Chimp Shows Planning Abilities

STORY:

Santino has lived at a Swedish animal park for 25 years.

But the 30-year-old chimpanzee isn't always a model resident.

He's recently been bombarding visitors with stones and other missiles — and preparing his attacks in advance.

It's apparently evidence of intelligence never seen before in an animal.

The staff started to see small stone piles on the ape island — he had built small piles here and there.  That's how we discovered it. And he had been throwing stones on some occasions. He doesn't do it every day only when he's in a particular mood, when he wants to flex his muscles in front of the audience.

The head of the animal department at Furuvik Park contacted a local university.

Cognitive scientist, Mathias Osvath has just published his subsequent study.

The behavior shows that an animal, in this case a chimpanzee, can plan for a future psychological condition, a condition that doesn't exist at that moment. The ape doesn't have the feeling when he collects the items and there are no visitors but he assumes that he will feel indignant and want to do it. So he can plan for a future psychological condition, which has been seen as a uniquely human trait.

Santino collected his ammunition from the moat around his enclosure.

He also knocked chunks off the concrete floor - storing them in piles ready for when the park opened.

It implies a special awareness that had been seen as human. It was Aristotle who came up with the idea that closing our eyes and still seeing a world around us is a typical human trait. This challenges the idea that the human beings are the only creatures that have this kind of disengaged consciousness.

Santino has now been dubbed 'The Thinker' by his keepers.

But while his behavior shows intelligence it's not condoned.

If he continues his anti-social ways he'll have to stay indoors even when it's no longer snowing.