A review by darkenergy
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

4.0

This book comes alive in examples and experimental or field studies of animal cognition, most of which come from the author's first or second hand experience with a smorgasbord of species. The problem is that a lot of it also addresses the remaining skeptics of animal cognition - and given that he acknowledges those holdouts are more in the humanities or historical practitioners (behavorists in particular), it would've been nice to cut that back somewhat because it made for dry interludes between these interesting, ingenious setups that test animal cognition in relevant settings. Just as we wouldn't call someone stupid for their inability to name 1,000 species, we have to test other species in the context of knowledge they'd actually use.