Any honorable ethics for the anthropocene must transform our valuation of animals from utility to the respect conscious beings deserve. To that end, I love learning of examples of animal intelligence such as the meta-cognition of Western Scrub Jays:
“Western scrub jays, corvids native to western North America, are a favorite of cognitive scientists because they are not “stuck in time”—that is, they are able to remember past events and are known to cache their food in anticipation of hunger…the findings are exciting because they provide further evidence that humans are not the only species with the ability to think about their thought processes.”
–Scientific American, Jason G. Goldman
Corinna Schulenburg 