In one of Aesop’s fables, a thirsty crow is unable to reach the water in a jug. He tries to push the jug over, but fails. So he drops stones into the jug until the water level rises high enough for him to take his drink. Thus we are shown that thoughtfulness is superior to brute strength. It is not, then, a story about crows. It is a story about humans. You wouldn’t get a real crow behaving like that, now would you?

So I went to Madingley in Cambridgeshire to meet a lot of crows and a professor. The professor danced as she walked and wore heels like pencils. The crows were still more unexpected. Float a mealworm on the water — the crows in question are mad for them — but make sure the container is too deep for the worm to be beaked and gobbled. Guess what the crows do.

They don’t only perform Aesop’s trick with the stones. They have moved beyond it. If you offer them a choice between a bright yellow stone and an identical bright yellow bit of foam, they unhesitatingly choose the stone every time, knowing that the foam will float, and will impede rather than aid any attempt to get the worm.

In every test they have faced, these crows have shown themselves to be as cool, as logical and as intelligent as chimpanzees. And there to show me all this was Nicky Clayton, tango dancer, scientific adviser to the Rambert Dance Company and professor of comparative cognition at Cambridge University.

She works with jays, scrub-jays (you find them in California) and rooks, and has discovered intelligence of a kind and a depth that everybody thought was restricted to humans and their nearest relations. These crows have shown intelligence that can be compared to that of a four-year-old child.

It has been assumed that only humans are capable of planning for the future and reminiscing about the past. It has been assumed that only humans are capable of understanding minds other than their own. It has been assumed that only humans can learn through memory. These assumptions have been meticulously dismantled at Madingley in a series of elegant and effective demonstrations, elegance and effectiveness being the most obvious things about Professor Clayton.

Jays love to hide stuff, acorns in particular. They don’t do this at random. They remember; they carry maps in their heads. And when they have something to cache and they know they are being watched by another jay, they will fake it: they will pretend to cache, then hide the acorn elsewhere. Jays, like humans, deceive.

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Closer than you think

We humans have spent most of our history putting as much distance as possible between ourselves and our fellow animals. Descartes said that all non-human animals were incapable of thought, and were therefore mere automata. Since then, we have grudgingly allowed apes to have some kind of consciousness, but well — they are pretty close to being humans, aren’t they? So our species pride is just about intact.

But now we find birds, creatures remote from humankind — not apes, not monkeys, not even mammals — acting with intelligence and thought. They will, for example, use a tool to get a tool to get food with. These birds are coolly and logically planning ahead. They are thinkers all right. Even Descartes, being a logical being himself, would have to admit that they are.

All this asks great and searching questions about the nature of intelligence. It also asks more basic ones — like, for example, who the hell do we think we are? Humans have always operated on the principle that we can do whatever we like with our fellow animals. After all, they can’t feel, they don’t have real emotions, and they are incapable of thought.

Jeremy Bentham asked a more basic question: not can they think, but can they suffer? But this obvious ethical question is mostly ignored. We can do what we like with our fellow creatures because they can’t do the things that humans do, things like feeling and thinking.

But they can. We don’t know much about animal thinking and animal feeling because, over the centuries, we haven’t tried very hard to look for them. To change our views of non-human animals would mean that we would have to change the way we treat them, and to change the way we view ourselves. It would challenge the species chauvinism that is the bedrock of our thinking.

But we’re not alone. And we never have been.

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Rhino charge

I have expressed concern in this space about rhino poaching in Zimbabwe, and the political will — or lack of it — that lies behind any attempt to enforce the laws that are supposed to prevent this poaching. Because of this, then, it is important to point out that in a recent case, the Zimbabwe justice system has acted forcefully against three poachers in Masvingo who were caught before they had managed to kill a rhino. They each got five years. I don’t wish to gloat, but I am impressed at the powerful message these sentences send out.

Watch Nicky Clayton's bird dance