Dinner conversation progressed from discussion of a New York Times article about the quest for humanely-produced foie gras to what makes certain meats a culinary taboo in a given society (brief segue over the startling revelation that Thursday night in the Pinault household was, in fact, horse night), to how animal intelligence can be measured (a subject that always invites my crusading rant about the underestimated wisdom of swine), to an article in Spiegel about research on the extraordinary cunningness of ravens.
Ravens survive by scavenging food from larger predators, an unpredictable enterprise that requires the most successful ravens to be audacious, deceitful, and clever. Unlike “dumb” birds, ravens didn’t evolve with “the luxury of just doing the right thing automatically.” They are excellent problem solvers. According to ravenlogists, they are cognitively equal to young human children.
All this raven dinner talk prompted me to Google-up a copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” which I then attempted to read aloud rapidly. My lord that’s a musical assemblage of words! By the time I got to “And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting,” the household was covering its ears and screaming “Nevermore!”
