We killjoys sometimes make life easier for ourselves by considering animal consciousness from a distance sufficient to enable us to overlook the often-remarkable capacities of individual species. We talk about “reactions”, “associative learning”, “mechanisms”, “programmes” and “instinct” – terms that apply equally to the behaviour of ants and apes. The purpose of what follows is to look closely at some individual species and their remarkable capabilities, to put the notion of humans versus (all) animals, man versus beast, to the test.

A good place to begin is with bees. They have only a million neurons, compared with the 9 billion neurons in the reader’s brain – though they are widely branched and richly connected. Lars Chittka’s “Bee Cognition” should be mandatory reading for anyone persuaded by the views advanced in this chapter and, indeed, this book. It is a reminder that the central thesis of human exceptionalism has to be specified carefully. Chittka reminds us of the rich behavioural repertoire of social insects: “that orchestrate life in the colony, facilitate the construction of a communal home, secure a steady stream of appropriate food for their young, defending the colony and regulating its climate”.

This is usually dismissed as “just instinct”. Instinct it is, but the “just” is not justified. In the case of bees, the provisioning of their young in a specially constructed nest, required a precise spatial memory in addition to extraordinary home construction skills because “evolution does not take kindly to a mother who forgets the location of her offspring”. There is also the vital capacity to learn to identify and remember – and to communicate through their dances – the spatial location of those flowers that are the richest source of energy. Bees can remember multiple foraging locations and even the time of day when each one is profitable. And they have to learn this quickly, given that life expectancy is only a few weeks, and they often employ the short cut of copying the flower choices of more experienced individuals.