Can other animals plan ahead?

Asked by: Peter Moore, Banbridge

You could argue that a squirrel is planning for the winter months, when it buries nuts in the ground, but does the squirrel actually know why it is doing this, or is it just a hard-wired behaviour? These things are hard to test, but experiments with scrub jays have shown that they will stash food in places where they expect to be hungry the next day. And a chimpanzee called Santino at a zoo in Sweden has learned to hide piles of stones in advance so that he will be able to ambush human onlookers and pelt them.

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