问答题 Over the years, I have written extensively about animal intelligence experiments and the controversy surrounding them. Do animals really have thoughts, what we call consciousness? Wondering whether there might be better ways to explore animal intelligence than experiments designed to teach human signs, I realized what now seems obvious: if animals can think, they will probably do their best thinking when it serves their own purposes, not when scientists ask them to. So I started talking to vets and zoo keepers. Most do not study animal intelligence, but they encounter it, and the lack of it, every day. The-stories they tell us reveal what I'm convinced is a new window on animal intelligence: the mental feats animals perform when dealing with captivity and the dominant species on the planet—humans. Anyway, it is comforting to realize that other species besides our own can stand back and assess the world around them, even if their horizons are more limited.