REAL LIFE NEWS: RAVENS REMEMBER IF YOU TRICK THEM
by Hazed
It’s not just elephants that never forget – it turns out that ravens have good memories too, and if you play tricks on them they will remember.
A team of Austrian and Swedish scientists have run a small study on captive-bred ravens, and they found that the birds remembered when they were tricked out of getting a good treat. We already know that ravens are intelligent, and this study has important implications for understanding their social dynamics.
The researchers wanted to test the ravens’ memories as it related to the fairness of interactions. They aimed to find out if the birds would remember a single positive or negative event. They used nine ravens who had been raised by humans – called Tom, Laggie, Horst, Louise, Nobel, George, Paul, Joey and Rocky.
In the first trials, one bird was used as the subject of an experiment and a second was an observer. The birds were trained to offer bread to humans and receive cheese in return, but in the trials the human would either be fair and give the birds the cheese they expected, or be unfair and eat the cheese themselves. The researchers ran the trial using various human experimenters.
Two days later, and then again two months later, they performed a new set of trials, including one in which each raven could choose who to offer the bread to – the human who had been fair, the one who had been unfair, and a new person they hadn’t seen before. At both of the later trials, most of the ravens picked the fair experimenter, showing that they remembered the negative experience.
Interestingly, the ravens who had been observing showed no preference – merely observing unfair treatment had no effect.
This was a very small trial, and because it used hand-reared ravens the results may not apply to wild birds, but it is still interesting. Edgar Allan Poe had it right: you don’t mess with ravens, because they will remember, and come back to haunt you!
Source: http://gizmodo.com/ravens-remember-if-you-were-a-dick-to-them-1795965892
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48860