#crow behaviour

This may just be a paranoid theory. Trying to cope with the upset. But

Today, I killed a cockatoo. I’m devastated. I cried so much. For extra context, I’m vegetarian & don’t use other products where animals are killed for our use. It is important to me & has been all my life, I’ve been vegetarian for 17 years & I’m still in my 20’s. No one else in my family is. It’s my choice. If I can prevent the death of an animal, I will do whatever I can. Just know this fucking kills me. I did not want this. I don’t know who would, but definitely not me.

I think maybe a crow, used me to kill the cockatoo.

We all know how smart crows are by now.

I tried to stop. The cockatoo was about to clear my car, I saw him reach safety. So, I didn’t break harder. Then all of a sudden, within a second, a crow flew down close to the cockatoo, directly in front of my car.

The cockatoo turned back to the crow & moved toward it. Right in front of my wheel. In the same second, the crow few off & I made contact.

The crow must of been fine. There were no black feathers. Only white ones. Everywhere. I felt it. I heard it. It breaks my fucking heart.

Did that crow come down to antagonise that cockatoo, knowing the cockatoo would put their dispute above its safety & getting out of the way? Did it know that it could jump in front of my car & fly off safe, but the cockatoo couldn’t?

I don’t understand why it would swoop down like that. It was nowhere to be seen until that last second.

We can't know much about inner mental states including feelings of others (even less so in very differently structured organisms like animals). What something is like is usually discussed under the fancy term Qualia in philosophy. Scientist can describe the world all day long, but they are always evading the question how something is like or feels. Hence we don't know if there is a mental state like fun for this particular crow or «What Is it Like to Be a Bat?» as Thomas Nagel put it in his famous paper.

What this video from Russia documents though, is a huge degree of adventurous and adaptive (- maybe even inventive) intelligence. Even if the crow is transfering or mimicking a behaviour it has originally seen on humans that still implies functional knowledge of the matter.

Here are two other videos, which illustrate playfull and adventurous behaviour of crows (especially in younger age):

http://youtu.be/YbdNtC4V3IM