From the Daily Mail:
When scientists found out that chimps had better memories than students, there were unkind comments about the calibre of the human competition they faced.
But now an ape has gone one better, trouncing British memory champion Ben Pridmore.
Ayumu, a seven-year-old male brought up in captivity in Japan, did three times as well as Mr Pridmore at a computer game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen.
And that’s no mean feat – the 30-year-old accountant from Derby is capable of memorising the order of a shuffled pack of cards in under 30 seconds.
Both chimp and man watched a computer screen on which five numbers flashed up at various positions before being obscured by white squares.
They then had to touch the squares in order of the numbers they concealed, from lowest to highest. When the numbers were shown for just a fifth of a second – the blink of an eye – Ayumu got it right almost 90 per cent of the time.
His human opponent scored a rather less impressive 33 per cent, Channel Five programme Extraordinary Animals will reveal.
I think this further calls into question how we (humans) treat these animals. Almost every year we discover they’re even smarter than we imagined the previous year.
It’s important to consider what all this means. When we lock up a animal like this in a cage for its entire life, isn’t that very much like imprisoning a fellow human being?
If this animal can think and imagine as we do, then why would it not have the same feelings about being locked up as we would?
Also, the way Chimps are used for cruel testing and then discarded like a piece of trash is something we as a human beings must take a hard look at.
I fully understand the importance of being able to test medicines, vaccines, etc. on these animals because they so closely resemble the genetic make-up of humans.
However, the more we study them the more we begin to understand that they share a great deal more with us than just genetics.
-Chris Jones
