It does make evolutionary sense as why they would need to do this. Mathematics helps us direct the world around us so why not animals too?

But what really is counting?

“To name or list (the units of a group or collection) one by one in order to determine a total; number”.

So can animals understand numerosity?

This seems a bizarre question and not one I have put much thought in to before. During our lecture with Richard he proposed a few ideas on how some people thought different animals could count.

The first example was Clever Hans – the horse who could apparently count. It seemed bizarre at first. Hans’ owner would point to number and Hans would stamp his hoof however many times. This animal could not only understand the numeral but the number (concept) that represented the numeral – amazing right? This was eventually debunked by psychologists who found that Hans was merely following subtle cues by his owner so knew when to stop “counting”.

During the lecture I thought there were some degree of ability of some animals to count. My logic was thinking about an animal, a lion for example, would know how many cubs it had. If one was missing, the lion would know that two wasn’t enough and off they would go to look for the third.

I then thought about my own daughter, who is two years old. She can you tell you that she is two but not two years. She can recite numbers 1-10 then 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 20 20 – she loves saying the number 20!

She has a new book which counts down from 10-1 with lady birds. This is something she is struggling with as we have always practiced counting from 1-10. Again, we have recently been practicing jumping in puddles citing 3-2-1 blastoff. However, she always says 1-2-3 blastoff. So yet another confusion for her.

So can she count? Yes, to an extent. She can recite the numbers.

Does she know what the numbers mean? No, not yet. She cannot yet assign numeric value to a group of objects yet.

She understands that if she insists on taking three teddies to Tesco and one goes AWOL (or mum has hidden it) she knows that one is missing. One not being the correct word here – the exact one. She knows that something is not right and what she had is now not there. She doesn’t know that three is suddenly two. Not the concept of number anyway. But, what she does know that she had Peppa, George and Iggle Piggle and recognizes which one is missing. (A similar analogy to the lion example I had thought about).

This brings me back to my own argument about whether animals can count their young. They know that each of their cubs represents a number and if one is gone – I think they would know which it is.

Lions can count to a degree – what I found what slightly more complex than I originally thought above. Below is a video which explains that lions can count based on the number of roars they hear. The results were that if their roars out numbed the roars played to them by two they would go ahead and fight/defend themselves.

So what about Ayumo the chimpanzee who could count.

As a class we tried to the tests that this chimp did and were not very successful. Perhaps with some practice (and a reward like Ayumu received) we would improve on this. When watching this it did seem more like memory of number rather than understanding numerosity.

I did find another clip however, which shows a chimp counting dots thus demonstrating they do understand numbers and numerals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCy7M6ueSpE

References

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/counting (accessed on 18th October 2016)