The lives of many humans are closely interrelated with those of domestic animals, and many admire wild animals, too. Even so, there's a widespread assumption that animals don't think in the way that people think--they may read our cues and react to them, but they don't count, understand concepts, or plan for the future.

But the assumption may be wrong, according to research discussed at the AAAS Annual Meeting. The Associated Press cited Edward Wasserman, an experimental psychologist at the University of Iowa, and wrote: "Monkeys perform mental math, pigeons can select the picture that doesn't belong. [And] humans may not be the only animals that plan for the future."

It's a story with near-universal appeal--and in one form or another it was picked up from Dublin to Detroit and L.A. In Brazil, where the AP story ran on Estadao.com under the headline 

"Cientistas dizem que alguns animais planejam o futuro." Even American Buddhist Net sampled the story.

In Schmid's story, Nicola S. Clayton, a professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge in England, said that researchers have dramatically expanded their understanding of animal cognition in the past two decades. They use tools, he wrote, and "there is evidence that some of them save tools for future use."

He also cited Jessica Cantlon of Duke University, who explained that "number sense" may be a skill "among the shared evolution of many primates."

"Indeed," he wrote, "college students and macaques seem equally able to roughly sum up sets of objects without actually counting them."

Dick Ahlstrom, in the Irish Times, wrote: "A 'backbone' measure of intelligence was whether the organism recognised things that are the same and things that are different, he [Wasserman] said. Humans do this as a matter of course, but when tested, baboons and pigeons have shown they could do it too. The same two species could also recognise "relations between relations," a form of knowing which was the odd one out.