It’s no secret that corvids – crows and ravens – are exceptionally smart for birds, especially at problem solving. Now an experiment carried out with ravens provides evidence they may have a basic Theory of Mind as well; this means they have an ability to attribute mental states they experience to another raven.

In a paper published in Nature in February, researchers Thomas Bugnyar, Stephan Reber and Cameron Buckner from the universities of Vienna and Houston, carried out an ingenious experiment that tested how ravens caching food behaved when they thought they were being seen by another raven.

There is increasing evidence that the Theory of Mind exists in chimpanzees, bonobos, scrub jays and ravens. How equivalent the experience of a ToM is between species is, so far, untestable, but the strong possibility that some form of ToM exists in different animals provides yet more evidence of the complexity of the mental life of species apart from humans.

Not only does this add weight to calls that humans should reconsider the way they relate to other animals, especially the often appalling way we treat farmed and domesticated animals, but firmly places Homo sapiens as the product of the same evolutionary process that produced ravens, dogs and garden slugs.