…don’t ask
Sasha Explains It All
Everybody Can’t Be Smart
If there is one thing people ask me all the time, besides “How can you look so young and beautiful?”, it’s “Which animals are Smart and why aren’t ALL animals Smart?”
Here’s the answer to that question and we’ll start right off with the #1 most asked about species, the chimpanzee.
There are, in fact, about 120 Smart female chimps in the world. All of them live in Gorilla City in Africa. They are teachers and engineers and scientists and nurses and chefs. All of them are sterile, mostly due to birth defects or some other natural cause. They are all very good people and very likely will not be replaced by chimps when they die.
You see, chimps are just too much like humans to allow them to become sapient. The males especially are vicious, cunning, violent assholes. So are a good share of the females. Sound familiar, humans?
If chimps were sapient, they would band together and start killing humans, probably with human weapons. They’d also probably come ofter us NHT, which would be the end of the chimp species, or nearly so.
To prevent this ever happening, every single chimp on earth, except the gals in Gorilla City, has been dosed with nanites that shield their brains from us NHT, who tend to Smarten up creatures we hang with for very long. So, no Smart chimps.
Next up come farm animals like cattle, sheep, goats & pigs. Like chimps, there are some of those that have become sapient, but the majority are kept dumb. The reason is obvious: they are going to be eaten or kept for some other purpose. Freedom and a long life is not in the cards for them, so making them aware would be monstrous cruelty.
Horses, mules and donkeys, for some reason we haven’t figured out yet, are very resistant to sapience. Only about one in 50,000 can ever become sapient and when they do, they immediately ask to go live in an NHT Sanctuary Zone. Without fail, all of the sapient domesticated horses & asses are very nice folks.
Small mammals don’t deal with becoming Smart very well. They tend to freak out and eventually go catatonic. That’s understandable given their very short lifespans and place on so many creatures menus. With the exception of domesticated rabbits (and even then, mostly the ones who escaped to live in the great Sanctuary warrens), most of the smaller sapients are creatures like skunks, opossums, otters, wallabies, etc.
The NHTA is very careful about making monkeys smart. They almost always turn out to be troublemakers with a chip on their shoulders. There are some Smart baboons and larger monkey species, but again, they are in Sanctuaries where they can be monitored.
There are no Sapient wolverines, honey badgers, or Tasmanian Devils because that would just be fucking insane. It was tried in the 1990s and it did not go well at all.
You may have noticed that so far I have only mentioned mammalian species. That’s because almost everything else just can’t become sapient, despite decades of trying. There are exceptions, however.
Parrots: The larger macaws, cockatoos and Amazon parrots, along with the African Gray, can become sapient. They tend to gravitate towards jobs in security, espionage (yes, we do it too. And much better than you humans.), aerial mapping, and show business.
Ravens & Crows: These corvids attain sapience by becoming part of a hivemind. Take a single crow far away from any other crows or ravens and he is still sapient, but not very intelligent. On the other hand, a flock of 20 crows creates 20 damned smart birds.
Ducks: These folks are a class A enigma. They should not be able to become sapient, but they do. Now, none of them will ever be a rocket scientist, but they have a decent average intelligence.
Raptors: Only the very largest birds of prey become sapient, and even then it’s only about 1 in 1,000.
After birds, almost nothing else can become Smart, with three exceptions.
Giant Tortoises: They are almost all sapient, but not geniuses. They are also incredibly thoughtful and slow in conversation. It’s almost as bad as talking to an Ent.
Octopuses: Octopuses CAN become sentient, but don’t seem to WANT to. Which is probably good, because the one or two who have become sapient were weird motherfuckers.
Domestic Honeybees: Don’t ask how because NHT scientist, myself included, do not have the slightest clue. That said, bee swarms are some of the nicest folks you’ll ever meet and have a great sense of humor.
So there is the answer to your question, folks. Oh, one other thing. Cetaceans have ALWAYS been sapient. Silky and Roscoe arriving on our earth had nothing to do with it. Cetaceans are swell people, but to us land based lifeforms, they might as well be aliens. I probably need to do a rant on them sometime.
Until my next rant,
Sasha Jane Cross, PhD (X3)
