Super smart animals. Part One.

The first in a two part series in which Liz Bonnin travels the world in search of the most intelligent animals. She meets chimpanzees who show remarkable numerical recall, a skateboarding dog, navigating pigeons, a bird who uses bait to catch a fish, imaginative dolphins, reading seals, and an octopus escapologist. Irene Pepperberg talks about her research with her famously intelligent parrot, Alex. She introduces Griffin, her new parrot and we see some archive footage of Alex. Liz pits herself against a chimp raised in Japan by Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa, Ayumu, in an intelligence test. It becomes clear that most animals are far more intelligent than we might have thought, displaying memory, imagination, forward planning and the ability to adapt and learn things not necessarily related to their environment.