever the chimpanzees
encountered this specific task with Martin-Ordas again, they would
remember that they needed to search for the correct tool.
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