It can be argued that nothing travels further on social media than animals.

I had already seen the news coverage that some Australian birds seem to be setting fires on purpose to get prey out of the undergrowth when the story recently surfaced again on my Facebook feed. According to some of the comments, many people seemed surprised by this discovery. My reaction was more like, “Well, of course.”

However, I promise to be surprised if I ever hear that a bird has started a fire to collect insurance proceeds.

Preliminary testing and eyewitness reports have indicated that the brown hawk and black kite, birds that regularly hunt on the edges of wildfires, have picked up bits of smoking bush and dropped them into new areas in an effort to smoking frogs, lizards, and snakes that are the bird’s food source. Researchers are now working to record videos of the phenomenon, both in Australia and elsewhere.

Intentionally lighting fires has now been joined by tool use, complex emotions, and altruism on the list of characteristics that we once thought of as uniquely human, but have since been observed in other parts of the animal kingdom as well. We have known for decades that some animals are incredibly intelligent; we are only gathering more evidence the more we observe.

Living in the wilderness known as “southern Westchester County,” I long suspected an alliance between my street raven population and the local raccoons. The raccoons provide the muscle, they open our trash cans and serve up the high calorie junk food, and then the crows come and pick out the treats, along with interesting and useful ornaments like old string and aluminum foil. When I leave the house in the morning, the crows are gathered in the nearby trees, seeming to laugh as I pick up the debris scattered around my vast estate, which I long ago called “the quarter acre of hell.”

While crows may be the brains behind that association, raccoons are smart enough to know that if they make too big of a mess, my neighbors and I will turn to more extreme garbage-blocking technology. They have become adept at removing lids, carefully getting into the garbage can, taking what they want and not making a lot of mess. I went outside and discovered a completely gnawed T-bone, the remains of last night’s dinner, neatly left in the driveway next to an upright garbage can.

Suburban scavengers aside, Homo sapiens is gradually realizing that it does not have a monopoly on intelligence, self-awareness, or (depending on how the term is defined) language. While I am not an expert, it has become clear through many carefully controlled and documented studies on numerous species that, in their own way, other creatures can analyze and seek to alter their environments. Other species also have the ability to plan an action before executing it, with the intention of achieving a particular goal, and can learn from the consequences of actions that do not go as planned. I have met parents who wish they could say the same about their teens.

Of course, there are a number of ethical questions that arise from our growing appreciation of the capabilities of other species and from the realization that we are not as special as we once thought. In many societies, including our own, the protection of cetaceans and other marine mammals is largely justified by our awareness of their high intelligence and relatively complex social structures. In other societies, eating these animals for food is relatively rare, but ethically acceptable.

But what will it mean if we realize that a honey bee has a highly evolved memory capacity? Or that an octopus shows great reasoning ability? It could be argued that harvesting honey does not harm bees and that eliminating octopus from their diet would not be a challenge for most Americans. But pigs, a staple food source here and in many other cultures, demonstrate a sense of self and high levels of emotional intelligence; so what?

Proposing a vegetarian diet may not be a sufficient solution, depending on the characteristics that we are considering. Forest trees can share resources and even very basic communication through a network of fungi that some scientists refer to as the “all-wood network.” If we discover previously unknown imperatives for communication and self-preservation in plants, could we feel the pressure to become a new kind of ultra-vegan, eating only what we can create chemically in a laboratory? Or could we approach the wolf, who does not wonder if the rabbit is intelligent like him, but only thinks about dinner?

Both are extreme positions, of course, and many reasonable people occupy a middle ground between them. For example, some people may choose to continue eating animals, but also work for agricultural reforms so that edible animals are raised in more humane conditions. Existing debates about whether and how to use animals in scientific research, the ethical implications of zoos and water parks, and the use of animal products such as hides and leather, will surely be complicated by the growing body of knowledge about animal intelligence and the inner nature. lives of non-human species.

Learning more about animal intelligence also has huge implications for how we structure our own society. As we build machines with artificial intelligence, a broader understanding of how intelligence expresses itself in nature will add depth and nuance to those technical capabilities. Understanding how animals store and process information can also help us address diminished capabilities that we often see in our own old age, when we can remember events from long ago with perfect clarity even as we repeat ourselves over and over again in conversation.

Watching birds set deliberate fires is part of our process of appreciating the intelligence that appears in the world around us. Arguably, we’re getting smarter about it.