Can we agree that in general, animals are pretty dumb, much

pretty much.

>>2214770
Animals are dumb. There's no one denying that. But you have to think of animal intelligence in the context of their brains being smaller and less developed than ours.
Despite that, they can do very intelligent things and learn quickly for something with brains that size.
Look at a Border Collie trained to follow commands and herd animals. It's extremely impressive, showing how smart they are. But at the end of the day, they're still dogs that lick assholes and sniff their poop.

>>2214779
>But at the end of the day, they're still dogs that lick assholes and sniff their poop.
yeah but the reason we have an aversion to licking assholes is because we get sick if we do it. we don't sniff our poop because there's nothing really for us to learn from it. i wholeheartedly believe that if dogs had a canine intellect with logical and reasoning capacities similar to the average human, they would still be licking assholes and sniffing poop because those are behaviors which serve a purpose to them.

>>2214782
i'd like to add that it is perfectly healthy to eat your own shit. well maybe healty isn't the right word -- it stresses your body trying to digest things it has already decided it can't digest or has already digested -- but you won't get sick and die from it. it's your own gut flora after all

I think thats only true for some animals. I mean this doesn't work 100% obviously but I think most people do that stuff way too much with normal pet species and then underestimate actual wild animals and weird species.

I wouldn't call an animal "stupid" in the sense of the word that we normally use.
When we say someone is stupid we mean he is of lower than average intelligence. A stupid animal would be one that is particularly dumb for that species and those are quite rare. Animals are, on average, exactly as intelligent as they need to be to survive.

And of course comparetively no animal is as intelligent as a human, otherwise we wouldn't be ruling the planet.

>>2214798
It's your colon microflora, not the one in your mouth or your stomach or any other earlier part of your digestive system and that can cause major problems.

>>2214823
This, it's stupid to use a stupid subjective word like that. You can hand a dog a book and say "haha this fucking dog can't read, what a daft cunt", but it could then wander off into the woods and easily hunt and survive better than plenty of people could.

>>2214823
>otherwise we wouldn't be ruling the planet
for how poorly physically optimized we are for most tasks compared to the animal world, we really would be quite fucked if -- say -- lions had similar capacity. we wouldn't have made it out of the stone age.

>>2214934
I wanna see a lion throw a spear without opposable thumbs and without hips perfectioned for throwing stuff

>>2214938
Yeah, because spear throwing is the absolute only path an intelligent species can take.

>>2214949
i dont know about that, but having appendages that are capable of precise manipulation sure helps a lot

>>2214770
Yeah. Of course they're stupid compared to us. Nor do they have the ability to feel complex emotions and act on them. They have basic self preservation instincts but they aren't aware of their own existence in the sense me and you are.