I had this very heated argument with my friends about animals having the ability to reason,but to my astonishment all of them believe that animal reason...saying, if they don't reason,how come if they hear the sound of something strange they run for there lives and I told them that animals don't think but act on some pre-installed sounds that has been installed in there memories which I called INSTINCT....yet they are still not convinced thinking am kind of dumb to have think that animals don't reason.


So the question I wanna ask now is DOES animals have the ability to reason ?


please don't derail this trend cos u might derive something informative from the answer the intelligent ones will give!!!

Hell No Animal Don't Reason,they act on instinct even human act on instinct most times but few people that don't trust their instinct and act with their brain are considered as intelligent and smart people.

Animals do not have the ability to reason. That's why Man is higher than animals because we can reason. Animals rely solely on instinct for their survival.

No, they cannot. We're higher in the Chain of Being for a reason. Rationality's only found in human beings. Animals have nutritive and appetitive characteristics. Plants., e.g. trees, just have nutritive. But human beings have nutritive, appetitive and rational characteristics. Rationality's an inherent value, unique to human beings ONLY. With rationality also comes responsibilities, having duties and obligations. These are some of the reasons why humans are moral agents and animals are moral patients. Moral agents have the rational capacity to understand moral obligations. Moral patients (e.g. non-human animals) do not. There're more reasons I want to list, but just to keep it short, my last reason's going to come from this really cool [thought] experiment called the Chinese Room Experiment, although it's not about animals but computers. With it, you can prove that computers only have weak artificial intelligence. They have no rationality nor intentionality. It really is the same thing with animals, except that with computers - such as robots, they're simply outputting what has been programmed into them, just like the man in the Chinese Room Experiment, while animals merely act instinctively and do not think/rationalize their way through things like we do.

Well I don't think they do. Buh their ability to flee from danger or predators are some of their adaptive features

Some animals do reason especially primates.

Do you know that a dog has up to 100 different facial expressions, do you know that dolphins and humans are the only animals that have s3x for pleasure? chimps have been taught how tomb solve puzzles, dogs can be trained to take care of disabled people. There are many others, These are some of the things a learnt while watching animal focused TV stations ( which are my favourites) and visiting science related websites.

So ask yourself this question, can animals do these things without thinking?