Capacità cognitive, lateralizzazione cerebrale e benessere degli animali

People frequently think that intelligence is not widely distributed in the animal kingdom. Some species like dolphins, dogs, primates or parrots are considered to be quite intelligent while the remnant animals are considered to be more similar to instinctive robots rather than to thinking subjects. This wrong approach to the animal mind could stem from the studies of Ludwig Edinger (1855-1918), who is known as one of the founders of the modern neuro-anatomy. He made many important neuroanatomical discoveries but he also thought, combining Darwin’s Theory of evolution and a nineteenth-century version of Aristotle’s “scala naturae“, that brain evolution was progressive and not linear, from fish to amphibians, to reptiles, to birds and mammals, to primates and finally, to humans, ascending from lower to higher intelligence in a chronological series (Jarvis et al. 2005). In a “folk” evolutionary scale, only few animal species are usually fitted in a position somewhere close to humans, and the common notion that most of the animals’ brains are “simple”, i.e. that animals could not be intelligent, persisted for many years throughout the 20th century. However, according to the new understanding of avian and mammalian brain neuro-anatomy, it has been estimated that higher cognitive abilities which, until not long ago, were attributed only to a few species of primates, seem to be widespread not only in several species of mammals but also in the Class Aves (Vallortigara 2006). This contribution will review some authors’ original studies about conceptual abilities described on different animal species with particular reference to object permanence, tool-use, brain lateralization and means-end paradigms. The relationship between the existence of animal mental representations and the need for cognitive and welfare studies on a wider basis in veterinary medicine will be discussed.