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These and similar accounts have led some people to infer that creatures other than human can actually count. They also point to dogs that have been taught to respond to numerical questions with the correct number of barks, or to horses that seem to solve arithmetic problem by stomping their hooves number of times.

Animals respond to quantities only when they are connected to survive as a species-as in the case of the eggs-or survive as individuals -as in the case of food. There is on transfer to other situations or from concrete reality to the abstract notion of numbers. Animals can “count” only when the objects are present and only when the numbers involved are small-no more than seven or eight. In lab experiments, animals trained to count one kind of object were unable to count any other type. The objects, not the numbers, are what interest them. Animal’s admittedly remarkable achievements simply do not amount to evidence of counting, nor do they reveal m