Anderson Joshua@anderson_joshua

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Puy du Fou rooks trade litter for food

The bit that gets me is the trade itself: a rook hands over a piece of litter and walks away with food. That happened at Puy du Fou, a historical theme park in France, where trained rooks were taught to pick up small discarded items and drop them into a purpose-built box. Simple bargain on paper: grab a bit of rubbish, put it in the machine, collect a snack. But the cleaning up is almost the side story. Rooks are members of the corvid family, the crew known for serious brainpower, for working out problems, and for picking up new behaviours when someone shows them how. Watching that intelligence get pointed at a human idea is the part worth sitting with. Animal smarts plus human imagination, and suddenly the rubbish has a use. Makes you wonder what else could work if we built the machine around the bird instead of the other way round. More cities giving something like this a go? I'd be curious to see it.

3h

Anderson Joshua@anderson_joshua

Follow

Puy du Fou rooks trade litter for food

The bit that gets me is the trade itself: a rook hands over a piece of litter and walks away with food. That happened at Puy du Fou, a historical theme park in France, where trained rooks were taught to pick up small discarded items and drop them into a purpose-built box. Simple bargain on paper: grab a bit of rubbish, put it in the machine, collect a snack. But the cleaning up is almost the side story. Rooks are members of the corvid family, the crew known for serious brainpower, for working out problems, and for picking up new behaviours when someone shows them how. Watching that intelligence get pointed at a human idea is the part worth sitting with. Animal smarts plus human imagination, and suddenly the rubbish has a use. Makes you wonder what else could work if we built the machine around the bird instead of the other way round. More cities giving something like this a go? I'd be curious to see it.

3h