TO CARE FOR AUSTRALIAN FRESHWATER TORTOISES Although to humans
tortoises appear to be stupid on some ways, this is because we
do not always understand their behaviour, and because we expect
them to behave as we would ourselves behave in a given
situation. This 'anthropomorphism' is the cause of our
underestimation of the intelligence levels of many other
animals. Their code is different from ours - they would probably
consider humans to be quite stupid! Animals sense many things
that we cannot : their bodies are finely tuned to an enormous
range of smells, tastes, vibrations, wavelengths and even
electromagnetic fields. Their reasoning, obviously, is also
different from ours. We have yet to devise a suitable
intelligence test for tortoises. Richard Haas [reference 4] says
that tortoises "... can learn to discriminate between white and
black, between vertical and horizontal lines, between lines of
varying width and between various colours. Some have the
rudiments of a kind of social organisation shown by the '