squirrels

   You can read that some people consider animals to be more intelligent than human beings.  Some claim that cats are superior, intellectually, to people. Some say it's dogs, or even pigs. I vote for squirrels, based on scientific (empirical ) evidence. How many cats have ever outwitted a human? Oh, sure, they refuse to do human bidding, but that's not the same thing. It's just part of feline political philosophy, or something like it. Cats live in our homes. If they were smarter than we are, they would run the world by now.
      Squirrels, on the other hand, have outwitted many humans--particularly those who go to great trouble and expense to keep them out of bird feeders. They always get the birdseed, no matter what kind of squirrel baffles the bird-feeding person installs. If you watch them, it's as if they were playing a game, and mocking petty human efforts to thwart their desire for birdseed. Some people with bird feeders decide at the start that the bird feeder is a combination bird and squirrel feeder, saving themselves the humiliation of being outwitted by a squirrel, and publicly. Search "squirrel obstacle course" if you would like to see this in action.

are we getting dumber?

     For all the press ink spent on the subject of  IQ, or intelligence quotient (the results of a test given to people to find out how "smart" they are) there is an aspect of intelligence testing that is rarely mentioned. Intelligence, as measured by modern science, is a function of age. If a ten-year-old, say, answers  half of all the questions on the test correctly, his or her age will be a factor in converting  this "raw" score into an "intelligence quotient", or "IQ". If a twenty-year-old answers in precisely the same way, with the same number of correct answers, his or her "IQ" will not be the same as the ten-year-old's.  Assuming that testing for something styled innate intelligence, having nothing to do with education, is a reasonable thing to do, using age as a factor must be reasonable as well.
     It does, however, mean that our grandparents were right--that you should "learn something new every day"--otherwise your score on an IQ test would actually be lower as you age. If you got the same "raw" score at age forty as you did at age twenty, you would, in fact, be getting dumber.