I'm John Baxter, the Friends of History Debating Society, and Mr. Zakis has a spoodle named Dallas,

who for weeks and weeks now has demonstrated his philanthropy, his affection, basically is warmth

towards a magpie family that is striking because magpies have a reputation of being

extremely hostile.

They are aggressive and they're territorial and it's been spring and then it turns summer.

And they come to the backyard every morning and Dallas is there and then they have a working

relationship, sharing food, sharing water,

leaving each other alone, worrying about each other. It's odd, odd story. So, I went looking

for an explanation for this bizarre behavior, and I think I've found one. Jeremy, I go to the

Financial Times pointing to an article in Science magazine.

The argument goes like this. Despite evidence that animals like octopuses are intelligent,

we humans tend to overlook the cognitive ability of other animals. But birds descended from flying

dinosaurs have also had the battle to survive, and the cognitive gap may be narrower than we assume.

Corvids, that's the family that magpies exist in, Corvids can count, fashion, and use tools and engage in social play.

Parrots can mimic language and even learn the meaning of words.

Nutcrackers can cache thousands of morsels, retrieving them later when food is scarce.

A mighty feat of spatial memory.

That some of us still throw the term bird brain around as a barb, points to poor

cognition in our own species. What we have here is a study that suggests that corvids among all the

birds are the top and that they have come by a route completely different than the one we did as mammals to cognition.

Dallas is a mammal.

And I note engage in social play.

...