Different animals have different kinds of intelligence

This one could fit equally well in the politics collection but it's going in this one. Animal intelligence is super interesting in its own right :

“[Pigeons have] knocked our socks off in our own lab and other people’s labs in terms of what they can do,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Iowa. “Pigeons can blow the doors off monkeys in some tasks."

“Learning sets” are a great example of this. First developed by Harry Harlow, learning sets were, essentially, a test of how well a subject could learn to learn. Scientists might give an animal the choice of two doors to open, one of which had food hidden behind it. Then they’d do the same test, over and over, always with the food behind the same door. Humans did better at this than chimps, Wasserman said, and chimps did better than rhesus monkeys, which did better than bush babies. It looked like some kind of cross-species hierarchy of IQ was emerging out of the data. “But then people studied blue jays and I’ll be damned if the blue jays didn’t look better than half the mammals tested,” he said.

Birds and mice, for instance, both do better than people on tests of how quickly an individual can navigate a maze and remember the locations of objects, said Louis Matzel, a psychology professor at Rutgers. That doesn’t mean those mice are smarter than men. It just means that’s a skill their species had more need of.

Which has profound implications :

It’s useless to extend human rights to animals, he told me, because that’s inevitably going to be based on a hierarchy model of intelligence. Instead, we should be giving animals animal rights — starting with the right to a wild habitat. The biggest threat to any species is habitat destruction, he said. So he suggested we start there, and give each species the right to its native place to live, instead of trying to attach human rights to something that is not human. “How about we accord other species the respect they deserve?” Wasserman said.

God knows how we even define "human", let alone how we extend this to human rights.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/humans-are-dumb-at-figuring-out-how-smart-animals-are/