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Some years ago I saw a wild-life television programme featuring a troupe of baboons that lived near the sea. The
programme made much of the fact that the baboons took the food that they had gathered on the beach, and waded out into the
sea. They washed the sand from the food in the sea water before eating it. This washing, the programme suggested, was
a sign of high intelligence.
Our water spaniel, Jazz, is a very fastidious dog. He doesn't like
being messy, and even when out in the shooting field insists that the trailing bramble and assorted foreign bodies are
removed from his coat before he will commence the next drive! Last week we broke up the shooting season by going for
a few days at the seaside in South Wales. The weather was very stormy, and the sea was far too rough for swimming,
but all our dogs had a great time retrieving tennis balls on the wide expanses of beach that we visited.
I
then noticed that Jazz did something extraordinary. Before bringing the tennis ball back to me, he took it to
a rock pool, dropped the ball, touched the floating ball with his foot so that it rotated in the water,
then picked out the ball again and brought it to me. He had effectively washed the sand off the tennis ball!
Surely this was an accidental fluke. I told my wife what he had just done, and I threw the tennis
ball for him again. Jazz carried out exactly the same procedure. My wife witnessed Jazz picking up the ball, taking
it to a pool, dropping the ball in the water, touching the ball with his foot, picking it out again, and
bringing it in to me. It seemed quite obvious to me that fussy Jazz didn't like the gritty sand in his mouth,
so he had found a way of cleaning the sand off the ball. What other explanation could there be?
Intelligent
- or what?
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