I don’t get this.

ScienceDaily: Birds Found To Plan For The Future
Science Daily — Planning and worrying about the future has always been considered an exclusively human activity, but now at least one species of bird has also been found to plan for tomorrow. The finding also raises the intriguing possibility that, like humans, birds may get anxious about the future.

Research published in the journal Nature shows that western scrub-jays are able to plan for future food shortages by caching food. The birds are shown to have learned from their previous experiences of food scarcity, storing food for future use in places where they anticipate future slim pickings. The researchers at the University of Cambridge believe this is the first known example of future planning in animals.

Isn’t this what squirrel’s, hamsters and a host of other rodents do? And when beavers make a dam, they aren’t planning?

I guess that’s all just instinctual behavior.

I call BS on this. Not that birds aren’t smart enough to plan, I’m sure they are, but the idea that mammals who do the same thing are just following genetic impulses instead of planning on their own.

And when wolves hunt down an elk, or lions do a joint stalk exercise, or when leopards put a carcass up in a tree for later, no planning there either.

I wonder what makes these researchers think humans plan?