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Originally Posted by herbi7
That's interesting Drago. I heard about the horse that can count. Similar to dogs trained to do tasks. Those kind of animals are acutely aware of our body language and tone of voice aren't they. I think hamsters are quite sophisticated as they retain a huge map of food sources and things in the wild but as to simple one two three I dunno! I think mine go very much by tone of voice a d pattern, cause and effect etc. Willow my first Syrian would wait when she'd got somewhere precarious going by my tone of voice as I warned her and she had to wait tfor me to get her down instead of leaping. She learnt it the hard way ��
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It’s funny really! On your point of complex food maps- yes, it does make total sense why hamsters may have those, but be unable to count. It all comes down to what an animal really needs to make of a situation, and how every organism views a situation through a different lens; focusing on different aspects for each one. The term was coined as “Umwelt”, or how each organism views the world in accordance to his/her biological needs. Another such example, would be the analogy of the tick and the human at the carnival. The human walking through the field, smells all the food, hears the sounds making them aware there is fun ahead, and watches all the other humans interact. The tick on the other hand, ignores, and completely misses the carnival- as it is largely unimportant to him. The tick notices the scent of large mammals, feels the intensity of the wind, and the length of the grass he is in. Both organisms are in the same situation, but view things entirely differently.
This ties in to a hamster’s ability to count as they likely never have to count, at least in the way we do. A complex food map would indeed serve them well, but doing math? Unlikely. Humans on the other hand, would be opposite. The way the hamster views the world, makes it unnecessary to perform mathematical analysis the way we do. One could argue that a hamster’s brain is plenty complex enough to perform such math, but if it doesn’t serve the hamster in some way, they’re highly unlikely to do so. Thus, even if they could, it’s unlikely they ever would. Just the same as the tick was capable of smelling the carnival food, but didn’t, simply because it served no purpose in his life.
Animals do respond to intonation quite well. It’s sad that we don’t really know of any animals that can solidly grasp human language. Shockingly, chinchillas appear to have the best skills in identifying human language. Due to this, they are often studied in auditory experiments done between different species of animal, to see how they comprehend... well... us! All in all, a very interesting subject, and one I’d like to see more studies on. Sadly, we can’t get a whole lot of studies as the abilities of hamsters are largely unimportant, outside of testing for things like mental disorders. A lovely topic nonetheless
