Oddworld Forums - the totally sentient thread!

Oddworld Forums (http://www.oddworldforums.net/index.php)

- Off-Topic Discussion (http://www.oddworldforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=9)

- - the totally sentient thread! (http://www.oddworldforums.net/showthread.php?t=19976)

()

F'rexample?

Deciding that stealing food from humans was no longer a challenge, the crows began helping themselves to stretches of fiber optic cables, bulking up their nest building material with pieces of wire and building their nests snuggled tightly amongst the cables supplying electricity to the city.

As you can probably imagine, this wreaks absolute havoc with the city's power grid. The crows have caused a spate of blackouts around Japan. On one occasion in 2007, a crow-manufactured blackout led to the high speed bullet train being shut down.

Something needed to be done, and the Kyushu Electric Power company decided to form an organization dedicated to outsmarting the pesky birds. Thus, the Crow Patrol was born. Its mission: to seek and destroy any crows' nests built in an electricity-laden location.

In the first three years of its existence, the Crow Patrol undertook twice-weekly rounds in an attempt to rid Kagoshima of its bird plague. They removed some 600 crow homes from the cables.

But the crows had wised up to the Patrol's mission, and deciding the territory was well worth defending, formed their own cunning plan. Operating on the "needle in a haystack" premise, the crows started spamming the area with dummy nests, to the point that the fake nests outnumbered the real ones.

It was an ingenious plan. First, it meant that while the Patrol went about their work of clearing the city, there was only a small chance that the nest they removed was going to have been lived in by a crow family. Second, if the Crow Busters did strike it lucky and destroy an actual home, there were a multitude of empty nests ready and available to move into. And finally, more nests meant more blackouts, leaving the crows added time to build new homes while the humans scrambled to get power back up.

So with it looking like the crows are there to stay, at least we can look on the positive side and say that Japanese crows are much smaller and less aggressive than the American cro... oh, no that's not right. They have a wing span of up to a meter, scary fucking beaks and sharp claws, and there have been a number of occasions where children have been attacked by Japanese crows for the candy held in their innocent little hands.

Holy shit. It might be time to just move out of the city and let them fucking have it.

In ancient Rome crows were a sign of greatness.

()

Crows lie. They deliberately deceive other crows, and sometimes human researchers. They also craft tools for multiple purposes, and use multiple tools in sequence for a single task.

But the thing is... They don't have opposable thumbs.;)

They have beaks. You can do a lot with a beak.

()

They have beaks. You can do a lot with a beak.

I know you're a fan of chickens but arms, legs and hands can do a lot more. Sure, the brain power can be roughly the same but it's about lifestyles. A chimp is better adapted to do certain things.

()

I know you're a fan of chickens but arms, legs and hands can do a lot more. Sure, the brain power can be roughly the same but it's about lifestyles. A chimp is better adapted to do certain things.

It's actually representative. I wouldn't call myself a fan of chickens. And the combination of beak and feet is a surprisingly good tool creation combo.

I would say it's even more impressive that crows can use tools without opposable thumbs.

There are a lot more videos on Youtube, but how can you go past David Attenborough?

Also, I once saw a falconry display that showed off how the bird used a stone to crack open an egg that had particularly thick shell. That was cool too.

It's actually representative. I wouldn't call myself a fan of chickens. And the combination of beak and feet is a surprisingly good tool creation combo.

I was just kidding because of your avatar xD. And a crow would never be able to create tools the way a humanoid ever could.

()

Also, I once saw a falconry display that showed off how the bird used a stone to crack open an egg that had particularly thick shell. That was cool too.

I once saw a falconry display that included a crow that did not belong to the falconer. It was a wild crow that simply turns up for each show, does a bit, then goes home after payment. The show stops for the winter, but the first day it is shown again next summer, he's back. If he's ever not there, the falconer just calls "Mr Crow!" across the fields and he comes back before the show has finished. All organisms must work for their food, and this one has independently invented performance as one of its means.

I remember when everyone was congregating around the show area for one of that day's showings, I was watching that crow just sitting there, hanging around with intent. I was already sure it would be involved, but it had no leg ring or leather coil. Is it wild? Is it tame? I couldn't work it out, but the falconer explained.

Brilliant. So crows have employment, and performance arts? They're my favourite 'intellegent' species (quotation marks simply to avoid argument over the definition) by far, but I'd never heard that. And unlike lots of animals that can use tools, the ability to create them too shows something must be going on inside that feathery noggin. One experiment featured a piece of food in a long tube, a piece of straight wire and a crow. The crow bent the end of the wire into a hook (as was said, beak & claws is a pretty good combo), and proceeded to fish the food out of the end of the tube. Nate's video probably showed an equivalent natural situation, but I couldn't be arsed to watch it.

Sure, they had to show the crow a piece of curved wire first, but it's still impressive.

Also octopuses. Pull switches, open jars, squirt handlers, predict football results... They can do it all.

()

I was just kidding because of your avatar XD.

I know. Like I said, it's representative.
Wasn't there that story a little while ago about those crows in (I think) Japan who would get walnuts or another similarly hard nut and drop it on the road at traffic lights and waited for a car to crack the nut? Then they would press the button and wait for the lights to go red, collect their food and fly off into the sunset. Or something like that.

i heard about that, but i don't think they actually pressed the button to change the lights. they just waited for them to change when someone pressed it.

It wouldn't surprise me if they were. They do this, after all.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8631486.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth...00/9353588.stm

The emotional center of the brain functions as the root of thought; the motivations spawned there get analyzed by the rational (thinking) frontal and pre-frontal, which make sense of the situation and determines course of action. Our wicked developed frontal region is what gives us humans our capacity for intellectual endeavors. Chimps are second to our brains, with about 25% of our processing power (dogs = 11%, cats = 3%), so they're some pretty smart little fuckers. But, this is all secondary to the awesomeness of baboons getting drunk on naturally fermenting fruit.

So? Wasps do that. I once saw two drunk wasps fly headlong into each other at top speed.

I get angry when my bees are drunk because there not making me enough fucking honey.

Seriously, you'd be surprised, every spring the first time they leave the hive they got the left over windfall apples from the little orchard and get absolutely pissed. So much so in fact that sometimes they die or pass out. Sugars just not good enough.