[elliotwagner]

I wonder whether they feel some kind of enjoyment from these kinds of actions

[autoexec]

Animals have to get their enjoyment where they can. It's always fun to watch them play. You can start to think that animals are always optimizing the time they spend being active and are carefully preserving their energy in order to survive, but then you see some birds going sledding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0OjCneVUg) and it's clear that they're just in it for the fun.

[Jarmsy]

This summer I spent an hour watching a pair of magpies harass a fox. The fox was trying to sunbathe, but the magpies kept dive-bombing it, pecking its tail, and landing in front of it then flying away just as the fox went for them, all while making a chattering sound that seemed a lot like laughter. I've heard theories that they do this as revenge for stolen eggs, or to chase foxes away from their nests, but this was in an open patch of ground far from where they nest and it really looked to me that they were just teasing it for fun.

[jl6]

That's a cool video but I'm not 100% convinced that crow is "having fun". It looks equally plausible that the crow is trying to break open the object, possibly in search of food.

[HPsquared]

Of course, animals are conscious and enjoy things and feel pain too. Just less intelligent and with less language ability than humans. Chimps and dogs certainly understand humour. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants do too, being social creatures.

[thanksgiving]

I think it is also important to note here that apparently not all humans understand humor either or understand it differently or something.

[leftbit]

It's difficult to reason about intelligence in this context.

Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.

Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.

Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.

[frostburg]

Anectodally elephants do things like hiding and revaling objects for no apparent reason other than comical effect. One could build elaborate evolutionary fitness reasons for this, but I mean...

[deadbabe]

Elephants that make other elephants laugh get laid more often.

[puzzledobserver]

There's an interesting article by David Graeber on how we characterize play and fun among animals: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/whats-the-point-if-we-cant....

I can't say that I've understood it all, but he appears to criticize scientists for not thinking about play seriously, and instead reducing most aspects of animal behavior to things like survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.

[gpderetta]

> fun [...] survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.

This has to be both right? Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits, but the immediate reward for play must be fun.

[polytely]

there is this study that shows bumblebees exhibit behaviour that looks a lot like what we would call playing, seems to serve no purpose except being enjoyable.

My sorta crank belief is that we are massively underestimating the intelligence and consciousness of animals (and possibly even plants?)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...

[FeepingCreature]

Plants do not have consciousness. Reacting to stimuli does not require conscious processing.

Like, I'm all for "we're underestimating animal brains" but they do have to have brains.

[forinti]

So my brother was in a zoo somewhere in Europe (I forget which one) and he was watching the penguins. The enclosure had various levels and one penquin was throwing stones at a fellow penguin down below. It would throw a stone and then hide behind the ledge and the penguin it was taunting would look up to try to find out what was going on.

[mmooss]

How do penguins throw?

[diegolas]

i can guarantee you horses can and do annoy people for fun

[Etheryte]

Humans are fundamentally not that different from other animals really. Any emotion you have, they have. It's a Victorian era misconception that humans are somehow a unique species with all these wonderful properties and animals are dumb.

[gwd]

> Victorian era misnomer

Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.

[card_zero]

Jeremy Bentham popularized animal rights before the Victorian era. His well-known line was "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?".

This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."

Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.

[randomcarbloke]

a misnomer is a failure in naming ie peanuts, koala bear, etc. I think you mean misconception.