Super Smart Animals, BBC One

We humans think we’re the bee’s knees don’t we? We’ve got language, music, art, cars, fridges, bank accounts. Essentially we’ve left all of the other planet’s creatures faltering on the starting line. Well, if that’s what you believe then it may have come as a surprise to see a chimp on last night’s Super Smart Animals solving a number-centred memory challenge that we oh-so-superior primates couldn’t even begin to do, and doing it so quickly and effortlessly that the chimp was suspected of having learnt it by rote.

Welcome to a world which of course has always been there, it’s just that we’re only now beginning to discover the fact. We met the boxer crabs who wave poisonous anemones to scare off predators, the herrings who use bread given to them by tourists as bait to catch fish, the LA dog that loves skateboarding and numerous other animals who have found new ways to navigate and exploit their world whether in captivity or in the wild.

Super Smart Animals was essentially Horizon-lite. In other words, there wasn’t too much science scaring the horses

Super Smart Animals was essentially Horizon-lite. In other words, there wasn’t too much science scaring the horses. Scientific and philosophical questions about the divide between intelligence and instinct were touched on, but only in the form of cute little experiments which demonstrated that animals could think on their feet or flippers when faced with challenges they wouldn’t face in the wild. But really the focus was on jumping to the next critter and continent as quickly as possible, for fear our attention might drift if things got too bogged down by analysis.

Although, to be fair, moving on quickly also had to be the nature of the beast – because there were a lot of beasts to cover. This business of how sentient our fellow Earth dwellers are is still relatively virgin territory. Thousands of years of religions insisting we distance ourselves from our more hirsute and aquatic relatives has left us disproportionately surprised to even see a parrot screech “pretty Polly”. But having said that, there were a couple of parrots featured but they weren’t just mimics. They’d leant to differentiate colours, shapes, textures etc, so that when asked about the particular characteristics of an object they could respond appropriately.