In nature as in schlocky movie tropes, intelligence often goes hand in hand with evil. Dolphins are smart enough to invent politics, and we know that because of how males occasionally kidnap females in order to monopolize their fertility . Chimps and other great apes have proved their brainpower by understanding that they can lie to others , and immediately doing so . And crows – well, crows can hold a grudge like nobody else. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

We’re not kidding. The average life expectancy of a single crow is about seven or eight years in the wild – but “it’s now 14 years that the birds continue to respond to us,” John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington and b

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