Chimps are vicious bastards—but smart

[haggholm]

A chimp in a Swedish zoo has been observed not only to use rocks as weapons by flinging them at zoo visitors that annoy him, but also stockpiling stones and using rocks to break off bits of concrete to use as projectiles. The real significance is that

while many apes have been observed collecting stones for nut cracking or other planning behaviour, it has been unclear whether the ape was doing the work to meet a current or future need: that is, is the ape looking to crack nuts because he is hungry now, or because he expects to be hungry?

Santino's stone-gathering however, is a clear case of planning for the future, [a researcher] said, since the calm manner in which the chimpanzee collected the stones differed from the agitated state in which he later hurled them.

Given all of the above, I also think that Santino is a very appropriate name…

Seriously, though, I find this rather fascinating, and it serves to strengthen my conviction that the difference between human and non-human animals, in intellectual terms, is quantitative, not strictly qualitative. It may be a very great quantitative difference, mind—I’m under no delusion that they’re just like us; but notions that the intelligence of animals has some strict limit where we set up a qualitative criterion to differentiate ourselves from them—such notions have a consistent tendency to fall apart.