Animals Using Tools

Looking for a site that hosts videos of animals using tools? Well, you came to the right place! Looking for something else? Then this site is probably not for you.

I’ve always been fascinated by animals. I love spotting foxes and owls in the wild, taking care of cats, dogs, and axolotls as pets, reading about birds solving puzzles, and listening to David Attenborough tell me about exotic animals in faraway places. But most of all, I loved observing animals. I watch them and wonder, “What’s going on inside their brain? What are they thinking? Are they thinking?”

Out of all the ways of exploring animal brains, I find watching them using tools to be the most elucidating. What can we say about an animal that can manipulate its environment to achieve a goal versus one that can’t? What can we say about intelligence from watching birds pick up sticks to scratch their backs?

Tool usage isn’t the only way to measure animal intelligence. It’s probably not even the best way. I’m not even sure what kind of a tool would be useful to a fruit fly (tiny spears to fend away other males when courting a female?). It’s easy to tell that a chimpanzee recognizes himself in a mirror, but would we be able to tell if a turtle did? Would it start checking out how its shell looks from the side? What does it say that a chimpanzee recognizes itself in a mirror but a mountain lion does not? Do you have to have a theory of mind to manipulate other animals? What can we learn from watching animals learn to manipulate human tools? Why does the gorilla react aggressively to the mirror while the chimp sees himself? Why do some cats ignore it while others try to fight or play with it?

However, it would be foolish and closed-minded to suggest that we can’t learn anything. We need to accept the value of these observations while being aware of their limitations. We know that magpies will drop rocks in water bottles to increase the level of water so they can drink it but many other birds do not. It’s reasonable to assume they have the same goals - magpies aren’t known for being exceptionally more thirsty than other birds - so we are seeing a cognitive ability in one species that is lacking in another.

As I was pondering these questions, I started saving clips I’d found on the Internet and making notes on them. I would see something interesting on Reddit or Youtube and bookmark it. I found my collection growing and growing until, eventually, I thought I should do something with it all. Thus, animalsusingtools.com was born.

We are in an era where we have new things. If a researcher spends 8 hours a day for a decade living with a group of ten chimps, that’s 292,000 animal-observation-hours. With about a billion pets in the world, there are about as many animal-observation-hours every single second (278,000). To be clear, the researcher will learn things about animals that would never be learned in a dispersed fashion.

We would never know about the intricacies of chimpanzee social life without the tireless efforts of Jane Goodall. There are countless examples of such things. However, isn’t it also true that the dispersed fashion could learn things that would otherwise never be detected by the researchers? What if 1 in a million cats could pass the mirror test? Researchers would never be able to capture this. There are hundreds of millions of pet cats in the world, certainly, which raises the chance of finding the needle in the haystack. What if 10 different videos from 10 different people all showed their cats doing something that looks exactly like recognizing themselves in the mirror. That would be very interesting indeed.

Sure, it would be nice to have these in a scientific environment with double-binds and other fancy stuff like that, but we’re not going to do that with a million different cats. And, in some ways, we don’t need to. All we need is one clear (and not fake) example of a cat passing a mirror test to demonstrate that at least one cat can pass the mirror test. That fact alone would be significant.

When we say “animal X can pass the mirror test”, that means at least one member of that species can verifiably do it. It’s never the case that all members of a species can (including humans - severely autistic people do not show signs of self-recognition, for example).

Some research has shown that 75 percent of young adult chimps (ages 8-15, which was the highest of any age range) and only 1 out of 3 Asiatic elephants tested passed. I don’t see any reason to think that passing the mirror test couldn’t be rarer in some species, even much rarer. Maybe one in a million cats can pass? How would we ever find that within the confines of carefully controlled experiments? I don’t think we can.

There are other reasons to be cautious about the crowd-sourced approach. Sometimes it’s easier to convince yourself that something is working. For example, the soundboard videos, in my opinion, are not conclusive. I find in these videos that the humans often respond to everything that dog says as if it’s intentional, but it’s not at all clear to me that it is. The question of whether dogs can understand soundboards would benefit from a rigorously controlled experiment. This is the kind of thing that would benefit from a controlled experiment. But that’s not true in all cases. You don’t need to be an expert to conclude, after watching chimpanzees look in the mirror, that they are definitely aware that they are seeing a reflection.

I’m not pretending these are a “random sample”. This isn’t a randomized control trial. In particular, because it’s not random, not controlled, and not a trial. So it fails on all three!

This is a collection of videos (and some pictures) of animals using tools (and other related topics I found interesting) that I’ve collected from the Internet. These are not my videos - I’m simply curating them. As these are videos from the Internet, they must come with a note of caution. First, I do not research whether these are real or fake. I don’t try to contact the originator, investigate for signs of digital manipulation, etc. If I see something that leads me to believe a video is fake I won’t include it or will at least mention that. But I’m no expert at detecting fake videos so be aware. I don’t do anything to determine their authenticity; I just grab them from wherever I see them online Possibly, some of these clips are fake. In general, I think the vast majority are real, but others could disagree. I’m also going off of lots of videos, not just one.

Enjoy!

We need to be careful not to conclude too much (especially in the negative) or fail to learn as much as we can.

It’s easy to make a straw man out of these tests. “Well, some moles are blind so I guess they can never be self-aware.” No, that’s not what anyone is saying. This test can work in some cases and will not in others. We just have to accept that and continue to think of other ways to probe the question of self-awareness.

But I think there is a lot we can learn from these videos. And while some are funny, or cute, or warm your heart, they are also interesting. And as much time as I -or anyone - can spend with animals, there’s still a plethora of clips online that people have recorded of animals using tools. Someone finds their cat reacting to its reflection in the mirror and makes a funny video. I think we can learn a lot from this world. All of a sudden, we are in a world where everyone has a camera at the ready and there are billions of interactions. There are billions of people in the world, having billions of interactions with billions of animals, capturable on billions of cameras and smartphones. Let’s learn something from all of this.

Yes, I am learning things about animal cognition from high schoolers’ TikTok videos that I didn’t from reading scientific papers. The preponderance of the evidence is significant. If everyone filmed their cat walking in front of the mirror and the most interesting or funny were posted, that’s an incredible dataset. The funny ones are usually the most enlightening. I think the chance of a grand conspiracy of people making animals appear to be using tools seems far-fetched to me. Ranging from a grand conspiracy of teenagers (I’m nominating “grand conspiracy” to refer to a group of teenagers) who kick their kicks from fooling nerds who collect videos of animals to people manipulating photos to get more likes.

We don’t have to pretend the question of do animals dream is any harder than it is. We know that. We’ve seen dogs run in their sleep. Doesn’t mean all animals and…