7. Anyone who has owned a pet dog has witnessed canine behaviour which at times closely mimics human responses: being hopeful, being excited, being sad, being afraid and so on. The null hypothesis here, it seems to me, is that the animal actually has these states of "mind", rather than that it is going through some completely different, separate, unrelated process which merely closely resembles human emotional states. To my surprise, as a fairly recent and reluctant cat owner, I have seen my cats exhibit what appears to resemble such complex reactions as a rapid survey of the surroundings to see if anyone witnessed an awkward fall.

8. Outside of the remit of pet animals in human company, though, mammals which live in social groups form a complex of often hierarchical relationships: dominant and submissive members of the group and so on. They perform patterned behaviours where different members have different roles; hunting animals such as female lions and wolves, for instance, cooperate, so that hunting parties contain scouts, flushers, chasers and so on. Many group predators display patterns of behaviour such as setting up ambushes. These roles are not fixed but are interchangeable between members of the pack. This demonstrates that the animals not only know of each others' existence, but of their relationships, since for instance in felines often only relatives cooperate. Elephants, wolf packs and so on may comprise unrelated individuals, though. Particular members of the group have expectations of the ways that others will act; cooperation must be learned, and members that do not cooperate may be "punished" by biting or by withdrawal of food. They also perform planned activities; ambushes or driving prey towards a pre-placed fellow pack-member indicates some form of awareness of the future. One cannot plan if one does not remember past events and strives to re-create things that have worked before; this indicates an awareness of time and of modelling the behaviours of other animals, so that there are expected, desired behaviours and unexpected, undesired ones, both in fellow pack members and in the prey animals. This implies a considerable degree of ability to form and maintain mental models of the behaviours of unrelated individuals.

9. Many animals have been shown to make and use tools. Not only chimpanzees in the wild, or finches in Gibraltar which use thorns as probes and levers to get at otherwise-inaccessible food items. Crows have been experimentally demonstrated to be able to improvise tools from available objects to get at food items. In other words, tool use is not always inherited behaviour or mimicry of others; the invention of novel tools has been demonstrated, outside of the mammals.

10. Again in the Aves, recently, a well-known experimental African Grey parrot named Alex died. Alex had been taught human speech; he was able to identify a wide range of objects and colours by name in English, to count up to five or more, to understand simple questions in English and formulate novel answers in the same spoken language. He was able to spell simple words out phonetically - "nuh, uh, tuh, NUT". He was able to express desires in spoken words: "wanna nut, now", even when this did not form part of the experimental dialogue. Many instances have show that his utterances were not simply mimicry of those of his trainers; he was able to construct sentences of his own, as well as parse those of his trainers. This shows considerable proficiency in manipulating an alien to him form of symbolic communication, very considerably exceeding the abilities of chimps and gorillas in the use of sign language. Video clips are available of conversations with Alex; they compel most observers to complete re-assess the presumed levels of intelligence of a bird with a brain the size of a walnut, orders of magnitude smaller than a human's brain.