Hi Everyone,

There was an article in the paper this morning about pigeons being able to recognize themselves in a mirror and suggesting that they have the cognitive abilities of a 3 year old child. I searched the internet for the story and here's what I found:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080613145535.htm

There is also some other pigeon related news that some of you might find interesting on this same website under "Related Stories".

Nice article Brad , and a good read . We could have told them that , and saved the University some money doing all that research


Thats a cute picture of the pigeon watching what looks like cartoon or something on the monitor screen .

Thanks for putting it up

hambone

Hi Hambone,

You're welcome...glad you enjoyed the article. I'm dubious though if it's true because whenever I've placed a mirror in front of my birds and specifically my male pigeon, he goes at it like it's another male pigeon and doesn't seem to realize it's himself in the reflection. I'm not saying that pigeons are stupid, but I do question if they are capable of self awareness and if the study was flawed. Perhaps they see themselves differently in a mirror as apposed to on video, I don't know.

I agree with you Brad......in fact I "started" to post about the same thing, but didn't want to make anyone mad. We tell people all the time to put a mirror in front of a single pigeon to see how it reacts so they can try to figure out if it's male or female. If it knew it was seeing it's own reflection, why would it react at all? Pigeons are not stupid, that's for sure, but I don't know about this little project. Lots of animals can be "programmed" if you will, to respond certain ways to certain stimulus.

Someone had posted a link which listed many surprising facts about pigeons and the self recognition was one of them. This placed the pigeon very high in the rankings of intelligence among animals. They do seem to be smarter than many birds and I'm never too surprised when I read this stuff. Just how intelligent they are, I don't know but I tend to give many animals more credit than most would consider normal.

Bill