What is the smartest animal?

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Very true, Orwell. I was making the point that most people have a rather limited view of what "animal" means... and also don't have a clear idea of what "smart" might be.

I omitted another measure: "Most likely to still be around, not only in a few billion years, when Earth gets fried by the sun, but way beyond that."

i think that "smart" means "intelligent" and i think "intelligent" means "able to solve problems".
i do not equate "sociality" or "friendliness" with "smartness".

so there are 2 animals i am intrigued by. they are octopus's and crows.

i saw a program where a hungry octopus was presented with a completely sealed jar with a prawn inside it.
the octopus could not smell the prawn, so it identified the prawn from memory as something that tastes nice.
then the octopus explored the jar and he seemed to look carefully at the jar without touching it much.
after a while he wrapped his tentacles around the lid and unscrewed it in the right direction and got the prawn.
he must have worked out with intelligence how to get the prawn.

also, their eyes are very similar in design to human eyes and they see much the same way we do. it is weird to think of an animal like an octopus having as clear a view of the world as me.

then there are crows. they are extremely smart. maybe more so than octopuses.
they use tools.
i saw a show where a crow wanted to get a grub from inside a knot hole in a tree that had fallen down.
the crow went and found a stick, and then chewed the end of the stick with his beak so it frayed and looked a bit like a brush.
then he carefully held his tool in his beak and lowered it into the hole and "brushed" the face of the grub with it. the grub got mad, and eventually bit the brush and held on.
the crow then pulled the stick out with the grub attached and dined happily.
he then did it again and again.
he fashioned a tool with abstract thinking that worked very well.

another more impressive thing i saw was where a crow was presented with a piece of meat that was dangling from a string.

the meat was too far from the ground for the crow to reach if he landed on the ground, so the crow had to get the meat that was dangling by a cord while he was on a perch that the cord dangled from.

but there were about 50 cords dangling from the perch, and they were all strung through rings and guiders that made it hard to see where each string originated from.
it was like a macrame puzzle where you had to trace with your eye, every string through all it's twists and re-routings through rings and guides to see what string should be pulled in order to lift the meat up to be retrieved.

the crow stood on the perch and looked carefully at the strings, and his first choice of string to pull up was the correct one.

i was astounded.

There are so many answers to your question that I don`t even know where to start.

Depends on how you define smart, and what you`re comparing.

In average, I think apes are the smartest.

The usage of the word "animal" as restricted purely to a member of the kingdom animalia has not reached the Oxford English Dictionary yet.

humans, we, though most dont like to think it, are animals

Why is there no option for "other"?

The Borg

Cheesecake.







(I'm not at all sure why I said that.)

Good to know that somebody else appreciates those amazing archaea.