Other primates have also been studied extensively, including baboons, and have been found to display highly intelligent behavior. For example, baboons send watchers to the outskirts of their colonies as a way of providing protection for the group. If a watcher senses danger he will make a barking sound, resulting in the scattering of the colony. If the animal giving the alarm is a young one, the troop adults may check out the source of alarm before running away on the word of an inexperienced youngster, thus giving evidence of the baboon's ability to discriminate and to use logic and reason. Primates do seem to have rudimentary forms of many human attributes.²⁴

There is much evidence being accumulated which would suggest that many non-primate animals also are capable of thought and decision-making. A gazelle, for example, might sense an approaching lion. It reacts by lifting its head, indicating that its attention has been aroused. At this point it has a choice of at least three alternatives. It may casually lope away to a safer place, it may break into a desperate run, or it may judge the danger to be non-existent or minimal and resume grazing. The gazelle appraises the nearness of the danger and its magnitude, and displays an appreciation of the mathematical product of the time-space factors of how imminent the danger is, based on its own time-space potential. It judges how fast and how soon and what distance the danger will travel to reach it, as well as how fast and how soon and what distance it will have to cover to escape the danger.²⁵

The observation of this action would imply that a thought process has occurred. This, of course, does not necessarily indicate that there is consciousness involved, since one could still argue that this behavioral process is an unconscious action. Nevertheless, if a similar behavior were witnessed in a human it would be believed a conscious act. It is most difficult to determine the presence or absence of consciousness in other animals; perhaps, however, our denial of animal consciousness is more of the same self-centered perception of existence that led to previous erroneous beliefs, such as the earth or sun being the center of the universe. The inability of science to prove the existence of consciousness in animals is most probably the shortcoming of humankind and not of the animals.²⁶

Donald Griffin, a biologist who has written a book entitled Animal Thinking, is convinced that animals display conscious awareness. He sees some animals as capable of planning, making choices, adapting to new situations, cooperating, counting and ratiocinating.²⁷

It has also been demonstrated that animals are able to select which among many incoming stimuli will be registered in consciousness. This we all experience frequently, such as when we effectively "tune out" distracting sounds by concentrating our attention on one voice among many in a crowded, noisy room.²⁸...A similar phenomenon can be demonstrated in a cat by monitoring brain activity with an implanted electrode and watching for changes in brainwave patterns as awareness shifts. If a cat sits calmly with a metronome ticking in the background, a brainwave pattern is produced with a higher amplitude wave presenting each time a tick is heard. When the cat sees a mouse its attention shifts, tuning out the irrelevant ticking of the metronome, and resulting in a substantial change of the electrical activity recorded on a graph.²⁹

There is evidence that higher animal forms may dream. EEG recordings in sleeping birds and other mammals show very similar patterns of REM sleep. Donald Griffin has written: "Sleeping dogs sometimes move and vocalize in ways that suggest they are dreaming; their movements resemble those of feeding, running, biting and even copulation. They sometimes snarl or bark.".³⁰

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