politics

Yeah corvids have (at the very least) simple languages and dialects, and are known to pass knowledge of good vs bad humans across generations. My grandpa nursed a crow back to health when he was in his 20s, and decades later sitting on the same bench in his 80s, crows would still regularly land on his shoulder. No one else's. I assumed they just like looked at a person and made primitive happy or angry sounds, but apparently it's deeper than that

Elephants are maybe even cooler: vocalization's only a small part of their communication, and they mainly use combination of seismic vibrations from their feet & ultra-specific body language. Their amount of variation between body/trunk/ear posture is way more subtle, complicated, and intentional than anything humans do for body language. It may even be something like a sign language, with its own grammar and syntax. Their feet are also incredibly sensitive, picking up vibrations invisible to everyone else: so they make extremely precise vibration-creating movements to send specific, patterned messages to each other via the ground. They'll also do this with a much louder rumbling when they need to send info to a friend several miles away

Yeah capitalists separated orcas from their loved ones to imprison them in a fucking swimming pool, and then acted shocked when a couple seaworld trainers got mauled. Not a single non-captive orca has killed a human: divers actually regularly swim with them (and there's several cases of orcas charging at distant lone swimmers before turning away when they see it's a human)

There's videos of them uncannily mimicking human words to seemingly attempt communication, as well as offering us gifts of their captured prey, and even seaweed after we refused all the meat

They also seem to have a pretty good idea that humans have diverse morals and practices. They distinguish individual humans as well as larger groups, and the matriarchs seem to remember and pass a library of information across generations. Historically, they knew to recognize and flee from settler Japanese and the Europeans who hunted them, while maintaining proximity to indigenous Japanese Ainu and certain Native Americans, who revered orcas and developed a symbiotic hunting relationship (and believed to have a deep spiritual friendship with them)

At the peak of orca hunting, they adapted extremely quick by sharing knowledge across pods, such as the locations of boats containing hostile cultures of humans, as well as evasion strategies. We found out that they literally figured out sailboats moved in the direction of the wind, and that they just needed to feel the wind and migrate the opposite way of that.

The last human zoo exhibit was in 1994.

Humans have been using fire to cook food for over a million years. We diverged from chimpanzees six millionish years ago. Its almost guaranteed that cooking food is intimately tied up with the divergence of humans from other apes, as it gave us access to greater sources of nutrition, as well as the ability to spend less time eating by using heat to break down food instead of our teeth and guts

Not to mention it's hard to have anything other than oral tradition. No way to write anything down. I remember someone talking about how octopodes and parrots are both incredibly clever, but they don't have any real way of transferring knowledge between generations, so each one must relearn the same stuff. And squids only live like 8 years or so, which don't help either.
I think orcas transfer knowledge? This is not at all my area of expertise, but I know different pods will have different ways of hunting the same prey + fashion fads and other stuff. But they don't have any sort of permanent record, which must be sucky.

It really depends on this concept of "smart", right? Even if orcas have the same brain capacity in physical/neurological terms, what distinguishes humans is the social aspect. When I say social, I mean thay we have constantly compounding social learning and concretizing that knowledge into technology (going back to sharpened spears tips or pieces of flint). This is the aspect which really sets humans apart, not necessarily the biology itself (though our brains have no doubt evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to depend on this social aspect).

If orcas had such time and ability to pass knowledge on not only through direct communication, but through communicated technology, they might have the same level of intelligence!

To be clear, I'm not making any normative claima about morality or such, I just don't want us to fall into the "biology determines smartness" idea which is undialectical and wrong. With my analysis, and a good normative ethics (which is like "treat beings as the best version of themselves that could exist given time and assistance") we could have a better take.

You know those motherfuckers have some mad shit to talk about us.

There's many cultures of orcas with wildly different documented hunting practices. I honestly feel like you can't generalize orcas in the same way you can't generalize humans, e.g. blanket statements about human nature as evil because of the actions of some cultures

It's even more complicated when you consider they have literal sub-species, such as Transient Orcas (mammal-eating) and Resident Orcas (fish-eating), with the latter usually being more social, empathetic, & tight-knit. Residents and Transients tend to steer clear of each other and have unspoken beef, with some Transient pods occasionally kidnapping & eating calves from Residents when no one's looking. Even among Transients, some pods regularly cruelly play with whales or seals, while other pods don't appear to do anything of the sort

They're just like us 🥹