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posted by martyb on Saturday September 05 2015, @10:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the must-have-watched-'King-Kong' dept.

Cool. Calm. And oh, so calculated. That's how a chimpanzee living in the Royal Burgers' Zoo in the Netherlands set out to swat an aerial drone that was filming her group. In an article in the journal Primates² published by Springer, Jan van Hooff and Bas Lukkenaar explain it as yet another example of chimpanzees' make-do attitude to using whatever is on hand as tools.

The incident happened earlier this year, on 10 April, when a Dutch television crew was filming at the zoo in Arnhem. The idea was to use a drone to film the chimpanzees in their compound from different close-up angles. The drone already caught the chimpanzees' attention during a practice run. Some grabbed willow twigs off the ground, while four animals took these along when they climbed up scaffolding where the drone was hovering. This behavior is not frequently observed among these chimps.

Filming started when the next drone flew over. It zoomed in on two chimpanzees, the females Tushi and Raimee. They were still seated on the scaffolding holding on to twigs that were about 180 cm (ca. six feet) long. Tushi made two long sweeps with hers -- the second was successful in downing the drone and ultimately broke it. Before and during the strike, she grimaced. Although her face was tense and her teeth were bared, she showed no signs of fear. This suggests that she quite deliberately and forcefully struck at the drone, rather than fearfully or reflexively.

Fascinating. Evidence that drones do indeed provoke a response in the monkey ape brain, which could explain the drone antipathy felt by many humans. But what is it, a response to hovering insects or predatory birds?


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  • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Sunday September 06 2015, @06:15AM

    by RedBear (1734) on Sunday September 06 2015, @06:15AM (#232907)

    Cows come to the barn at milking time. All livestock comes to the barn at feeding time. Animals have a sense of time, whether that sense is accurate or not - and those milk cows are often times quite accurate.
    Dogs? Dogs are somewhat more intelligent than some other animals. Maybe the dog was taking a cue from some other occurence that happened on a regular schedule. And, since dogs have better senses of smell and hearing than most people, you may very well be unaware of that regular occurance.
    There are a lot of explanations that don't depend on precognition, or ESP, or whatever.
    If some member of the household, or even a near neighbor, had very regular bowel movements, Rover smells that, and associates the bowel movement with the imminent arrival of the master. Mystery solved.

    As I explained to the AC that keeps posting, the leaving and returning times were about as random as it gets, and involved no communication with me or any near neighbors pooping or any cows or any other possible rational explanation that would explain how the dog would know that someone 5 miles away in town, with sound-absorbing forested hills between him and us, just randomly decided to drive back home through downtown traffic to an isolated home outside of town.

    Yes, there are a lot of very common, overly simplistic explanations that are not backed up by any observed evidence that would explain what was observed. Except they don't apply, and don't explain anything, and it's very easy to control for most of those possible simplistic explanations in an actual controlled experiment. Dogs have good hearing and sense of smell, but they aren't PowerPuff Girls.

    The simplest explanation is usually the best, but I have to agree with Sheldrake's assertion that around this particular subject people have a remarkably strong tendency to believe that their own quickly imagined and often quite unworkable "explanation" (like a dog supposedly hearing a vehicle suddenly turning and approaching from miles away in the middle of traffic) trumps any observed evidence and unequivocally proves the observed evidence cannot possibly be correct. Which is not skepticism, but dogmatic rejection of an idea because it "can't" be true.

    One of the kind of glossed-over assertions of the skeptics is that dogs just randomly get up now and then during the day and sit staring at the front door as if they are waiting for someone to come home, stay there for some unspecified time and then go away from the door, and that the observer just magically forgets every single time the dog did that and nobody ever showed up, while magically remembering every single time the dog did that and someone showed up. None of that is supported by any observed evidence. Dogs don't do that, and human memory isn't that unreliable.

    As I said, "confirmation bias" exists and must be controlled for, but it can't be used as a club to just completely disregard everyone's observations. Especially when the observer was originally not even looking for any sort of pattern to begin with.

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  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday September 07 2015, @12:29PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Monday September 07 2015, @12:29PM (#233254) Homepage

    Yes, there are a lot of very common, overly simplistic explanations that are not backed up by any observed evidence that would explain what was observed.

    The simplest explanation in this case is that none of us know what actually happened, because you didn't keep notes of every instance or non-instance of this activity. All we've got is your recollection, which is as unreliable as any other human's memory (which is a surprising amount).

    None of that is supported by any observed evidence.

    There is no evidence. There's an anecdote.

    Dogs don't do that, and human memory isn't that unreliable.

    Yes, it is. It's crazily unreliable. Given ten minutes and a Photoshopped picture you can have people honestly "remembering" visits to countries they've never been to. What do you think the intervention of 10 or 20 years is going to do?

    That's why scientists like to take notes and run statistical analyses.

    (ironically, I used to have a perfect example of the unreliability of my own otherwise not-too-bad memory - but I can't remember it)

    Finally, there is one other simple explanation. You could be lying (I'm saying this only as devil's advocate). This is - currently - a simpler explanation than any involving hither-to undetected supernatural activity.

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